I-COOL

We're finally in AUSTRALIA!!! We arrived last Wednesday, so we've been here a full week now, and have a good amount of stuff to share with you! It's been pretty rough getting on the 12-hour-difference time schedule, but we'm getting there!

First of all, it is absolutely BEAUTIFUL here. The plant-life and wildlife are exotic and the beaches are breathtaking. The sky is literally bluer here (less particulate matter in the air) and the clouds alone are incredible. They're so high in the sky and vast; it really gives the true impression of how huge Australia really is.

We've both now been in our third ocean! 3 down (Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian) and 2 to go (Arctic and Southern)!!!

Anyway, we're in Perth, which has a population over over 1.5 million people. That being said, it is commonly known as the world's most isolated city...which it is! The nearest cities are thousands of miles away. Perhaps arising from being the most isolated big city in the world, the food is super expensive here! Many times 2- or 3-times as expensive as in the US! We certainly didn't quite expect that! North of Perth, about half way up the continent of Australia is Ningaloo Reef; the world's only extensive reef system of the west coast of any continent. We may even get a chance to visit Ningaloo Reef for a glider deployment! On the east coast of AU is Cairns (the Great Barrier Reef) (which we will be visiting for a week at the end our our trip!), the Gold Coast, Sydney, etc. Those are the more commonly known and visited tourist attractions.

So over the past week we've been lucky enough to go to the beach a few times, visit the city, and do some walking around in Kings Parks, which is a part-preserved forest/part-botany forest. Really pretty there.

Some of the birds here really are quite fascinating. Beautiful colors and really cool sounds and songs! The Kookaburra sounds really cool in particular. Its sound is actually replicated by Aboriginals that play the didgeridoo.

The first couple days we got here the surf was great! But the swell has passed and I'm (Dave) waiting for another good swell to come in since I brought my surfboard! Also had some wetsuit problems, but hopefully they'll get resolved soon and I can get some really nice waves! One of the professors we're working with at the University of Western Australia worked on a project to create the world's first artificial SURFING reef! The reef was designed to create perfectly breaking waves for surfers, and is just a few miles away from where we're staying!

This past Monday we started work at the University of Western Australia's (UWA) Oceans Institute (OI). We are working with Ben, Christine, Dennis, Mun, and Chari, who are all from UWA. We started off on Monday morning with an ANFOG (Australia's National Facilities for Ocean Gliders) meeting about the plans for this week and the next coming 2 months. We have a glider deployment this Friday, for which we have been preparing and testing the glider U209 for. The glider will be taking measurements of the Leeuwin Current just off the coast of Perth. The Leeuwin Current is vital to the marine biology and ecosystems here in Western Australian waters. In addition to prepping U209, we prepped U210 for another Marine Science Institution in Tasmania for a very cool guy named Lindsay who I met in the Canary Islands this past March for a global glider observatories conference!

After we get U209 in the water, we will begin prepping the 2 gliders which we will be piloting for our primary research this summer. They are a new type of glider which we have not worked with yet, which is exciting to be able to learn how to tech and operate another type of glider (there are 3 main types of gliders, so we'll know how to operate 2 out of 3 after this summer!). The type of gliders we are very familiar with are Teledyne Webb Research Slocum Gliders, such as U209 and U210 are, as well as the Rutgers University gliders such as RU27. We will be working plenty with Slocums, but the main part of the data from which we will be using for our research will come from sensors aboard the 2nd type of glider: iRobot Seaglider. Essentially, the sensors on any glider are the same, the variance is just in the glider itself; the vehicle to which the sensors are attached. When it comes down to it, data is data!

We will be researching the Perth Canyon, an ancient part of the Swan River and begins about 20 nautical miles off the coast of Perth. I'll get into more detail about that when the times comes, but its geoformation is similar to the Hudson Canyon off the coast of NJ!

So as we said, we'll be going out of a boat early Friday morning to deploy the Slocum glider U209! We will be with Dennis, the glider tech at UWA. We'll be sure to take some pictures!

Speaking of pictures, photography and is a mini-hobby of ours, so we'll be sharing some photos we take along the way of this Australian Adventure! I (Dave) particularly like dynamic landscape photography and supermacro photography. Hope you enjoy them!

Cheers,
Dave & Shannon

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Australian Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.