UD and the University of Georgia team up for a research cruise to study the ocean’s micro layer. (All photographs by Jarek Rutz/Delaware LIVE News)
A University of Delaware research cruise that was initially supposed to take off in 2022 and was delayed several times due to inclement weather and problems with the ship finally was launched Sunday.
“There is plenty of excitement,” said Dr. Andrew Wozniak, a professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy who is one of the cruise leaders, Sunday. “We’re all kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s been a very long journey, but we’re very excited, to a person, everybody’s very excited to get going.”
Dr. Andrew Wozniak
The cruise, which will be about 10 days long, departed off the coast of Lewes, and includes a service team of 11 – six from UD and five from the University of Georgia.
There’s also two engineers who are responsible for making sure all the equipment on the ship is running smoothly.
Two service technicians along with a handful of graduate students round out the ship’s members.
Their mission is to collect, test, examine, study and make findings on the ocean’s micro layer by exploring it off the coast of southern Delaware.
The boat will hover around three to four locations.
“We’re going to sample that little layer plus the layer below it, and we’re going to look at the biology, we’re going to look at the chemistry, and we’re going to measure the surface tension properties of the water and draw some linkages between those three components, and try and develop kind of a model that better understands mechanistically what’s controlling that surface tension,” Wozniak said.
That surface tension is the controlling factor for some of the ocean’s gas exchanges, and the better they can understand those linkages, the better they can understand that gas exchange.
The ocean’s micro layer is the layer of water right between the ocean and the air.
By looking at this layer, researchers can determine what is being put in the ocean and what is then released back into the air, which is important when looking at climate change and the impacts of pollution.
This layer is also where a lot of organisms and new life hang out, like larvae, and while Wozniak said that is indirectly related to what the cruise is researching, he is interested in seeing how the pollution in that micro layer affects those living creatures on the surface.
“We can predict how the ocean is going to be impacting the atmosphere,” he said, “One way is through that gas exchange, and the other way is through aerosols.”
While people think of aerosols as the spray cans and mists, Wozniak pointed out that aerosols are all in the atmosphere.
“They come from cars, they come from biomass burning, wildfires and more,” he said, “so there’s these little particles that we’re not seeing all the time. They end up affecting cloud cover. They end up affecting the light that’s coming down on the earth.”
So on land, he said, it’s easy to see where they’re coming from.
“But on the ocean, they’re coming through waves, so waves break, and they go up,” he said, “so all that stuff that’s sitting there at the surface is the seed for that stuff that goes up into the atmosphere.”
If scientists and researchers can understand at a predictive level what’s going to be there at that surface and how well they form clouds, for example, Wozniak said they then can understand a little bit more about weather, the heat budget and climate.
He joked that it will just take a couple days for those on board to be speaking like pirates.
Jokes aside, he admitted he himself and others tend to get a little “sea crazy,” but the tight ship does have televisions, satellite connection, and a cook, kitchen, a lounge, showers and beds.
“Think of yourself on a long road trip, you’re going to figure out ways to pass the time,” Wozniak said. “For example, the stretch where we go from the shelf out to the middle of the ocean, we’re going to be cruising there for 12 to 18 hours, so we’re going to figure out ways to keep ourselves busy. I just had an undergrad ask this question, and I said to bring books, bring games, bring cards.”
There was already a deck of uno spread on the lounge-room table Sunday morning.
The boat is called the R/V Hugh R. Sharp Ship and is 146 feet long. Its namesake was a businessman and aviator who worked and had familial connections with the DuPont Corporation.
Raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Jarek earned a B.A. in journalism and a B.A. in political science from Temple University in 2021. After running CNN’s Michael Smerconish’s YouTube channel, Jarek became a reporter for the Bucks County Herald before joining Delaware LIVE News.
Jarek can be reached by email at [email protected] or by phone at (215) 450-9982. Follow him on Twitter @jarekrutz
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