24 November, 1995

November 24, 1995



Location:  66 32' South Latitude  x  95 70' West Longitude



Update:



Today I lived the color gray, every hue, every subtle variation.  I

attended the universal gray convention.  Today I  joined the church of gray.

Gray was everywhere today.  It was almost like a religion with its ten

commandments of gray.  If gray could have a hall of fame, I was locked

inside it today.  I discovered that gray is not just a color, but it is a

smell, a taste, a sound as well.  It is an aura, a feeling. I have lived a

24 hour recurring nightmare of gray.  I have been to the edge of the gray

abyss, and have come back forever changed by that experience.



I just cannot seem to shake how the sea and the sky were absent of any

color other than gray.  The ocean was not blue, it was gray.  The sky and the

clouds were gray.  The sun even got caught up in the melancholy.  I

patiently waited for the evening sun to paint on the dusk sky from its

palette in orange, yellow and red.  It never happened. 

The waves gently rocked our ship, lulling us to sleep away the somber gray

hours of the day.



As we make our transit, we have reached a point now, where we are far

enough north of the Antarctic Ice shelf,  that we rarely see ice.  I miss

the ice.  I miss the way everyone on the ship would talk of the shapes and

the color and the magic of the ice.  I miss also the feeling that when we

were in the ice, we had become part of something bigger, some plan, some

greater whole.  Out here in the ocean it is very easy to feel alone and

separated.  The grayness of the day made its way into the mood of the people

on the ship.  Everyone seemed just a bit quiet, a little reserved.  Some

doctors and scientists say that the weather can have a profound affect on

how you feel.  I am a living case study. 



The science marches on with the waves.  Each day we continue to collect

multi beam data of the sea floor.  Occasionally we see variations in the

features of this mostly flat basin.  It is these little changes, bumps on

the sea floor, that are exciting to the scientists.  These maps that are

being made reveal features never before seen.  They provide a small glimpse

of a huge sea floor system that has been formed over millions of years by

the slow plate tectonic motions.  



The act of collecting data to produce sea floor maps is a scientific

adventure.  It is a search for the new and unseen.  Like adventurers that

discovered continents, the scientists are in a race to be the first. The

race for the scientists is a race to be first, to collect, analyze and

interpret data, and ultimately to publish so that their findings can be

shared within the scientific community.