Director's Weekly Reports

The Langseth returned to Galveston Tuesday after a very successful  cruise collecting high bandwidth source signature data on the new airgun arrays. She sails for Costa Rica on Saturday and begins a full  schedule of challenging operations through 2008. The crew and all the  technicians on the ship, as well as everyone back here in the marine  department continue to perform at herculean levels, facing up to, and  overcoming, the challenges involved with bringing such a huge and  complex machine - that is a multi-streamer seismic boat - to full  operational status.

Wednesday afternoon was spent with the Lamont Advisory Board - a  particularly good meeting - in which some important decisions were  made - and stimulated by a great science talk by Doug Martinson. The  board wants to provide some funds directly to Lamont researchers to  help 'seed' new and innovative research projects. The amounts of money  will be small to start, but I think it will grow.  I will send out an  a formal announcement next week that lays out the selection criteria  etc that will be used for disbursement of these funds.  The money is  coming from direct donations from the Board members themselves, so  they feel truly invested in the project.

Having ExCom and a Faculty on the same day (like today) is just not good for my constitution, so I will talk about something else... Just as LDEO led the world in bringing multichannel seismics to academic research three decades ago, so we have again attained a first (as far as I know) of being the first academic general purpose research vessel to tow multiple hydrophone streamers (enabling practical collection of 3D data sets). A couple of days ago R/V Marcus G. Langseth had three 6km long hydrophone streamers deployed, towing them successfully a few tens of meters apart, and learning the many challenges of rigging and ship handling. It will be a steep learning curve for us in the coming months as we bring this new capability to the academic community. The goal was to deploy four streamers - we did not make that - the weather in the Gulf (and the reliability of the weather forecasts) has been very poor over the last couple of weeks so we lost many days of working time.

I flew out to Bermuda on Tuesday to spend three days with the leaders of ocean institutions from around the world. The unusual ten-year- old international entity hosting this meeting (Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean - POGO) is working to play a bigger role in the planning for GEOSS (Global Earth Observing). The breadth of international representation was impressive - Director-level folks from fifteen different nations, plus many government representatives. The meeting exceeded expectations (mine at least) with regard to the substance of the dialog, and was an 'eye-opener' with regard to the level of coastal and ocean observation activity world-wide. It was something of a novelty to hear the representative from the Chinese Academy of Sciences defining the direct economic benefit of multi- million dollar investments in coastal monitoring, impressive to hear the British describe the operational predictions from models assimilating observations in real time from the Irish Sea, and the six or seven decades of data from Plymouth's Continuous Plankton Recorder program, though seen before, never cease to make the case strongly for sustained programs of careful and systematic ocean observations. All this as Tony Knapp announced that NSF had decided discontinue funding for the Bermuda Test Bed mooring after 13-14 years of operation...