The Fate of the Ocean

[xchrom]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/fate-ocean


Illustration: Yuko Shimizu

WE’RE IN FOR A WILD RIDE, say Oceanus’ 13-person crew, salts old and young, most of them Cape Codders with lifelong careers on the water. Consequently, many of the 12 members of the scientific team—oceanographers, science technicians, and graduate students, along with this observer—scatter across the ship’s three decks in the moments before we sail, seeking privacy for our last cell phone calls home, backs turned to the rain, shouting against the wind. At 177 feet and more than 1,000 tons, R/V (research vessel) Oceanus is the smallest ship in the long-range fleet of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and I suspect there’s not one of us aboard this morning who doesn’t wish we were sailing on one of the larger vessels.

Bad weather at sea is exponentially worse than bad weather ashore. The liquid world reacts in a pyrotechnical way to blowing air, exploding into the marine equivalent of a firestorm at winds that onshore might only make you button your coat. We’re headed into a Force 9 (strong gale) on the 12-point Beaufort scale. Before we make landfall, one week hence, we’ll have dabbled in Force 10 (storm) and skirted Force 11 (violent storm) conditions. Force 12 is a hurricane.

Outside of Buzzards Bay, we’re slammed with 20-foot seas ripped white by wind and careening unpredictably on the shallow waters of the continental shelf. The swell is abeam of us, and Oceanus wallows with the corkscrew motion sailors despise. One by one, those of us not on watch disappear below to set the storm rails on our bunks, wedge our life jackets under the edges of our mattresses, climb in, wait, and hope for intestinal fortitude and good seamanship from Captain Lawrence Bearse’s crew on the bridge. The only way to avoid being flung from our bunks by the violent motion is to hold on and hug the wall, which is essentially the outer skin of the vessel. It’s a strangely intimate experience, below waterline, feeling the ship bowing and flexing against our backs, and absorbing into our bones the deafening thunder of steel as the largest waves drive Oceanus nearly to a shuddering stop before her single propeller fights back with the power of 3,000 horses. I’m torn between staying awake and worried in a fascinated kind of way, or falling into oblivious sleep.

A cold front from the north, fueled by the remnants of Tropical Storm Tammy, and Subtropical Depression 22 are merging and birthing a midlatitude cyclonic monster destined to grow 1,100 miles in diameter. Twenty inches of rain have already fallen over parts of New England, the region’s weightiest rain event since 1999’s Hurricane Floyd. A day earlier, en route to Woods Hole and stuck in Chicago by weather so bad it closed down Boston’s Logan Airport, I called Ruth Curry, the expedition’s chief scientist, to ask what she made of the forecast. “Science doesn’t stop for the weather,” was her cheery reply.