2 Stations Down

This morning brought with it a new day of sampling, for most of the scientists on board, at least.  Being part of the coring team means that we do not core at every station (though if time weren't an issue, we totally would).

Most everyone on board is researching something that involves paying attention to the diurnal cycles of life, meaning that ocean processes behave differently during the day than they do at night. A flurry of activity starts just before dawn as people prepare for net tows and collecting water with the CTD.

CTD stands for 'Conductivity Temperature and Depth', and is the primary means of collecting samples of water throughout different depths in the ocean.  It consists of a ring of hollow cylindrical bottles, what we call the rosette, and each tube has a top and bottom seal that can be closed on command.  When deployed, all the caps are open, allowing water to pass freely through it as the rosette descends to the deepest target depth. On the way down, sensors attached to the frame provide key measurements of the water properties, including chlorophyll and oxygen content. Then, the bottles are 'fired' (meaning closed) at chosen depths on the way back up.  This way, we're able to get 'snapshots' of the ocean.

Rounding out the morning sampling is the zooplankton group who use a specialized instrument called a 'MOCNESS', which is able to collect zooplankton from different depths in the ocean.  Unfortunately, they'd been having problems with it at station 1, and those troubles continued today.  With how routine sampling can get out here, it's sometimes easy to forget how lucky we are to be able to get these samples and do our science.  During each deployment, there is a number of things that could go wrong and leave us with nothing, yet somehow we pull through and the data keeps coming.

Oceanography is a field that brings out each person's inner 'Macgyver', as when problems come up, we have very limited resources with which to solve them.  We try to plan and pack for every scenario we can think of, but generally there's at least one situation that requires some jury-rigging or invention to resolve on every cruise. It's all part of the fun :)

For my group, today consisted mostly of sample analysis, prepping the multicorer for our deployment at station 2b.  We noticed that the inner 'spider' that houses the core tubes was much more wobbly than normal.  It sounds like an easy fix - just tighten a giant bolt; but this bolt is attached to a huge piece of metal that has a few hundred pounds of lead bolted on to it. We ended up using three ratchet straps to lift the middle section to support it while we tightened it with a deck wrench. Problem solved!

Outside of my normal lab duties, I also started prepping for the coring team's 'bonus' duty this cruise, which is crushing styrofoam cups!  We only have 2 stations where we'll be able to crush cups, and the first opportunity will be tomorrow at station 2b.  We'll do a second batch if necessary later at station 5.


Nick and Jake as we're about to make some adjustments to the multi-corer.

The Steinberg lab and some of the crew working with the tempermental MOCNESS. 

A preview of some of the cups to be crushed, also a styrofoam head from a school teacher who's been part of our project.