Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s FLIP vessel decommissioned after 60 years
maritime-executive.com
maritime-executive.com
He was an interesting guy. He left Austria during the Anschluss and started working on his doctorate at SIO. When the US entered the war he put his PhD on pause to enlist in the US Army Ski Corps. As a native German speaker and former ski instructor, he thought it was a good fit.
A little over a year later, the Department of War found out from Roger Revelle and Harald Sverdrup that they had a talented oceanographer deployed to the front lines. So they pulled him out to help with submarine warfare and the planning of some upcoming amphibious landings in Africa, and later, Normandy.
He was still working at SIO into his 90s. And, as was the case with all the scientists and staff at SIO, he was an all-around nice person.
SIO was a chill place to work. A good portion of the folks kept surfboards in their offices so they could surf before work. You weren't going to get rich working there, but the people and the location were hard to beat.
Good surfing requires pretty particular types of waves. Which in turn requires particular wind. Even at good locations, these are transient conditions that can appear and disappear at the whim of nature (even over the course of an hour).
Ergo, surf's up = drop things that don't need to be done ASAP
They'll be there later. Good waves probably won't.
Salk Institute is an even more surreal place.
It requires are crew of five (not including the up-to 11 scientists). Much of the science would probably be better off without noise introduced by crew and the generators.
Scientists might be better off with an unmanned battery powered platform. Or unmanned ROVs.
And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper for scientists to simply piggy-back on those.
Not that much cheaper. At least in the US based oil companies I have worked with, the cost of sending even one person to an offshore platform can easily exceed 20k USD. Everyone on the platform has to have extensive safety training. Only a few training facilities are setup to do things like Helicopter Underwater Escape Training [1] so the cost is pretty high.
In contrast, FLIP used 3 diesel generators. I watched the 27+ minute video from 1969 linked by someone else and was struck by how much it reminded me of offshore O&G platforms and drilling rigs with steel walls and diesel generators screaming. The guys in the video wore no hearing protection in the generator room. It was loud on the video and from wandering thru a generator room on land I know it had to be deafening. I have tinnitus from all the loud machinery that I worked around and it does impact your quality of life. As a service company hand you always got the bunks in the cabins closest to the noise sources so there was no way to escape.
When you combine the generator noise with the noise from those dot matrix printers you get a nice wide-band noise source. Since the FLIP was studying acoustic signals they must've overcome the constant noise from the platform by filtering. I know from some ocean bottom receivers that I worked with that you can hear individual boats entering and leaving a recording area through a water column that is thousands of feet thick. Since the generators ran 24 hours a day they likely needed some signal processing to mitigate the constant noise.
And back in 1969 what OS would they be using? CP/M? The rack they loaded in the FLIP video looked a lot like an old DEC Vax rack-mounted computer that we scrapped back in the 1980's.
Another thing I noticed about FLIP is that many of the ladders used to access the different levels appear to be hardware store aluminum ladders as opposed to built to purpose ladders. I think the POD will have the benefit of experience gained with the FLIP to hone their design so that access issues are streamlined and efficient. In their ePOD course (very cool stuff there) about the living quarters you can see that ladders are fixed in position.
Thanks for this link. For those that watched the video of FLIP I recommend walking through the courses in the ePOD part of this POD link.
It's one of those things that dates from a period in the 1960s when the oceans were seen as worthy of exploration as the Moon. People talked about undersea cities. But only a few very tiny undersea research habitats were ever built. There just wasn't a use case.
FLIP was all about those undersea sound waves, thermal gradients and sloping ocean bottoms.
Less underseas cities, more total atomic warfare.
- Nuclear power
- Access to Earth orbit
- GPS
- Mapping of the world's oceans
- Miniaturized circuits
- The Internet
- Interstate road systems
- Hubble Space Telescope
- Earth observation satellites
- Destruction of the current human civilization
Although I agree that it is nice that we scrapped some benefits out of it along the way
NED: Steve are we allowed in here? ZISSOU: It's the scientific community, man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbFdjq-QIRc
Interestingly, in a life imitates art way, an R/P FLIP crew member describes the culture onboard the actual sea lab as resembling Life Aquatic here: https://rvsallyride.ucsd.edu/2017/04/04/week-3-report-from-f...
In our field of technology, ideas, performance, growth, and debugging there’s only so much value talking and so much more value in measuring. Data and experiments have driven my projects forward so many more times than ideas and meetings.
You don’t know what you don’t know.