Notes From an Environmentalist. The Day I Saved the Gulf Stream.

     The Day I Saved the Gulf Stream

On February 27^th the headline in the New York Times blared, “Scientists are Freaking out About Ocean temperatures.”

It reminded me of when I had my first lesson about ocean temperature. It was in February and I had just signed on as the youngest member of the scientific crew on a cruise to Africa, South America and the Baltic.

I stood on the bow of the Atlantis II watching huge fat snow flakes swirl out of the inky blackness, then dance and flit in our lights before dying in the frigid waters of the Atlantic.

I was full of anticipation and a little smug that I would soon be in the tropics while my college classmates they would still be tromping through the slush of another Cambridge winter.

The next day we crossed into the aquamarine waters of the Gulf Stream, the sun came out and the temperature rose to 80 degrees and would remain there for the next 6 months.

We were riding on the top of a massive escalator of ocean currents that sink as cold water off Canada, and then crawl south along the ocean floor to the equator where they are heated and rise as the northward flowing Gulf Stream that tempers the climate of the East Coast and Europe.

This and the world’s other similar ocean currents are what are freaking out ocean scientists because the currents are breaking down and nobody seems to know quite why.

My next ocean temperature lesson came six months later when we re-crossed the Gulf Stream on our return to Woods Hole.

It was 4am. I had just finished my last plankton tow and taken the ocean’s water temperature and saw that they were plunging. I immediately remembered a sea turtle we had caught in the topics several weeks before.

I went below to check on her huge onboard tank, and sure enough, the water temperature in her tank was plummeted as well.

I didn’t know what to do but there was a large hose carrying the ship’s hot water supply nearby, so I coiled it around the bottom of the turtle’s tank, increased the flow and tumbled into my bunk thinking I had done such a very good deed.

The next morning at breakfast there was general merriment at my expense. It seemed the chief engineer, my fishing buddy, had come on watch at 4am and discovered that the ship’s water pressure was dangerously low.  

After several hours of searching he narrowed the culprit down to the tube I had wound through the turtle tank. The scientific crew was ecstatic that we had saved our valuable specimen. The engineering crew … not so much.

Oh and how did the turtle do? Just fine. She survived and became a star attraction at the Woods Hole aquarium, one of the finest in the world.

I would revisit her every year and we would reminisce about the good old days when I had saved her from the perils of the cooling Gulf Stream.