A little more than a year ago, on the night of February 9, the 170-foot research ship Wecoma headed west from the Oregon coast into darkening rough seas. Within hours, the ship was trying to make its way into a gale that drove rain horizontally across the decks. By the next day 45-knot winds were jacking waves up to heights of 30 feet, conditions that could easily have smashed smaller vessels.
The relentless pounding continued for days. Oceanographer Ed Baker remembers February 14 as the worst night of all. Waves crashed and roared over the deck, blurring sky and sea. Then the wind would suddenly change direction without warning, propelling rollers into the ship from an entirely new angle. The Wecoma pitched and bucked violently in unpredictable jerks. "What you can't appreciate until you're out there is the whipping motion," says Baker.
"If you're not holding on, you can get thrown across the deck." Despite the storm, Baker, a researcher at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, and his colleagues were determined to launch a half-ton deepwater probe into the Pacific from the roller-coaster decks. They knew that a mile below the Wecoma a volcano had blown its top, and only the most unholy of storms would keep them from collecting evidence of a newly discovered side effect of such an eruption: giant underwater twisters of hot water, called megaplumes, loaded with minerals and strange life-forms. As the deck crane cavorted wildly in the wind, the researchers gingerly lowered the probe--a cluster of sampling bottles held by a wire tether--over the side. Once the probe was in the water, they let the tether unspool for 40 minutes until the bottles were a mile underwater. They worried the whole time that the corkscrewing motion of the ship would snap the wire. Then they had to haul the load back aboard. "Swinging is a bad thing," Baker says, remembering the gyrations of the crane. If the bottles slammed against the hull, they would be destroyed. If they slammed against scientists and deckhands, someone would die.
Conditions deteriorated and the captain of the ship banished the scientists inside, where they passed hours trying to drink coffee that frequently flew out of their cups or trying to rest in tossing bunks that thrust them to the floor. Sleeping, Baker says, “was always an adventure.”
