Underway and here to stay

6/1/2026

Hi y’all! My name is Sarah Packman, and I am a CTD watchstander aboard the R/V Langseth for P04E. After 3 weeks at sea, the science party has hit our stride. Here are some of the highlights since we last wrote from the Marshall Islands.

We set off from Majuro on May 11th, saying a bittersweet goodbye to the atoll that had welcomed us for the past week. We promptly rolled into shift work, with roughly half of us staying up from noon to midnight, approx. half staying up from midnight to noon, and the remainder on a variety of different schedules. The first days involved working out some kinks, settling into our new sleep schedules, and exploring life aboard the Langseth. Also, two of our crewmembers, Roxanna and Riley, graduated from college! A huge congratulations to them!

On May 16th, we crossed the International Dateline, repeating a day and joining the so-called Order of the Golden Dragon. Fun fact: the timezone we then inhabited is the last on earth to experience a given day, and it is not observed by any country on Earth.

Soon enough, though, we crossed into Honolulu Standard Time (hey, Hawaii!). Along the way, we sampled the very top of a seamount. Over a few tens of nautical miles, the depth of the ocean went from 6000 m to 1400 m. Pretty cool if you ask me. 

As we settled into our routine, we found a few different ways of passing the time on transits between CTD casts. Card games have been a favorite, including Dutch Blitz, cambio, palace, and of course, cribbage. Todd, the Chief Science Officer, has been especially instructive in the ways of cribbage smack-talk, though at the time of writing, he has not yet beaten me in a game :). Beading has also taken us by storm, courtesy of Elisa and Jess’s supply of beading needles, thread, and every color of bead you could ask for. We have also greatly enjoyed heading out on deck to look for sea creatures hunting by the light of our ship, including mahi mahi, oceanic whitetips, and squid. 

On May 31, we completed the time-honored tradition of decorating styrofoam cups, then sending them down to the bottom of the ocean attached to the CTD. They shrunk to about an eighth of their original size due to the immense pressure. Some creative people shrunk things other than cups, including styrofoam skulls (courtesy of Todd) and a styrofoam brick decorated like Spongebob.

Now, as we get closer to the eastern equatorial Pacific, we have already seen a sharp drop in dissolved oxygen concentrations, heralding the approach of the eastern tropical Pacific oxygen minimum zone. We eagerly look forward to sampling this very chemically and biologically unique region of the world’s oceans!