‘I won’t make it on the outside boss…..I’s an institution man now’

Give me an “I”, give me an “F”……

This is an angle that is very rarely talked about but I thought it was something that folks may find interesting: The reintegration into society! It sounds strange but we have lived a very intense and unusual life for 5 weeks. There are some strange things that you notice when you get back onto land.

This wasn’t in the script, they’re improvising!

When you are working in the field you are vulnerable to the environment that you are in. Sometimes you have to roll with the punches. This is the time for seat-of-your-pants science; on-the-spot experimental design, new goals on the fly and planning of optimum time and resource use. It’s not what anyone wants but it’s where science gets sexy and a lot of interesting discoveries are made.

Scientific blogs from BobEco now available…

…in French (Leg 1, Leg 2) and English (Leg 1, Leg 2). These will give some more scientific background information to the BobEco cruise.

Zen and the art of ROV maintenance

In the frantic offshore life of long shifts at awkward hours, drawing graphs plotting that thing against that other thing, and telling a poor ROV pilot that you would like him to use a huge robotic arm to grab that little speck (“not that one, the other one, yes, the one that’s swimming away…..grab it!”), do we ever find the time for harmony, for inner peace in body and mind?

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

We are now within the Celtic sea, the French part of it at least. I didn’t know there was a French part of the Celtic sea but it turns out there is, and I am in it.

Disk 1 complete; please insert Disk 2 to continue playing

The next area we investigated was the Lampaul canyon. Here we started at over 2,000m depth and followed the canyon up its axis, getting shallower and shallower. Our main interest here was geological. I know very little about this side of things but even I could see sudden changes in the rocks of the area.

The beating heart of the “Pourquoi Pas?”

A vessel of this size contains many different worlds, each overlapping but potentially invisible. I have been onboard for weeks and I still see people at meals who I have never seen before! There is far more going on here than I am aware of.