Here is my short report about what happened to bob.

Before I disassembled glider I turned it on and took some variable values:

m_vacuum = 3.98 inHg
m_battery = 14.1V
m_leakdetect_voltage= 0.443V

Then I opened the aft section first. I prepared small bucket under the glider expecting some water from it. It was nice surprise that not a one drop came out between end cap and hull section. Evidence that leak was not big. No water traces I found on the inside surface of the end cap. Means that leak is not coming from the aft section. Next I deattached science bay from aft hull section and found some water drops at the bottom of aft battery:

Next I deattached science bay from front section and removed small bag of desiccant, which was placed by Webb during previous repairs. Evidently water traces can be seen  at the bottom and water absorption bag looks like a great deal to keep glider drier when leak is not big:

Looks like water was coming from front section.

Next I inspected front section. Water traces at the bottom of pressure case. Leak detect sensor is wet. Water drops on the inside part of the front cap. Salt water traces on the buoyancy pump cylinder, which tells me that buoyancy pump assembly is the cause of the leak:

I decided to open the front plastic cap to inspect buoyancy membrane and here is what I’ve found:

I hope this is not a new species called buoyancy pump killer fish.

Glider Bob decided to spring a leak late Friday (05/22) night. Is there any better timing than that? To make matters worse, Glider Bob was about as far offshore as possible with the prevailing currents pushing him offshore and to the south (cyan track).

Fortunately, Justin was out on the Wecoma and they were able to recover bob early, early Sunday morning without much apparent hassle. We’ll have to talk to Justin to find out for sure. I monitored the recover via glider terminal and the Wecoma’s webcam, while I fed Dashel a bottle around 2am.

Laura left bright and early Tuesday morning on the Elakha to retreive bob from the Wecoma, her report: The transfer went well. Glider and cart were tied to a line and dropped in the water from the Wecoma, and we winched it on board the Elakha. We lucked out with the weather, and as far as I could tell Bob did not hit either of the two ships.
Now we’re waiting to hear from Anatoli just how much water is inside …

I spent some time today looking at patterns of CDOM along our glider sections. As an introduction, CDOM is colored dissolved organic matter, also known as “yellow substance,” “gilvin,” and “gelbstoff.” CDOM is a subset of the pool of dissolved organic material in the ocean (and lakes, streams, estuaries, etc.) that is optically active (i.e. has color). CDOM appears yellow or brown to the eye depending on it’s concentration, it absorbs light very strongly in the blue region of the spectrum, and fluoresces in the blue as well. CDOMs optical characteristics enable us to monitor it’s concentration and distribution with a fluorometer on the Seaglider (WET Labs ECO-Puck; CDOM fluorescence excitation/emission at 370/460 nm). CDOM is an important parameter to keep track of for many reasons (see excellent review by P. Coble, Chem. Rev., 2007, 107, 402-418), but for our purposes we are primarily interested in monitoring the variability of sources and sinks of carbon in the OMZ.

Here is a plot of all of the CDOM-depth profiles from our most recent complete section, Line 11, with oxygen concentration in color. The red line is a running average at each depth bin.

CDOM profiles from SG157, Line 11

A couple of things pop out right away. CDOM is degraded by sunlight very quickly, which is evident here in the surface data. That’s just a good double-check that the fluorometer is working. Second, there appears to be (maybe?) two discrete pools of CDOM – one associted with phytoplankton production and degredation in the chlorophyll maximum (photic zone, high O2), and one associated with the microbial community in the OMZ (low light/aphotic & hypoxic). However, it is impossible to tell from these data alone if the source of the CDOM in the OMZ is local or if it was derived from far away sources and has been transported with the water mass. Collecting water samples for CDOM spectral absorption  measurements will tell us a great deal about the nature and origin of CDOM in this area. It’s also important to remeber that not all CDOM is fluorescent, so we are actually looking at a sub-pool (the fluorescent bits) of a sub-pool (the colored bits) of the pool of dissolved carbon. However, the CDOM data that we are able to collect autonomously could be very instructive when considered in conjuncion with other variables like chlorophyll, backscattering, and physical indecies of mixing and mass transport.

This is just a first-look at the data, and I’m still trying to get my head around it. Feedback in the comments is encouraged!

Hey all – just realized that Seaglider 157 made it’s 400th dive off of Iquique on Saturday (9 May, 2009). Very exciting! The glider is now on it’s usual onshore-offshore route, about 2/3 the way through the seventh ~135 km, cross-shore transect. The eastern south Pacific oxygen minimum zone has never been sampled over these time and space scales, so I hope you all can share some of my enthusiasm for these unprecedented data. Now, if we could just find a research vessel so that we could get out there and do some discrete sampling…

Anyhow – thanks to everyone involved for your continued efforts.