Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Behind the scenes of the ship


This week we have been exploring all the parts of the ship we have not yet discovered and were lucky enough to get shown around the engine room and the bridge. It is evident that each area of a ship (bridge, engines, science etc.) has a group of people doing those specific jobs and that the combination of everyone doing their part keeps everything running smoothly; like cogs in a massive machine. 

The engine room control panel. With that many buttons no wonder it takes so much training to work in the engine room!
The engine room is located in the hull of the ship and is the biggest room on board by far, taking up about 2/3rds of the bottom deck. This is obviously a very important part of the ship because without it we would not be moving anywhere! The Langseth has 2 engines leading to 2 propellers and also 1 bow-thruster. There are so many different bits of machinery down there that it can take 4 years of studying to be qualified to work in the engine room. It is very loud and warm but surprisingly clean and tidy. There are also 2 compressors which are used to pressurise the air for the air guns that we tow. 

One of the very noisy compressors. It is hard to portray the size of these in a photo, they are huge!
The heat from the engines is used to produce all the hot water for the ship and the engine room also has machines for desalinising our water. Fuel usage is constantly monitored and fuel moved between all the many tanks spread around the ship to ensure even weight distribution. Even though we only travel at about 4 knots whilst acquiring data we burn between 5000-6000 Gallons of fuel a day due to the massive load of the equipment we are towing behind us.

One of the two engines
The bridge sits at the front of the ship on top of the main living quarters. From here it seems as if practically everything can be controlled. They drive the ship when we are not driving from the main science lab during acquisition, control the speed, can manage the safety aspects including all alarms and watertight doors and keep a look out for anything floating past that might get caught up in our seismic gear (so far buoys and pallets have been sighted). One very important job of the bridge is to communicate with other nearby vessels. Nobody would expect us to be towing 6km of streamers so we have to make sure we let other ships know with enough time to arrange safe passing, therefore avoiding collisions.

This is the main control panel in the bridge. There are screens for  navigation and
radar as well as all the speed controls. There are two smaller control panels
on the port and starboard sides of the bridge for work that
involves careful maneuvering e.g. picking up OBS's. 
The last seismic line is just being finished right now and then we can get ready to begin equipment recovery. It is about 40 hours until we are back on dry land again! 

Tessa Gregory
University of Southampton