Today was my fourth day diving with the Submerged Resources Center (SRC) team. I am working in Honolulu as a maritime heritage intern with the NOAA Pacific Regional Marine Sanctuaries Program while I am also completing my dissertation in the field of maritime archaeology at East Carolina University. For me, diving with this team is such a privilege, and to join them on USS Arizona is an incredible experience. There are many things that are predictable about a day at the Memorial; boats come and go at routine intervals and waves of visitors enter and exit in much the same fashion. But I have found that there is little that is predictable in the daily activities of the SRC team. By this I mean that their creativity and ingenuity never cease to amaze me. Matt Russell, as the taskmaster, describes the daily objectives early this morning, but I love the way that so much of their success relies on the way that the team can resourcefully figure out ways to get the job done. While many underwater archeology projects involve some simple, basic tools (such as measuring tapes and slates), Matt, Brett Seymour, Dave Conlin and Art Ireland create their own tools as they go in order to get the job done.

Kelly stands by with collection vials for the mung samples. Photo by Brett Seymour, NPS.

Today, Brett and Dave continued improvements to their AMAZING MACHINE in order to keep working on the photomosaic. Creating a photomosaic is a daunting task for any site; it is incredibly tedious and so many elements have to work in your favor. Doing a photomosaic at Arizona is a feat that only a team with this kind of creativity and experience could attempt. In the middle of the day I am struck by the scene of Brett near the surface of the bow of the ship with the AMAZING MACHINE, and Dave on a nearby quay working with the generator. What they are attempting to do is a complicated task, but they make it look simple in such an “all-in-a-day’s work” fashion. I realize how valuable teamwork is in this field, and Dave, Brett, Matt and Art are all incredible at working together. They work in environments where traditional methods of communication aren’t always feasible, and I’m so impressed with how synchronized their work is.

Matt Russell retrieves a mung sample from an interior cabin accessed through a starboard porthole.
Photo by Brett Seymour, NPS.

While Brett and Dave work at the bow, Jenni Burbank, Matt and I were wrangling “mung” from one of the starboard portholes of the ship. This is truly an interdisciplinary project: another study is being conducted on the microbial canopy that is growing on the oil that has accumulated on the overhead of the ship. The team coined this growth “mung” years ago, and today we were going to try to collect samples to be sent off to Pam Morris at Medical University of South Carolina. This task was going to require some more creativity and engineering, not to mention teamwork. Constructing a device to scrape microbial growth off the ceiling of a ship was one thing, the trickier part was figuring out how we would get this filmy stuff into small sample containers through a foot-wide porthole. After constructing a sophisticated mung retrieving device from PVC pipe and electrical tape, Jenni, Matt and I got to work. Like most of the work I’ve been involved in for the last two days, it was a messy task, and though I managed to avoid getting oil in my hair this time. . . but oil seemed to get everywhere else. We were successful at wrangling enough mung to carefully place into solutions that would help Pam Morris analyze this bizarre phenomenon growing on the oil inside the ship. It is really an amazing thing to see. I’ve always thought that peering into portholes on a ship is the most haunting part of visiting a wrecksite, but like so many other parts of the ship, there is so much growing and changing and evolving. It is another humbling reminder that working on Arizona isn’t like any other ship on earth. So much has happened and so much continues to happen at this site and I feel honored to be able to experience the site so intimately.

Team Mung prepares the samples for shipment and analysis. Photo by Brett Seymour, NPS.

I can’t conclude today’s thoughts without expressing my gratitude to Art, who is such a wonderful part of the SRC team. In any project involving tons of gear, boats and long days in the field, its such a blessing to have someone around who always seems to say the perfect thing or have the perfect remedy.