Methane Hydrates ??

Chapter 10.  Methane Hydrates – The Next Major Energy Source?

     Do you know what we will use for major energy sources (i.e., fuels) when we finally exhaust the fossil fuels that can be found and economically recovered (petroleum, coal, natural gas)?  Well, I don’t, either.  But the replacement fuel will have to be something the earth provides us that we are not exploiting at present.  Solar, hydroelectric, wind, geothermal and biomass-derived power will all be important after fossils fuels run out but those sources can only fill in the gaps in energy demand – some new major fuel source must be found.  And history suggests it will be found and probably is already known to exist.  And, no surprise, the deep oceans might be a good place to look for it.

     One candidate already identified under the oceans in significant quantities is methane hydrate deposits.   So … what are methane hydrates?  I am going to delve into a little geochemistry here, so bear with me.  I am not a geochemist so this will have to be presented in layman’s terms, which is probably better for the majority of my reading audience.  (If you actually are a geochemist and find errors in the following I’d love to hear from you – dphuey48@gmail.com).   

    Methane hydrates are a combination of methane gas and fresh water that form an intriguing little molecule called a clathrate.  Clathrates (there are other kinds besides the methane variety) are gas and water formed into a combo that is not quite a normal compound, which is to say the gas and water are not chemically bound to each other.  It is more like they are a couple living together.  This is significant when we get to the fuel source part of the story because the methane can be separated without addition of energy to break the bonds – like the couple living together can just decide to split with no divorce energy required. 

     The way clathrates get formed to produce methane hydrates under the oceans is this.  A happy methane gas molecule wanders around like an unattached bachelor.  Sometimes it is dissolved in pore fluids, sometimes existing as free gas, generally with no permanent attachments – a bachelor who has not settled down.  Then, inevitably, it meets a comely water molecule and the two of them decide to move in together.  No marriage, per se, thus no tough-to-break chemical bonds, but a very stable relationship nonetheless.  Presumably good for both of them (or so their friends all say).  And a then a funny thing happens.  Their earlier properties as individual gas and liquid molecules disappear and their new condition, the methane hydrate, becomes a solid.  You can really wear out the girl-meets-boy-and-settles-down analogy here -- it is not really one methane molecule per water molecule – there is about 1 mole of methane gas for every 5.75 moles of water in the stable solid, but you have to be a chemist to comprehend that.  



The image here shows the cartoon version of the clathrate structure.  The yellow sphere with four spikes represents the methane molecule; the surrounding blue matrix is the water.

      The new solid methane hydrate looks a lot like dry ice, but the resemblance ends at appearances.  The hydrate requires both the right pressure range and the right temperature range to continue to exist as a stable solid.  If you add heat or simply lower the surrounding pressure the methane immediately returns to gas form and the water turns back into a liquid.  That is why we don’t just find methane hydrates everywhere, even though we know the earth has a lot of both methane and H2O. 

     Methane is the most elementary of hydrocarbon molecules; one carbon atom locked to four hydrogen atoms, CH₄.  Petroleum molecules are hydrocarbons, as well, but infinitely more complex.  Methane makes a lovely fuel because it will give up a lot of energy (heat) when burned (oxidized).  Natural gas is almost 100% methane.  But methane as a free gas is hard to trap.  Hence natural gas wells tend to be difficult to locate and are often found at great depths under land and seafloor.  Those reserves of natural gas that got naturally trapped for millions of years are the ones we are tapping now and will run out of eventually.

    Methane hydrates, on the other hand, form without the geo-pressure cooker effects required to produce natural gas or petroleum deposits.  They do not require millions of years to form, like petroleum or coal, and they are stable once formed so long as they stay in a place with the correct temperature and pressure.  No impermeable seal or cap structure is required to retain them.  Such places can, in theory, exist anywhere under the shallower parts of the oceans in the near-surface sediments.  They are even known to exist under land in the permafrost regions of the Arctic and in the Antarctic ice pack.

    The potential for methane hydrates as a useable energy resource of the future is easy to picture.  Find subsea deposits of hydrates, dig them up or pump them to the surface, reduce the pressure a little (just removing them from the depths of the oceans accomplishes that) and, bingo, you get a steady flow of pure methane suitable for burning as a fuel.   A few elementary questions of importance come up immediately; the first of which must be – just how much methane hydrate is out there under the oceans?  Ah, things get a little tougher here, which is why this obvious windfall source of easy energy is not already on line.  Nobody knows how vast subsea hydrate deposits are on the global scale.  Actually, I think there is still a lot of debate about how much is to be found even on a local scale, like in the Gulf of Mexico or offshore India, for example.  And another pretty important question would be – how do we mine or produce this source of methane efficiently?  Can it be done at all?

     Answering the how-much-is-there and how-can-we-exploit-it questions is, initially, the role of ocean research.  So we have come full circle in this story and are back to deep ocean research drilling for science.   Methane hydrates in oceanic sediments has been one of the focuses of the Deep Sea Drilling Project and Ocean Drilling Program since the early 1970s. First, hydrate deposits had to be located.  If fact, a reliable means of locating them had to be developed.  Then they had to be drilled for sampling in order to get specimens into the hands of the scientists in the labs so their properties could be understood.

     So, first things first, how to find them?  This turns out not only to be easy, but problematic in how often they turn up unexpectedly.  If you drill and take samples of ocean sediments just about anywhere on or near continental shelves there is a pretty good chance methane hydrates will find you.  The gas hydrate stability zone (deep in the water and sediment column to have the correct pressure but not so deep that the geothermal gradient has made subterranean temperatures too hot) exists in many sediment regimes about 200-500m below the seafloor.  In some areas hydrates outcrop in solid form on the seafloor itself.  This condition is quite rare – stories exist of trawl nets coming to the surface with fizzing and foaming white chunks of “ice” that could NOT be ordinary frozen water.



Solid methane hydrate
disassociating with methane
gas ignited in room conditions

     Most solid methane hydrates exist under the seafloor intermingled with sediments in one of three apparently natural forms:  tiny granules like grains of sand or gravel, bigger chunks the size of walnuts or eggs, and in at least in one known example, in a virtual “ore body” with a lens of solid pure hydrate meters thick.  Whatever the form, when they are sampled subsea then brought back to the surface where pressures are lower and temperatures higher they immediately begin to disassociate – the methane escapes as a gas leaving the water behind as a puddle.  The picture at left shows such a lump on a lab table with the escaping methane burning nicely like a candle.  This sort of appearance of methane hydrates occurs commonly in ocean coring operations, even when no hydrates are expected at the target drill site.



Example seismic profile of
seafloor - no BSR evident here
(but there may be methane
hydrates anyway)

    When hydrates are expected at a location never before cored it is because there is a hint of their presence from prior seismic profiling of the target drill site.  The example seismic record here does not indicate the presence of solid hydrates because there is no tell-tale BSR (bottom simulating reflector).  If there were a BSR you would see a dark, relatively continuous line (reflector) several hundred meters below the seafloor that cut across all of the other layered reflectors as if they were not there.  And it would mirror the shape of the seafloor (the bottom) exactly.  This type of reflector is thought to exist in sediments with significant hydrate deposits because it represents the transition from solid stuff (the hydrate layer) to the gas phase methane trapped in the slightly warmer zone below.  This hard-to-miss seismic indication is not only good for finding hydrate deposits but suggestive of trapped gaseous methane that could be recovered as well.  But not so fast – it doesn’t always work that way.  In fact, in my experience participating in ocean drilling operations such reflectors in the seismic profile failed to predict the existence of solid hydrates just about as often as it succeeded.  And it went both ways – we found hydrates where no BSR was seen, and we found no hydrates where resounding BSRs appeared on the seismic record.

     This was demonstrated spectacularly on a DSDP cruise I worked offshore on the Pacific side of Central America in 1982.  Part of our mission was to find and sample solid methane hydrates and we had chosen certain sites with unmistakable BSRs.  To capture the elusive hydrates we brought along our first generation Pressure Core Barrel (PCB).
  

Pressure Core Sampler in
place at bottom of drillstring

A drawing of a later version, the PCS, is shown here.  Those specialized core barrels are designed to lock in place just above the core bit and accept a short, solid core in a cylindrical pressure chamber while coring proceeds downhole.  Then, before being retrieved, a valve is closed on the bottom end trapping the sample in a sealed pressure vessel.  The core barrel is then pulled rapidly to the surface where the temperature increases but the downhole pressure is contained.  As soon as it gets on the deck the PCB is immersed in an ice bath to bring it back to the insitu temperature where the sample was collected.  In all of our pressure sampling attempts at the designated hydrate sites on that voyage we never got a single confirmed trace of hydrates.

    With that apparent failure weighing on our morale we moved the vessel to some other sites nearby, without BSRs, where we intended normal coring operations for other, non-hydrate sampling.  And, sure enough, that is when the most famous chunk of drilled hydrate in history came up totally unexpectedly in a standard, non-pressured core barrel.  It was perfect piece of solid methane hydrate about a meter and a half long and about the normal 5-6 cm diameter.   The scientists on duty in the core receiving lab went berserk.  Not only was this completely unanticipated (there was no BSR at this site!) but they had none of their sampling and preservation equipment on hand.  And, of course, the hydrate “log” was merrily fizzing away and disassociating right before their eyes.  In the end a few residual chunks got thrown in pressure containers for later examination, but most of the huge sample was only captured on film and in our collective memories.

     So I am not a big believer in seismic profiling as a way of positively identifying methane hydrate beds beneath the seafloor.  I hear over drinks now and then that in certain areas (like the Gulf of Mexico) seismic procedures have been developed that identify hydrates with a better batting average but I have not seen the data so remain skeptical.  Finding methane hydrate beds scattered all over the oceans is an important endeavor but it appears the only way to positively know where hydrates accumulate in volume and what properties the deposits exhibit can only be achieved with drilling.  (Actually much the same can be said about prospecting for oil.)

     Finding and exploiting gas hydrate deposits can certainly become a major economic endeavor.  Indications of hydrates have appeared on almost every expanse of the continental shelves. 

See the map.  Estimates of how much there might be are educated guesswork (because you can only know by drill sampling) but the amount is believed to be huge.  Early over-enthusiastic estimates of total world amounts at the time of the earliest discoveries in the 1960s have been decreased by later researchers by about a magnitude per decade.  Even at that most current estimates place the total amount at 2 to 10 times the amount of normal natural gas believed to exist – which differs a little from the legend on the 2005 map, but still a substantial amount for an energy-starved world of the future.

     Scientists, engineers and strategic planners in the nation of Japan have committed themselves to exploiting hydrate deposits off their coastlines in hopes of enabling an energy industry of the future within their own borders.   (The internationally recognized Exclusive Economic Zone extends offshore 200 miles for all nations with sea coasts.)  In recent years they have successfully extracted methane from hydrate deposits under the Arctic permafrost in Alaska (by two different methods in small demonstration experiment) as well as from one offshore pilot rig in the Pacific about 30 miles offshore central Japan.  They are now in the process of determining how much gas they believe can be extracted from offshore deposits and at what operational cost.  I expect methane hydrates will ultimately prove to be cost-effective as an energy-producing fuel source.  That will then leave the question of drilling hundreds of potential sites to do reservoir evaluation to determine how much is down there.

     The problem with pressure core samplers.  Determination of hydrate extent and properties requires sampling and recovery of solid material.  But when the sampler (core barrel) is retrieved the sample is literally locked inside.  You can’t open the sampler without depressurizing the sample causing rapid disassociation before it can be examined in lab conditions.  The answer is a laboratory pressure transfer chamber to accept the samples from the core barrel where they can then be examined under proper stabile temperature and pressure conditions keeping them solid until the researcher wishes to let them disassociate into gas and liquid water.  This step was the hurdle of the future when I stepped away from the problem.  I believe industry and/or the Japanese government is working on this stage of the problem but much of that detail is proprietary – more indication that the economic potential for gas hydrates is very real.

     There is more to the lore of methane hydrates for those interested, including how they often form and clog natural gas pipelines, their role in the Deepwater Horizon blowout control efforts, and their theoretical role in global warming.

General methane hydrate information can be found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate

http://geology.com/articles/methane-hydrates/

Anecdote:  “Microscopes, Scales, Clocks, etc, on a Ship”

     The anecdote for this chapter is about equipment instead of people.  It is really just a little collection of interesting tidbits on the subtleties of setting up an efficient geo-science research lab on a ship at sea.  If you imagine the tasks required to create a high level set of laboratories on a large ship you can visualize some of the essentials fairly easily.  You need space (always tough on a cramped ship), in this day and age you will need a good computer network, plenty of clean electricity, instruments of all kinds normally found in any university research lab, doorway access big enough, and so on.  But when you try it you discover that many of the seemingly straightforward issues become tricky, new problems when they have to be solved anew.  Clean electrical power, for example, sounds like a no-brainer.  The ship (JOIDES Resolution in this case) has diesel engines that permanently power electric generators.  This electricity powers everything on the ship, from the main screws to the lights in the staterooms and all the normal electrical power for the labs.  But shipboard power is notoriously “dirty” – the nice 60 cycle waveform is full of spikes and irregularities picked up from other power cables running all over the vessel.  So in the end clean lab power had to be provided by a dedicated generator set that charged a huge battery bank, which then settled out the irregularities and provided suitable power for sensitive lab instruments.  That is just a mundane and mostly predictable example of ship-specific lab instrument problems.  Here are few more that took some of us by surprise or had us scratching our heads for a solution. 

Heave-tolerant lab scales.  Any laboratory needs a scale or two to weigh small samples accurately.  On land this is easy – use a classic old triple-beam balance or a modern digital scale.  But a ship heaves and this reflects weight changes on a scale the same way jumping up and down on your bathroom scales would do.  So the question was – how to create a laboratory scale on the ship that either ignored or compensated for non-stop, and irregular ship heave motions.  At first our proposed approach was overkill – a common occurrence when faced with a new problem.  We considered what it would take to put a triple-beam or digital scale on a miniature heave compensator.  This would entail creating a little moveable platform driven by a servo-motor system sensing and responding to actual ship heave.  The idea was to create a mount for the scale that would cancel out heave motions - stay steady relative to the earth while the ship heaved up and down around it.  Easier said than done.  Never mind that the lab tech would put working with a scale that from his perspective never stopped moving.  Nothing of the kind could be bought off the shelf and we never got around to trying to invent our own.  The reason we were fortunate enough to jump right to the correct solution was that when we considered what we would use as a sensor to detect ship heave we realized we had the answer right in front of us.  You detect heave (or any other varying motion) with an accelerometer.  Think about it long enough and you realize a scale to weigh things IS an accelerometer.  It measures the acceleration of gravity on any object and reports that result as weight.  So if we used a digital scale in the lab to measure a sample while the ship, sample and scale were heaving, the result would not simply be weight of the sample but weight of the sample constantly changing due to heave effects.  The nice thing about a digital scale is that it is very fast-response and can be programmed to take multiple measurements.  So all we had to do was program the little scale to take, say, a thousand measurements of the unknown weight over the course of a few minutes.  And then you average the results to get the correct weight of the sample.  Can it really be that simple?  Sure.  The errors in the real weight caused by heave acceleration all must average out to zero over time.  If not, after some time interval, the sample would either be on its way to the moon or to the center of the earth.  If it was still where you left it a few minutes later the heave-induced errors must have averaged out to nothing.  Neat and simple.



Two months at sea calls

for a lot of coffee



Scanning Electron Microscope.  Oh, we MUST have an SEM, said the scientific advisors when we began to set up the labs on the JOIDES Resolution – never mind that no ship at sea had ever installed and used one before.  So our lab technician experts found a suitable SEM on the market (it had the desired compact size, magnification power, and other features) and installed it in its own special little room in the laboratory stack on the ship.  It got clean power and very careful attention during installation and testing.  It worked great during tests in the shipyard.  Once at sea it turned to be just about useless.  Everybody overlooked or under-appreciated how much a working ship vibrates when it is full of motors and pumps, cranes and dollies, banging steel doors and waves hitting the bow.  A living ship never stops moving, either in the macro or micro sense.  And an SEM capable of 20,000x magnification can really capture all that tiny scale motion – except it captures it as blur in the imaging.  It is not a matter of increasing shutter speed to freeze the images – SEMs don’t work that way.  We eventually gave up after every vibration isolation trick available was applied with no improvement.  Blurry SEM images are no use at all and the best un-blurred images that could be produced were at magnifications no better than ordinary optical microscopes could achieve.

The Laboratory Clocks.  This tidbit is not technical, it is just cute.  When we began outfitting the new labs and offices on the ship (JOIDES Resolution) the list of necessities included lots of ordinary things like chairs, desks, filing cabinets – and wall clocks.  The most cost effective source of such items was the Texas A&M University supply system (A&M is the host institution for IODP and all the money goes through their purchasing system).  On the list of available office supplies were simple wall clocks.  So dozens of clocks were ordered to allow installation in every new lab and office space on the ship.  When they arrived we found out that each clock had as a background behind the dials the state seal of Texas, complete with the iconic Lone Star and the words, “State of Texas” boldly displayed on the face.  Now this seems just right if the clock is mounted on a wall in a state university office or classroom.  But on an international research vessel halfway around the world it looks a bit odd.  Not a problem.  It turned out that the clocks had plastic covers that hinged up to allow cleaning or setting the hands.  It also allowed access to the black “State of Texas” lettering on the nice white cardboard backgrounds.  Within the first month at sea everyone working in those labs and office spaces had discovered that white-out and a black pencil gave them full editing powers over the clock legend.  Before long a visitor could wander through the labs and notice clocks declaring, State of Confusion, State of Ecstasy, State of Anxiety, State of Paranoia, State of Delusion, State of Euphoria.  No end to those possibilities, really.

Basic Overview of Deep Sea Drilling



Chapter 9.  A Little More Overview on Deep Sea Drilling



JOIDES
Resolution Drillship
seen from above

     A regular reader of my blog has posed a few good questions – okay, he is a close friend, Chuck, not a random reader, but his queries are nonetheless to the point.  As he puts it -- I understand your ocean drilling programs called for you to punch holes in the seafloor all over the world, but I never could quite grasp why exactly you were doing it, how or why you pick the specific locations, what you intend to achieve, or what you ultimately found.  He went on to add -- I assume it all had something to do with searching for offshore oil and gas.

     Now, Chuck is a pretty sharp guy and still he missed some of the fundamental points, which tells me I have not done a good job of setting up the overall story.  So I need to revisit some of the basics.

     First, it is important to note that the DSDP and ODP science programs have had NOTHING to do with searching for gas and oil.  The offshore energy business is very motivated ($$$) and quite effective at searching for those valuable reserves offshore with their own equipment, manpower and skills.  They certainly do not need the help of a major international science research program on a bare bones budget to find oil and gas.  But not only was that never the goal of the science drilling programs, it was, in fact, not even possible for those ships to prospect for oil and gas. 

     Here is why – oil and gas reserves, big or small, exist under the ocean floor because ancient subterranean pressure cooker conditions produced the right mix of hydrocarbons millions of years ago.   Then chance kept them from migrating away (the most common circumstance) by placing them under geological “seal or cap structures” – something impermeable (like solid rock or even salt domes) that can trap elusive, energetic molecules for ages.  This rarely (on a global scale) occurs, and thus, oil and gas reserves are doggone hard to locate.  However, when someone does manage to drill thru a suspect geological cap structure and finds the good stuff it is usually there under pressure.   At the moment the seal structure is penetrated a seafloor blowout preventer (BOP) is required to avoid a release of high pressure hydrocarbons up the borehole and into the ocean.  Modern BOPs are enormous (as big as a small house), heavy, complex and expensive.  Neither the Glomar Challenger nor the JOIDES Resolution scientific drillships carried BOPs.  Neither ship had any of the necessary equipment to deploy or operate a seafloor BOP. 

Glomar Challenger

    Therefore, it was imperative that no hole was ever drilled where any over-pressured hydrocarbons could be encountered, accidentally or otherwise.  This was avoided by real time monitoring of dissolved gases in the recovered samples during drilling and coring operations.  But more importantly, avoidance of hydrocarbons was achieved by selecting only drill sites that had zero chance of containing trapped oil or gas reservoirs.  All seafloor sites proposed for drilling were selected after a great deal of seismic profiling performed by specialty ships designed just for that purpose.  This work was done years in advance of any drilling by the drillships.   Any proposed site that reached the level of being on the verge of approval for a science expedition had to go for review before the Site Safety Panel.  The panel’s name has changed over the years but its function and mandate have remained the same – determine if there is any chance whatsoever that the underground geological structure could include a seal or cap structure capable of retaining pressured hydrocarbons.  If the Safety Panel did not reach unanimous agreement that there was nil probability of trapped, pressured hydrocarbons at a candidate site, then the site was rejected totally and forever for scientific drilling.  There was no appeals process for borderline cases. 

     The Safety Panel has always been made up of volunteer petroleum exploration geologists with significant experience in helping the oil and gas industry prospect for reserves.  They knew their business.  In all of the years of conducting this type of open-hole, no-BOP drilling in the deep oceans there has not been even a hint of an oil or gas seafloor blowout.

     A humorous side note – the Safety Panel had to be comprised of very senior, experienced experts who were willing to volunteer significant time to review site data, and then attend meetings to determine yes or no on scores of proposed sites each year.  Volunteers of that ilk tend to get weary of the use of their free time and, thus, they migrate off the Panel all too often leaving the panel chairman the job of recruiting other similar expert volunteers.  At one such recruiting conversation the oil company specialist was given the pitch and said -- Let me be sure I have this right.  You want me to help you NOT find oil and gas under the seafloor, right?  Yes, he was told, that was it in a nutshell.  Well, then, he said, I am your man because I have spent the majority of my career doing just that!

     Okay, so the non-connection to oil and gas prospecting has been established and explained (I hope).  That leaves us with the other fundamental questions – what, where, why and to what gain are/were the research drilling programs all about?  The answer in its simplest form – the goal was and is fundamental geological research.  All fields of science (pick any one you like) require research to establish the basics; you can’t understand biology without studying and comprehending cells, for example; chemistry requires understanding the periodic table of elements; effective medicine must be preceded by comprehensive understanding of the human body, etc.  

     Same thing with geology – it is the study of the earth as a dynamic entity.  There is the core, mantle and crust.  Continents move around on the mantle; ocean basins are crustal but very different than continents; mountains are created, grow and then decline; sea levels increase and then fall.   How and why does all of this happen?  Basic geological research is aimed at these general questions at first.  Then thousands of other questions lead to answers that add a piece of the jigsaw puzzle of new information here and there.  Because 75% of the world is covered by water marine geology has a special role – studying the geology that occurs only under the oceans (and some very large lakes).

     A lot has been accomplished since marine geology was born sometime in the late 1800s.  Measuring the depth of the oceans, and dredging up random samples of sediments were the beginning.  After those meager scraps of information were procured things got more complicated.  Dredging from the seafloor, visual observations of the seafloor by divers and perhaps cameras were added.  Gravity corers were introduced that could take seafloor samples using smaller research vessels.  Echo sounding to determine water depth in the oceans evolved into seismic profiling of the terrain beneath the seafloor.  The ultimate of seismic studies is possible when a large earthquake occurs -- its echoes can be detected on the opposite side of the globe providing earth scientists with reams of new information about the internal structure of the planet.  Then came drilling and sampling under the oceans to complete the research methodology picture.  And in recent years there are some incredible examples of satellite oceanic measurements that also add their bits of data to the marine geology puzzle – satellites can measure the precise average sea level at any point in the oceans, which is affected by gravity differences relative to water depth; over seafloor mountain ranges there is a tiny dip in average sea level, over trenches the sea surface has a small hump that follows the trench line.

     At first (1930s and 1940s) offshore drilling and sampling were elementary and a lot of that was aimed at prospecting for energy resources by industrial interests.  But even to this day oil and gas reserves have never been recovered at water depths greater than 10,000 feet – and most of the areas covered by the world’s oceans are deeper than that.  So that explains the push for deepwater drilling for the sake of pure science research.  Before the advent of the science drillships it was the great unreachable unknown (see my blog Chapter 3 – Where It All Began).

     That is some background, very briefly, explaining the what and a bit of the why.  Fast forward to 1968, the beginning of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, and the conversion of the Glomar Challenger to be the first full time scientific drillship.



Rig floor and bow area of
 the Glomar Challenger

For the international marine geology field this was BIG news.  Naturally any senior marine geologist wanted in on the show.  Many, many intriguing and important questions could then be addressed with cleverly planned drilling and sampling at great depths (up to almost 30,000 feet combined water depth and seafloor penetration).  Was continental drift real or just a hair-brained theory?  Had the Mediterranean really dried up multiple times in recent history due to closure of the Gibraltar Strait?  Had sea level really risen and fallen dramatically over time?  Could evidence be found of what killed off the dinosaurs (and 90+% of all existing organisms at the time)?  What was the record of earth’s magnetic field reversals?  What were those crazy methane hydrates found in sediments and sometimes accidentally brought to the surface in trawl nets?  These and hundreds of other geologic questions could potentially be put on the agenda for real hands-on research with strategic use of a dedicated drillship capable of bringing back good core samples and other deep ocean downhole measurements.

     But there was only one scientific drillship faced with enormous international interest and demand.  To handle this problem a set of committees was established with members including prestigious geologists from all over the world.  (Countries that contributed funding naturally went to the head of the line).  A framework of operations was set forth – the Challenger would conduct six voyages (legs, later called expeditions) per year, roughly two months in duration, with some scheduling flexibility built in to allow the ship to move around the world.  Each Leg would be a self-contained research exercise with a preselected complement of scientists.  Drilling was aimed at heavily reviewed, pre-selected sites chosen to have the greatest chance of recovering subterranean samples that would help explain some facet of the goals of the specific research.  Proposals for specific voyages were solicited, received, reviewed, nurtured to maturity and ranked.  The small percentage of winning proposals became operational plans for specific Legs and were put on the drillship schedule years in advance.
  


Examples of microfossils
found in ocean sediments

     For example, if global climate change were to be studied sites might be selected with potential to reveal the fates of buried ancient reefs that might have died off due to sudden warming or cooling of the climate.  To study seafloor groundwater activity, the scientists might select sites known to have elevated temperatures caused by near-surface geothermal activity of unknown origin.  To study global mass extinction events sites would be selected likely to have high sedimentation rates where a treasure trove of marine microfossils could be expected.  See some examples of oceanic (pelagic) microfossils at left.  Each was once the skeleton of a tiny living creature.  There are tens of thousands of known varieties.  Only the largest can be seen with the naked eye.

     Then it got more complicated.  Once more was learned by the marine geology science community, more complex questions could be derived.  For example, a particularly confusing bit if tectonic plate structure could be targeted for one Leg where drilling through the sediments to basement rock would shed light on theorized plate movements explained up until then by seismic studies alone.  Once the book of knowledge is opened there is no The End in sight.  The marine geology textbooks of today (and tomorrow) had to have facts based on something.  And a whole lot of that something was the information gleaned one core sample at a time from the never-ending voyages of the scientific drillships plus the dedicated, almost zealous attention of the best geological minds of about 2-1/2 generations, and counting.

     And lastly, what have they found?  We would need to look at a modern marine geology textbook to even scrape the top of that question.  And an expert beyond by level would be required to explain most of it.  But since I am the chronicler here (it is my blog after all) I will hit a few of the high points, much more as example than as summary.

• The highly controversial theory/hypothesis of continental drift was positively confirmed by deep sea drilling before the 1960’s ended.  Scientists are still struggling to absolutely explain how that can happen, but it is now indisputable that South America was once joined to Africa and the Indian subcontinent did go on a wild joy ride north across what is now the Indian Ocean until it crashed into Asia and has been trying to make progress ever since by forcing up the entire Himalayan mountain range, to cite a couple examples.
• And, while we are on that subject, the submarine fans of deposited sediments from the Himalayas brought out to sea by the Ganges and Indus riser systems are so voluminous that they suggest that there would be a range of mountains 3 or 4 times as large as the present day Himalayas if not for the constant wearing down grain by grain that gets carried away and deposited at sea.
• And, yes, the Mediterranean did dry up completely more than once due to closure of the Strait of Gibraltar.  The first time has been dated to about 5.9 million years ago.
• Yes, the dinosaurs and almost all of the other living creatures on earth at the time were made extinct about 65 million years ago because of a comet that smacked into the Yucatan peninsula coastline at the Bay of Campeche, triggering a “nuclear winter” that lasted many years.
• The North Pole has continued to wander from its previously-presumed fixed location, and still does so.  And this is independent of continental drift that just confuses the geologic clues.
• The oldest seafloor is only about 230 million years old even though the earth itself is a little over 4 billion years old, or only about 5% of the total.  How can this be?  The seafloors are continuously created at undersea mountain ranges which act as seafloor spreading centers.  “Zero age crust” is created (even as we speak) when basaltic mantle material oozes out along the ridge crests and then moves off in both directions (very slowly – covering a distance about equal to your height in your lifetime).  This starts the great “conveyor belts” of new seafloor material that becomes new crust and move across the top of the mantle in great tectonic plate migrations, gathering sediment along the way, getting therefore heavier, sinking further into the mantle, and finally bumping into another plate or a continent.  At that point the moving seafloor plate generally subducts, or plunges under the continental plate and disappears back into the mantle.  The great seafloor trenches are created at the subduction regions.

Chunks of solid form methane
hydrate ignited to burn off the methane

•  Methane hydrate deposits naturally occur in the ocean sediments in an impressive number of places worldwide.  How much of these deposits exist worldwide is a subject to wide ranging speculation based on wholly insufficient data.  what is known, however, is that they represent

  

an untapped energy resource that may outstrip anything mankind ever derived from oil, coal or gas combined.   Or maybe not that much – nobody really knows yet, but the potential is awe-inspiring.  Methane hydrates look like lumps of dry ice but convert to pure methane and water if you simply expose them to room temperature heat and ordinary sea level pressure.  At that point the pure methane can be burned with products of combustion as clean as or cleaner than burning natural gas.  Think about it.  Want to invest now in this potential gold mine of all time?

• Global warming (and cooling) has happened over and over again in geologic history, with corresponding increases and decreases in average sea level.  And there is NO record of any such occurrence in the geologic record that matches the dramatic parameters of the global warming we have been experiencing since the beginning of the industrial revolution.  Ice core samples have been taken from deep in the ice caps of Antarctica, Greenland and even Peruvian glaciers dating back about 200,000 years in Greenland and up to 420,000 years in Antarctica.  Tiny gas bubbles trapped in the ice contain atmospheric air as it was composed at the time the ice formed.  Data for dates up to 5000 years ago can even be inferred from tree
  ring growth rates in Bristlecone Pine trees (left) found in the White Mountains on the California-Nevada border.  There is a laboratory in the National Forest there dedicated to
  

  

  Very old tree in the Ancient
  Bristlecone Pine National Forest

  study of the ancient trees, the oldest living things on the earth.       All of these ancient atmosphere data indicate that the overall percentage of CO2 (a greenhouse gas) in the earth’s atmosphere has spiked during this current warming cycle to a greater level than anything ever known, especially so since the start of the industrial age.  The implication is inescapable that activities of man have contributed to the speed up and magnitude of the latest natural global warming cycle.

• The earth’s magnetic field has, without question, fully reversed (north and south poles exchanging places) dozens of times over the last 230 million years as verified in the seafloor sediment record.  The record is completely consistent worldwide.  The reversals were instantaneous by geological time scale resolution but that only means the sediment record can’t resolve the reversal phenomenon into a time frame less than 500-1000 years.  Nobody really knows why reversals occur or when to expect another one.  Or what happens during and immediately after a reversal.  (Migratory birds navigate at least partially by using their ability to sense the earth’s magnetic field.  What happens to them when reversals occur?)  The reversals do not happen at regular intervals and are not associated with global mass extinction events.  So maybe they are not dangerous for life on earth.  They have not occurred with any predictable regularity but, on average, we are about 20,000 years overdue for the next one.  Hmmm.

     The final observation here is an answer to the questions – why is all of this important, why is it worth the time, money and effort?  To judge if this work has an acceptable level of importance you have to accept the intrinsic value of basic scientific research.  This includes faith that some payoffs may eventually come in the future.  At the first discovery of cells did anybody envision that new knowledge leading ultimately to researchers finding a cure for polio or cancer?  When electricity was first the subject of experiments in some rudimentary lab did the people then envision cell phones or computers?  It is not fundamentally different with basic geological research.  Can studying samples of subducting plates lead someday to the ability to predict earthquakes before they happen?  Maybe.  It sure would be handy for folks like the Japanese who live on a string of volcanic islands.  Some marine geology research has more immediate probable payoffs.  Characterization of methane hydrates and global climate change studies are obvious examples.  Studies of microfossil distributions, oceanic circulation or hydrothermal vent regions are a bit more obscure.  But there is no gate-keeper judge on what basic research is more important than others.  In the end the underlying theme is – we should try to understand it all.

     That is a brief synopsis of the goals, methods and benefits of scientific ocean drilling.  As you can imagine books can and have been written on the subject.  A simple little blog like this cannot hope to explain much but any start that gets someone to read (and maybe read on) is worth the effort.  Below are some websites with more interesting information for those who care to learn more.

Core Discoveries Newsletter from NSF, with lots of details about every present-day aspect of US Scientific Ocean Drilling, Spring 2013 online version

http://iodp-usssp.org/wp-content/uploads/CoreDiscoveries_Spring2013_FINAL.pdf

Ice Coring to determine historical CO2 levels in atmosphere

http://news.wsu.edu/articles/36605/1/New-ice-cores-reveal-more-about-past-climate-change

http://www.daycreek.com/dc/images/1999.pdf

 Bristlecone Pine climate data

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=great-basin-bristlecone-pine-growth-rate-tree-line

Anecdote:  “A Good Bar Fight Story”

      No recitation of sea stories is complete without a bar fight story and I have a good one.  I know it is going to sound like some scene out of a movie, but, honestly, it really happened, I was there.  Our science and technician crew were celebrating another successful offshore exploration into the unknown at our final port of call, Singapore.  About 10-12 of us were enjoying our liquid refreshments at the bar of the famous Raffles Hotel.  Great place.  Looks just like you’d expect if you saw it in some old Humphrey Bogart movie.  Raffles, like much of Singapore is quite refined, polished and sedate.  Probably not the right place for a bunch of rowdy folks just coming off two months at sea and looking to blow off some steam.  We came to this realization when the young lady standing on the table singing the Aggie War Hymn was politely asked to leave the premises – and take your rowdy half-drunk friends with you.

     Not a problem, we knew of other good places to go.  One night club, in particular, was well known and catered to tipsy foreigners intent on not calling it a night at that hour (it might have been 1 am but my memory cells have suffered some abuse since then so I can’t be responsible for exact details here).  We repaired to the huge bar via several taxis and found it positively hopping with people and loud music.  It was a huge place as clubs go, two stories and full of everything a lonely sailor on leave could possibly want.  Again, the name is fuzzy in the old memory banks, Paradise Inn or something along those lines.  The cab driver knew exactly where to take us almost without us having to specify.

     We went in and situated ourselves at a couple tables on the second floor, which was less crowded – meaning that it was actually possible to wiggle your body through the masses of drinkers and dancers to the bar itself whenever you wanted to order a fresh beverage.  I had started drinking ginger ale at that point because I sort of knew my limits (but don’t tell anybody).  One of our scientists (I will call him Ethan to save his reputation, although that was not his name, of course) was thoroughly lit but still functional.  He was also one of those happy drunks who just gets more pleasant and funny as he drinks.

     Ethan made his way to the bar and wiggled in next to a group of Australian Special Forces guys who were there for much the same reason as us.  Nobody quite knows what happened next but Ethan evidently, quite innocently, did something that really ticked off the Aussie solider at his elbow.  Maybe he said something not as funny as intended, maybe he bumped into the guy, maybe he just made eye contact and the moody Aussie was itching for an excuse to start a fight.  In any case the soldier jumped up and punched the living daylights out of Ethan, who dropped like a stone and started bleeding on the floor.  The Aussie was not quite happy with that result so he tried to finish poor Ethan off but had a bit of trouble doing so because the crowd was packed in and Ethan was busy crawling through people and table legs to get away, at least until the bleeding and initial shock wore off. 

     Quickly his mates (us) noticed the ruckus and jumped to his rescue.  Well sort of, it was shaping up to be a  brawl between a half dozen mostly drunk, out of shape, generally pacifist scientists and lab techs against a human wall of young, fit, trained killers.  This is not good, I remember thinking.  At that moment the senior Aussie in uniform did something very sensible and welcome.  He jumped between the two skirmish lines and shouted – one on one, mates, let the boys go at it one on one.  I recall hearing one of our computer techs shouting back – what do you mean one on one?  It is one on zero, Ethan is not fighting, he’s crawling and looking for a place to hide.  Perfectly correct observation, I thought.

     And then the movie part occurred.  One of our number, a very well-proportioned scientist from Michigan (name withheld, I’ll call him Brad) came out of the men’s room, saw the situation and decided he needed to rush to our defense.  This is not as silly as it sounds because this particular man played football at Michigan and was drafted by the NFL Miami Dolphins.  He never played for the Dolphins due to some injury problems during his first training camp, but he was nevertheless the biggest, fasted and strongest of us all, by far.  He rushed up to the group, pushing bystanders aside, and approached the Aussies from their rear.  One Aussie turned in time to see Brad coming, sensed danger, and started to throw a punch, which he never finished because Brad caught him on the jaw with a picture perfect haymaker and the Aussie went down in a heap.

     Oh my God, I thought, this has gone nuclear, we’ll all be lucky to avoid a Singapore hospital or jail, or both.  And then the wise senior Aussie did another wonderful thing.  He jumped between Brad and the furious Aussie men of war and shouted – Good on you, mate.  One apiece.  Even Steven.  Let’s drink to that!  And that is what we did.  It was a hoot. 

     The end of the story is that we still had to fix up Ethan and very shortly someone had called the Singapore police.  Singapore has a well-earned reputation for being a tough law and order city-state and we did not want to mess with their police or legal systems.  So we went into high gear to find Ethan and get him out of there.  Ethan is sort of cute (women tell me) and even drunk and bleeding he caught the sympathies of a couple hookers with hearts of gold who had spirited him away to another room where they could protect him and clean him up a bit.  A couple of us reclaimed him, got him downstairs and into a cab and drove away just as the police were noisily arriving.  Ethan appeared at the hotel the next day for breakfast with a classic black eye but otherwise none the worse.  And with a pretty good story to tell for the rest of his life. 

     Epilogue:  I followed Ethan's career from then on and it is interesting to note that among other things he went on to be the director of a major museum featuring oceanographic displays.  They had a nice photo of him in the lobby - without the black eye.

Scientific Coring

Chapter 8.  Scientific Coring – Hows and Whys

      Geologists can study the earth with a number of different techniques.  In the 1800s when “geologists” evolved from a broader group known as “naturalists” they could simply climb over mountains and along river beds taking rock samples with a small pick.  The approach must be different with marine geology, which is dedicated to studying the ¾ of the earth covered by the oceans.  Under shallow or deep water a major and very widely used technique is seismic profiling or seismic surveying.  This is echo sounding,  generally using sound sources and geophone receivers near the sea surface.  The sounds travel a good distance into the subsea floor and return echoes that give a picture of the subterranean geology.  The images below are examples of 2-D seismic profiles typically used by DSDP and IODP for previewing sites that are candidates for drilling.  The sea floor and sub-layers can be seen.  The ocean surface would be miles away above.

     The offshore oil industry has improved the technology of seismics to include 3-D tomography from which truly amazing 3-dimensional images of sub-terranean geologic structure can be displayed on computer screens with stunning results.  Most large offshore oil and gas fields are confirmed by these techniques long before 100s of millions of dollars are invested in drilling and recovering the new reserves.  It is a point of irony that the actual oil or gas (or any other specific substance, say, coal or valuable minerals) cannot be seen and identified as such by the seismic imaging.  The presence of the oil or gas must be inferred when the physical structure of the terrain matches formations where similar valuable resources have been found in the past.  This is a highly evolved science in its own right within the oil and gas industry as well as among research geologists.

     There is a lot of educated guesswork involved in the interpretation of seismic images, especially when using the 2-D variety.  All those reflected dark and light pieces represent something, but what specifically?  Answering that question is where drilling comes in.  Whether on land or under the ocean, when a borehole is drilled the result is, well, a hole in the ground.  The hole itself has value as an access passage into which instruments can be lowered.  These “logging tools” can measure an astounding variety of geologic and geochemical properties in rocks and soils surrounding the actual borehole.

     But the real value of drilling for research is to bring back samples.  And the best way to do that is by coring, which is drilling a hole without destroying the innermost section – the core.  The drawing at right shows one of many types of core bits; this one being a specialized roller cone core bit used today by IODP from the JOIDES Resolution drillship.  The bit is rotated by turning the entire drillstring with a rotary drive mechanism located on the drillship.  (Much oil and gas drilling is done with downhole motors that turn only the bit but that is not compatible with wireline coring used in science research drilling.)  Note that the roller cones that cut the hole as the bit rotates preserve the inner core section as it passes the bit and enters a “core barrel” housed a few inches inside the drillstring just above the face of the bit.  The general dimensions here are bits with an outside diameter of 10-12 inches and cores with diameters about the same as a beer can.  Cores are cut in 30-ft lengths or at least that is the goal, not always successfully achieved.

     With skill and some luck a drill crew operating on a floating drilling vessel can retrieve cores of rock and soils from thousands of meters below the seafloor, operating from the surface of the ocean in waters 5000m deep or more.  The photo below shows some lovely hard rock cores that have been split lengthwise and laid out in the onboard core lab for inspection.  Note that many sections of the rock core have been captured relatively intact, many are broken into smaller pieces, and some sections appear to have been ground into virtual gravel.  Or --- were the gravel sections in that condition as they existed downhole? – one more thing for the geologists to ponder.

     Coring while drilling does not have to be continuous but most often it is when conducting science research drilling.  “Continuous coring” means every foot of depth in the hole that is penetrated is cored, striving for 100% core recovery – a foot of captured core for every foot the hole is made deeper.  Continuous coring is made possible by using “wireline core barrels”.  These clever devices lock into place inside the lower end of the drillstring immediately above the core bit and capture the incoming core inside a clear, tough plastic liner within a steel core barrel mechanism.  When the core barrel is deemed to be full drilling/coring is stopped and the core barrel is released from its position and retrieved through the hollow drillstring to the ship using a wire rope (wireline) on a high speed winch.  The core is prevented from falling back out the bottom of the core barrel by one-way “core catchers”.  The bit and drillstring remain in place in the hole while the full core barrel is retrieved and an empty core barrel is sent down to replace it.  Then the process repeats.

     Some core barrels are “passive” and do nothing more than provide a receptacle for the incoming core.  Some core barrels help cut or trim the core, others are “active” in projecting ahead of the drill bit and cutting the core with a core bit or “cutting shoe”. 
The picture here shows a nearly perfect core section cut by the diamond cutting shoe depicted.  The core barrel in this case is known as the extended core barrel (XCB) because the 4-inch cutting shoe and the lower end of the core barrel extend ahead of the main 12-inch bit and precuts the core before the main bit comes along to drill the main hole. 
     In soft sediments the best way to core is with the “hydraulic piston corer”, or APC, depicted here.  This tool shoots its core-capturing section 30-ft ahead of the stationary main core bit and cuts the core with a sharp-nosed, non-rotating cutting shoe.  This coring technique can be repeated as the hole is deepened until sediments become too stiff for penetration by the sharp cutting shoe - in some cases to depths of 700-800 feet below the seafloor.  In the diagram the yellow section is the bottom of the drillstring assembly.  It appears truncated but would actually extend all the way to the rig floor of the drillship. The technique is close to perfect with 100% core recovery generally expected.  It is also the best means to avoid disturbance of the sediments.  The comparison core section picture below shows identical sections at the same depth in the same sediments captured using a standard rotary core barrel (RCB) versus an APC core barrel. 

     In the upper image the RCB core has been "scrambled" by the rotary coring process - the sediment was not sufficiently rigid to remain undisturbed as the drill bit passed over it.  In the lower image the lines of undisturbed differing sediments in the APC core can be seen in the picture just as they were deposited on the seafloor 5, 10 or 20 million years ago.  The improved quality and quantity of the APC-type cores retrieved for scientific research drilling literally revolutionized the science of marine sedimentology and enabled scientists to make great strides in the interpretation of the earth’s climate history.

    Because APC-type coring does not involve rotation during the actual cutting of the core (which takes about 2-5 seconds for 30-ft) the cores can also be oriented – which is to say the north side of the core can be identified and labeled even after the core has been extracted and laid down on deck.  This orientation capability is vital to paleomagnetists who study the reversals of the earth’s magnetic field over time.  Entire science careers have been spent doing exactly those types of climate and magnetic field research using deep sea cores.

     On a typical IODP expedition 1000s of meters of cores are retrieved, cut into 1.5m long sections, then split and examined, all within a few hours of being extracted from miles below the surface of the sea.  In almost all cases the cores remain inside the clear plastic core liners.  The liners, also split lengthwise with the cores, become the permanent display and storage vessels for the cores.  The two split halves of any given core section are designated as “working” or “archive”.  Archive sections are immediately stored away in shipboard reefers maintained at about 40-45 deg F.  The working sections go to the onboard core lab to photographed, visually examined, and subjected to dozens of measurements depending on the type of core material and the specific science objectives.  The working sections are also subjected to sampling by the onboard scientists who take hundreds or thousands of small carefully labeled samples back to their university labs for later exhaustive examination.  The working sections are then boxed and stored away in the shipboard reefers alongside the untouched archive sections.

     At the end of a voyage the chilled core sections are boxed and sent by refrigerated trucks to one of three major core repository facilities, located in Texas, Germany and Japan.  The picture here shows a rack of the cores in their final cold storage room at one of the repositories.  Those repository core collections are considered national scientific treasures and both the measured data and the actual cores are available for further research by qualified earth scientists.  

 

 

 

Anecdote -- “Pine Wine and Vodka”

 
    Two months at sea as part of a research expedition on a scientific drillship is a LONG time.  You are away from family and friends, out of your normal comfort zone, and denied many of the comforts of modern living.  It is not iron men in wooden ships, certainly, but there is no TV, no telephone (or at least not in the past, things are better now), no sofa to take nap on, no fridge to grab a snack from, no mall to go shopping, very little recreation beyond movies in the crew lounge and maybe a game of chess, darts or cribbage.  And it is boring for much of the time.  Add all of these little anti-comfort details to the fact that both the Glomar Challenger and JOIDES Resolution were declared “dry” ships (no alcohol) and the results are obvious – smuggling, bootlegging and home brew.  The dry ship policy is a serious safety measure.  All U.S. Navy ships adhere to the same policy as well as most offshore drill rigs (although I was onboard a French drillship that offered beer and wine in the mess – but maybe that was only when the ship was in port as it was during my visit).  The safety issue is legitimate -- an alcohol-impaired roughneck or driller on the rig floor of a drillship is roughly equivalent to a drunk driver on the freeways – somebody stands a chance of getting killed.
     So did this serious anti-alcohol program work for the scientific drillships on their long expeditions?  Well, no.  Enforcement was a problem.  On more than one voyage alcohol ban enforcement was actually my thankless job.  What that mostly meant was that I, virtually alone, did not get invited to the secret drinking parties held quietly in selected staterooms and out-of-the-way labs corners.  It was pretty much understood (though officially denied, of course) that the enforcement policy was don’t ask-don’t tell, keep it under control, don’t get a rig floor hand drunk right before his time on duty, don’t be blatant, (and don’t invite the enforcer individual to any parties).
     Alcohol showed up on board by one of two means – contraband smuggled onboard in private luggage, or home brew.  The private luggage option is obvious and probably 50% of the invited scientists for any voyage brought a bottle or two of liquor or wine with them.  For them it was a long-standing tradition to drink a little at sea because most of their seagoing time was on research vessels that were not drillships, and thus not dry because they were not as inherently dangerous to life and limb as a ship with a full scale drilling rig.  The scientists tended to share their alcohol with a few old colleagues or new friends in the privacy of their staterooms after hours and no harm was ever done along these lines that I ever heard about.
     The home brew option was a lot more interesting and fun.  The Glomar Challenger crew included a veteran marine technician named Pine who was famous for routinely brewing up a batch of Pine Wine, ready for consumption by the brave and foolhardy near the end of each voyage.  Pine brewed his concoction secretly in a locked closet near the chemistry lab, although the secret was in name only because by about the 5^th or 6^th week of any voyage the secret was out when the atmosphere in the lab became heady enough to get a mild buzz – like visiting a winery in the Napa Valley.  He used grape juice, sugar, and who knows what other ingredients purloined from the galley, took a good long time to allow proper fermentation (about 6 weeks) and never failed to make enough for everybody to have a good shot at a “secret” end-of-cruise party held a night or two before arrival at the final port.  Picture the moonshine drinking scene with Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape”.  We always said Pine’s latest batch of wine was a “good year” – because it tasted like an old tire.  But that is not a fair assessment, really – it was worse than that.
     But Pine Wine was not the most ambitious home brew experiment I was ever aware of.  On one DSDP expedition the scientific contingent included a veteran scientist from Russia named Boris.  Boris was well known and well liked, onboard as well as ashore at the end of a cruise when he was always the life of the drinking parties at the pub nearest the dock.  Given that he loved his brew and he was Russian it was perhaps inevitable that he was asked if he thought the clandestine drinking enthusiasts on one voyage could produce some home brew vodka.  Would we be likely to have the proper ingredients at hand?  Boris answered in classis Russian fashion, “In Russia we have old saying – you can make vodka from old shoe!”  Figuring they could do better than an old shoe they pressed Boris for more useful information until he proceeded to detail how to use potatoes, cook them, ferment the mash, then heat it up and distill off the good stuff.  Sounded easy enough for a bunch of chemistry grads with a full lab at their disposal, albeit done secretly and requiring some sugar and potatoes “liberated” from the galley or food storage holds.  Needless to say, the vodka distillers stayed busy in their off hours making the best hooch they could devise.  On the appointed evening near the end of the voyage, deep in a locked storeroom, the conspirators gathered and ceremoniously presented Boris with their first glass of experimental vodka for his expert critique and appraisal.  Boris took one sip, made a deathly face, barely swallowed, and declared, “You should have used the shoe!”