July 27 - August 3, 2001 vol. 38 no. 30

Calendar

Friday, July 27

MBRD SEMINAR - Lory Santiago-Vazquez, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, UC Santa Barbara, will present "Eicosanoid Biosynthesis in the Tropical Coenocytic Chlorophyte Acetabularia Crenulata" in 4500 Hubbs Hall at 12 noon.
(Carolyn Sheehan, x24989)

Tuesday July 31, 2001

DOCTORAL DISSERTATION DEFENSE - Kara Lavender will defend her doctoral dissertation entitled "The General Circulation and Open-Ocean Deep Convection in the Labrador Sea: A Study Using Subsurface Floats" in 4500 Hubbs Hall at 10 a.m. The public is
invited.(Tim Ryan, tjryan@ucsd.edu)

Notices

SCRIPPS OPEN HOUSE - It's baaaaaack! To celebrate the UCSD 40th anniversary, Open House will take place throughout campus on SATURDAY, OCT. 20. The Scripps Open House will be 11 a.m.-4 p.m. All at Scripps, the San Diego community, family, and friends are invited to this free event showcasing the science and fun of Scripps. Activities at Scripps being planned include science demonstrations; a surf clinic; music and entertainment by Scripps performers; food; tours of the pier, Old Scripps Building, and Old Directors' House; and lots of family fun! A request for volunteers will be coming, so please consider helping out. (Note: The Birch Aquarium at Scripps is self supporting, and therefore, will not be free for Open House. Regular admission applies; coupons and discounts are welcome.)
(SIO Communications, x43624)

BAS BBQ TO DEBUT! Weekends in August at the Birch Aquarium: August 5- September 3 - A sizzling summer calls for sizzling a BBQ! Weekends in August, visitors to the aquarium will delight in fresh, hot barbecued food served in Smargon Courtyard near the new shark reef
exhibit. Make plans to bring your friends and family for a lunch outing overlooking the Pacific Ocean (and don't forget that we have thousands of fish to see too!).
(Lydia Cobb, lkcobb@ucsd.edu)

GEOREF JOURNAL ARTICLE DATABASE - Great news for users of the GEOREF Journal Article Database! On the SIO Library homepage at http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio, the link to GeoRef now goes to the new Cambridge Scientific Abstracts' product. Finally.......GeoRef users can set up an "Alert" to receive weekly e-mail updates of new citations! You can save your searches and quickly run a complex search without re-typing terms and phrases. The new GeoRef provides a simpler way to use your bibliographic software (i.e. Endnote, Procite, Reference Manager, Biblioscape). If you need to know if a journal is indexed by GeoRef you can quickly check the GeoRef Serials List. Note: You should *not* use the CDL version of GeoRef (at Stanford) for citations to recent literature; the CDL version of Georef (at Stanford) has *not* been updated since October 2000. For more information about using GeoRef contact Susan Berteaux in the SIO Library. (sberteaux@ucsd.edu, x20534)

GAY PRIDE PARADE - The UCSD Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community is proud to sponsor an entry into the Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade, Saturday, July 28, at 12 noon in Hillcrest along University Avenue. Participants can congregate for the march at the north end of the DMV parking lot, on Lincoln Street between Cleveland and Normal. Participants need to arrive at the parade staging area between 9:30 & 10:30 a.m. The parade steps off at 12 noon, and should be done between 2 & 3 p.m. T-Shirts will be available for the first 100 contingent members. For more information and upcoming LGBT activities at UCSD contact Shaun Travers, rainbow@ucsd.edu or x23493.

Ship News

R/V New Horizon-The first week of our summer cruise has been marked mostly by successes and by one failure. All scientific endeavors are succeeding to collect reams of data albeit hampered a little by high winds and rolling seas. We are progressing back toward the beach after transecting on our southern most line seaward for nearly 400 miles. Technical difficulties have been traced to an unclean power source, but all systems have functioned exceptionally well since. Preliminary data from our hydrographic survey show a 1.5 degree temperature break about 75 miles offshore around the Cortes and Tanner Banks, which we traversed at night. This helps to explain our one failure, which is that nothing has been caught by our portable, flexible macro-nekton collectors. Other observations include: chlorophyll concentrations that were astronomical (48.3 mg/m3) in the soupy waters sampled in the midst of the red tide north of Scripps pier. Survey expectations are still high and the work continues.
Alas, a one to two degree positive sea surface temperature anomaly persists in the waters outside the California Current. Bird observations sponsored in part by Pt. Reyes Bird Observatory have been influenced first by the red tide nearshore and possibly by anomalously warm waters offshore. Species, in order of abundance include: Leach's storm-petrel, whimbrel, black-footed Albatross, Western gull, elegant tern, red-billed tropic bird, Cook's petrel, Xantus's murrelet. These are just what are observed within a 100m counting grid from the ships bridge. In addition, our astute observer has seen a pod of Bairds beaked whales, numerous flying fish and possibly a lone sperm whale. MOCNESS work by SIO graduate student David Field has been counted among our successes of late with two in the bag in spite of weather conditions. Scheduling should allow for several more before the cruise is finished. Noteworthy among his samples was an angry amphipod with claws to back up his fury. Additional smaller net tows round out his study of current ocean controls on foram distributions to interpret sedimentary records of past ocean climate. Optics measurements are marked by cooperation between Greg Mitchel's and Robert Frouin's people and a visitor gratefully made possible by Julietta Fargion at NASA/Goddard. Now if conditions would clear long enough for the sun to peek through this fantastic collaboration could come to fruition. We thank the captain, Murray Stein, and his crew for their diligence which has made all our studies possible. The rough seas have not hampered our appetites, rather we have been eating delightfully well thanks to the fine cooks we have onboard. The second half of the summer CalCOFI cruise has been marked by a couple of delays, one mysterious mechanical failure and the other windfall naval detour that put us thick into an albacore school. The table fare brightened spirits as we continue to complete our data set covering the extensive grid designed to chart the California Current. In so doing, it appears the current is meandering well offshore with some negative temperature anomalies evident. Chlorophyll measurements are characteristically low outside the current. One high value encountered was 3.5 micrograms per liter just outside San Nicolas Island where a phytoplankton bloom had reached had already
reached its' peak as evident from the zero nitrate levels measured by our esteemed nutrient chemist. Santa Barbara Basin was bonus or bust, which is just what we experienced. National Marine Fisheries biologists observed incredibly high counts of both anchovy eggs and sand dab eggs. While the graduate project suffered a net blow out as a result of the algae
rich conditions encountered. Bird observations include thousands of Sooty Shearwaters between the Channel Islands and the mainland, mixed in with smaller numbers of Elegant Terns, Brown Pelicans, Pink-footed and Black-vented Shearwaters. Three species of Gulls also put in appearances in the more shallow waters, plus some early fall arrivals of 4 South Polar Skuas, 2 Parasitic Jaegers, and a Pomarine Jaeger. Farther offshore, the birdlife is still dominated by Leach's Storm-Petrels,being far more numerous this week than the last. A very lost Yellow-headed Blackbird alighted on the ship. It was over 180 miles from the nearest piece of land. Also a lone Black Storm-Petrel and Xantus's Murrelet caps off the bird highlights. Marine Mammals encountered since the last update include a few pods of Blue Whales, 3 Bryde's Whales, a few Fin Whales, and circa 3000 Common Dolphins. Thanks go out to the Captain, ships crew and scientific party for working in unison to keep us on schedule in order that we complete our transects within time alotted. Everyone on board would agree we are fooling ourselves if anyone thinks they are able to diet out here with the exception of the sad oiler whose gout condition prevents him from indulging to his hearts content like the rest of us. This completes this weeks report on my maiden voyage as chief scientist.
Dave Wolgast
Chief Scientist
CalCOFI Cruise

R/V REVELLE - Greetings once again from the Revelle. After 39 days on the high seas we are deploying our last dozen drifting buoys and are heading for 85W, 2.5N for a last survey of velocity, north to Puerto Caldera, Costa Rica. We will be port in just 3 days! (26
July). Over the past 5 weeks we have deployed over 100 surface drifting buoys, and completed 8 hydrographic and 14 meridional velocity sections between 105W and 85W, as well as two weeks of intense mass budget surveys at 95W. Although we came to the eastern tropical Pacific to study what we thought was a well defined current - the North Equatorial Counter
Current (NECC) - we have been surprised by the highly variable, wind-driven surface flow existing above a relatively stable geostrophic current. All our preliminary results indicate that the surface and pycnocline currents lead very different lives. It has been an arduous, but exciting and successful trip. We are all looking forward to returning to our homes in San Diego, Hawaii, Costa Rica, and Florida. But especially we are grateful to the hospitality
and professionalism of the Revelle Captain and crew. They have done Scripps mighty proud!
Signing off,
Revelle Science Party:
S. Kennan (NSU), J. Sprintall and C. Martin (SIO-PORD),
J. Calderwood, F. Delahoyde, and C. Mattson (SIO-ODF),
G. Pillard (SIO-STS), F. Ascani (Univ. HI), E. Vasquez (Costa Rica Ministry)

R/V Robert Gordon Sproul Weekly Scientific Report
Thur., 26 July, 2001 The deployment of our free-fall laser-stimulated imaging fluorometer
(no acronym yet) has been extremely successful. Occupying stations off Point Loma, Scripps Pier and Oceanside, we have gathered a fantastic array of digital images of phytoplankton and zooplankton fluorescence in situ. As the 2300 lb instrument falls at 10 cm per second, it gathers images 1 m below it, undisturbed by the instrument itself. Our bottle sampling shows that the "stars" seen in our images are dinoflagellates and chain-forming diatoms, as well as lots of large copepods, salps and ctenophores. The weather has been exceptionally nice - calm seas and light breezes. Captain Louis Zimm and his crew have been skillful in their recoveries of the free-fall system, and in keeping the science party happy and well-fed. Our ichthyoplankton sampling system has not worked, so we are subsisting on Mark's excellent cuisine. Tracy, our res tech, has worked extremely hard, allowing us our consistent acquisition of excellent data.
Peter Franks

R/V Roger Revelle http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/supp_groups/shipsked/Revelle/Revelle.html

R/V Melville http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/supp_groups/shipsked/Melville/melville.html
will depart when load-out is complete

R/V New Horizon http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/supp_groups/shipsked/NewHorizon/newhor.html

R/V Robert Gordon Sproul
http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/supp_groups/shipsked/RobertSproul/sproul.html

David Starr Jordan http://www.pmc.noaa.gov/schedule/ds.htm

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PLEASE NOTE - The SIO LOG is the in-house newsletter for staff,
students, faculty, and retirees of Scripps Institution of
Oceanography/ UCSD. All seminars, celebrations, lectures, and events
are for these individuals only, unless otherwise noted. Public
lectures will be advertised in the SIO LOG and in the local news
media.