Educational Activities

Journal Entry
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Wednesday
September 3, 2003
Lat 27.33 Lon 177.42

Yesterday we did our usual science data collections, but we were still in awe of having been able to be at Midway Atoll. The sand was a very fine grain and white, not yellowish like many beaches. It will be interesting to me to look at the sand and see if it is actually coral that has broken down over time to form the sand. The fish and turtles were plentiful and there were Monk Seals that are endangered were on the beaches and swimming in the coastal waters. It was an amazing day. The winds change in the winter and there are birds that come through on their migration paths from the Arctic and Alaska. The surface currents change at that time and it is the northern beaches that collect more of the trash instead of the southern ones. The White Terns had young that they were keeping an eye on and they would flutter in front of or above us making it very easy to understand how they got the common name of fairy tern. The yellow canaries flew around like our English sparrows in small flocks. All of the Great Frigates and Boobies were flying overhead or sitting in the Ironwood trees caring for their young and just hanging out. There were Noddy, Curlew, Shearwater, and both Tropicbird species flying around to keep us company, along with a number of large eared brown field mice. The waters were even more varied in the things to look at as we snorkeled by the reef or under the pier that the New Horizon was so warmly welcomed to early Labor Day morning.

I believe we were all sorry to leave and steam toward the date line. We are technically in Thursday because of passing that imaginary date line, which is even stranger when I think about us turning our watches back as we came this way and yet we went forward a day, It really is harder to understand when you mess with your watch than when you look at a world map that shows the time zones. To avoid confusion of the science data we are using today’s date as the 3rd so when we go back over the line we don’t end up with two days of the same date. Last night as we were doing the CTD testing there were hundreds of squid attracted to the lights of the ship and they were feeding on the very small flying fish that were also attracted by the light. It was wild to watch the chasing that goes on with the feeding frenzy.

This morning while we were reading the chlorophyll results from last night it was very frustrating. The samples would match up on their readings but they were unusually high and were not changing very much as the depths changed. We got our lead scientist to look at our results and he agreed they were messed up. It took some time, but we had somehow the machine did not read things as we had calibrated, we ended up having half of our samples not valid and no way to run them again. This was very depressing for us. The day has improved and we are feeling better. I still don’t like it that we lost that information and have no way to retrieve it.

Ms. Daryl Newcomb

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