Settling in at SAMs

I've been at the Scottish Association for Marine science in Oban since Septemember and time is going quickly...as is the light! It was great starting at SAMs with the Arctic cruise as it meant that I had already met lots of people which made settling in much easier (thanks Emily and Marie)! Since moving to Scotland I have been living with my friend Ali Rose in Fort William which has been great fun, but now it's time to move to Oban as the 2 hour commute everyday is getting very tiring! It's such a beautiful place to work, I am very lucky. Especially as at SAMs there are a group of fun people who like climbing, mountain biking (I have found a love for this sport), running and snorkelling! So I feel like I am seeing Scotland in all it's glory. 

View over Dunstaffnage bay looking up towards Loch Etive where we go sampling 

Loch Etive - this is where I do weekly trips out on the SAMs boat Seol Mara 

We are currently working with a collaberator called John Cohen from the Univeristy of Delaware: here is the research he does and what we have been helping him out with http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/our-people/profiles/jhcohen

This is our daily walk around the castle that we do at lunch time

We have also been collaberating with the British Antarctic Survey to work out what samples we can get in the Arctic when we all go up the Fram Strait in May 2018.

I have also been to two conferences since I've been at SAMs. The Arctic Conference held by SAMs was in Oban where lots of collaberators turned up to share there science and share each others resrouces and knowledge, it was very interesting! Then we all went to Glasgow for the Changing Arctic Ocean conference to hear what analysis all of the projects have done from the Barents sea cruise that we did a few months ago and then we started to plan what our next cruises are going to focus on. One major thing that came out of us all meeting up was that all of the scientific questions that we have been asking should be taylored to anwser questions about policy. 

I have been learning how to do respiration experiments on the tiny copepods! Leaving them over night in individual wells to see how the little creaters use up their oxygen. 

Incubated over night 

Each Calanus copepod has it's own little well ... it's new home for 24-48 hours. I will be conducing this same experiment on the ship in June. 

Pasteur pippettes...I use alot of these

I never ever thought I would get into anylitical chemistry but I am actually really enjoying it and understanding it which suprised me! This is thin layer chromatography with the fatty acid samples that I collected from the Barents sea.

By using a standard you can see how the molecules seperate, the standard is pure PUFA (fatty acid) so by comparing where that standard is you can see where your samples's fatty acid has run up the plate. 

First out of 100 samples woohooooo

Then after the TLC plate the  samples are run through a gas chromatographer this seperates all of the molecules with the smaller carbon chains running through the column first. 

A chromatogram is printed showing the rention times of the molecules and the bigger the peak the higher the amount of that molecule in the sample.

Loch Etive

Recently Dave and I travelled all of the way to Liverpool (it took 9 hours !!!) to discuss the next cruise with the Arise guys from Liverpool! It was a good trip and we got very organised ready for our meeting with BAS next month about how our project is going to run on the JCR.

This is where we are heading in May 2018. All the way from Southampton on the JCR up the Fram Strait and the West of Greenland. We are going to be filtering lots of water, dunking CTDs, dunking lots of zooplankton nets and conducting lots of experiments! Very exciting.

Stay tuned to see where I'm going to be living for my Scotland in Winter.......This blog might take a slight change for the next few months.! 

81.46' North

 

Here's a bit more of a detailed blog to show you what we have been doing on the cruise for the last 3 weeks whilst traveling up to 81.46' North; which I believe is the furthest that the JCR ship has been! Check out Celeste's blog for a photo of a Walrus and a cool photo of a minke whale!  

http://celestethelion.blogspot.co.uk/

 On a ship it's definitely easy to stay indoors so we all make a habit of sitting outside watching the world (mostly the wildlife) go by.

 

One of my best moments of the trip so far is just before we reached the ice at 2 am after a zooplankton net a few of us were outside enjoying the sun when we noticed humpbacks breaching. It was an astonishing site that actually made me cry with happiness because it was nature at it's best - how can something so big pull it's self out of the water like that. The biggest question is why do they do this? Scientists think it is to show an emotion, mostly likely happiness, which makes sense as when we are happy we jump around (well I do at least)!

Johan's photo

We entered the ice which emerged out of the fog rather eerily. I was very happy to be back in the ice...even if it has not been that long since being on a boat in ice. The sea kind of looks weird to me without it now ...which is kind of a strange thought!

Camille made us line up like Sardines..!


The JCR is not an ice breaker, it is ice strengthened! So it was pretty exhilarating to be pushing through the rotting sea ice, I spent most of my spare hours on the bow watching the ice fall apart beneath the ship. I loved the sound it made, the colours that were emitted and watching little Arctic cod fall off the bottom and find their way back into the water as their small home had been flipped over by the ship.

 

Doc Helen's ice crushing photo



We have completed almost 55 zooplankton nets!! wowza. That's one at each station midnight and midday! I've got a lot of hours under a microscope to look forward to when I get home!




Louisa's photo of a Tetrapod! so cute. like angels of the sea

Writing down the logs is fine, but at the end of the day when I'm trying to read my own handwriting to complete my logs is a nightmare!




 

 

 

Just to put it into perspective....this is the projected sea ice conditions for 2080... a terrifying thought! That is the main reason why we are all here...to get better measurements on this change and to see how the organisms from the water column, ice and all the way to the benthos from animals living on and within the mud and rocky substrate are going to cope.  

 

Mega corer going into the sea to core the sediment ... lots of beasties. This lets the CHAOS team see the core of the sediment.

 

I do think it is time for me to go home and get some time on land (or maybe in the sky).....  

 

 

 

The mud team!!! Working long hours, usually they do a 48+ work stint at each station, splitting up the work between them to get all of the trawls and cores completed for all of the various projects!

Peekaboo ... polar bears kept us entertained every few days! It was awesome to be allowed live and work within their home.

Pore waters (water between the sediment) was analysed for nutrients whilst on board!

 

  This trawl 1.2m wide, towed for only 5 mins and can carry onboard cameras to reduce impact whilst still showing scientists what lives on the seafloor. Larger trawls towed for long time periods can be very damaging compared to this specifically developed trawl.

Sacrificing a few poor beasties will help us to predict how they are going to cope with the fact that the Arctic is one of the fastest warming places with the overall aim to understand how much carbon is being buried by life on Arctic seabeds.

 

The trip was made even better by having already two already great friends Sian and Emily who I spent a season with at Rothera in 2015/2016 (we kept in contact since). As you can see we are constantly laughing and enjoying being in such an incredible environment; we have all been so lucky to have this great experience.

 

One of our first missions in the first few days after we got out of the ice and back into comms was to recover the sea glider! It was a pretty fun mission of hide and seek for a few hours. Then it called into NOC at Southampton and was told to stay put on the surface, we then spotted it and retrieved it by this very clever and very well driven winch - net.

 

This is the great team that I have spent the cruise with - everyone has worked exceptionally well together mucking in and helping on each others project to ensure that all of the work gets done. We can't wait for 2 days rest (site seeing) in Tromso in a few days time before we all fly home and go back to our daily lives...what ever that is I do not know yet!  

 

 

 

 

Ursus maritimus! Polar Bears!

After 2.5 weeks of no communication we are now back online as we have headed back South. For the last two weeks the RRS JCR has been sailing up the Barents sea where we reached 81 degrees North! I will upload a full science blog about all that we got up to in the next few days when the internet has fully recovered. For now, here are some epic shots kindly given to me by Johan (as usually I forgot my camera or just wanted to sit and enjoy the presence of such a big apex predator) of some polar bears we saw along our way ice breaking and transiting through the pack and fast ice of the Northern Barents Sea.

 Their scientific name is Ursus maritimus, translating to maritime bear which as we saw is a very fitting name for them as they navigated around broken up pieces of fast ice, rotting pieces and also big areas of open water. They are very powerful swimmers using their front two legs for the power and their back legs as rudders to assist with steering. As you can see here the power in their legs is incredibly strong as they leap between the pack ice.

 My favourite fact about polar bears are that they give birth to twins, if they don't then it's generally a rarity. Bears usually live in large territories so it is difficult to breed when males and females are separated by huge polynyas (open areas of water) and brash ice. However; when the females do breed and do raise their young...they try to stay away from the males as they have a terrible habit of eating the younger polar bears...even their own!! Giving birth to twins also increases survival rates of their offspring. The mums seem to have a great time though as before they give birth they eat so much food that they basically pass out into hibernation then sleep off all of the weight they've just put on and wake up to fatten up their twins!

 I was very happy to be back in the ice, the colours that is created from the melting and refreezing of ice is incredible...it also happens to be one of my favourite colours. They sit and walk around the ice edge hunting their prey, which is mostly seals. Though I noticed as a comparison to Antarctica there is a lot less wildlife around the ice, seals do not sit on the floes like they do down South and there were less whales apart from in the Southern Barents sea just south of Svalbard!

My next blog will include all of the interesting science that we have been conducting over the past 3 weeks...everything from box coring, to finding cocopops (Copepods) in my nets, to small scale trawling and also glider recoveries)!

Midnight nets!

Midnight zooplankton nets!

 Thank you to Celeste for these lovely photos...you can read her blog here: http://celestethelion.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/let-arctic-science-begin.html

Louisa and I complete vertical plankton net trawls at midnight and midnight on each sampling station, which has so far been every day for a week!! The great thing is that there is almost 24 hours of sunlight, except now it's getting a tad colder. From a biological perspective this is extremely important as we are trying to understand an reaction called diapause, a very important vertical migration through the water column during the winter that we want to understand, predict and model so that we can see what changes will happen if the Arctic sea ice keeps retreating at the same rate is is now. SAMs explain why this is so important, ''Calanus seasonally migrate into deeper waters to save energy and reduce their losses to predation in an overwintering process called diapause that is fuelled entirely by carbon-rich fat (lipids). This vertical 'lipid pump' transfers vast quantities of carbon into the ocean's interior and ultimately represents the draw-down of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), an important process within the global carbon cycle.''

The lovely Louisa who is working on the ARIZE project which is in collaboration with the DIAPOD project, we've got through these hectic days together!

Sometimes the nets are full with a substance called Extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), basically waste organic material and also lots of chain diatoms

We get absolutely soaked every time we do this! Here we are hosing down the plankton net to try and get all of the pelagic sample into the codend. The codend is the end of the zooplankton net, it has a 200 micrometer mesh on it to filter out all the big plankton and leave us with the plankton that we want to look at...the mighty copepods!

After each

 As the leader of this project Professor David Pond explains, '' Continued global warming throughout the 21st century is expected to exert a strong influence on the timing, magnitude and spatial distribution of diatom productivity in the Arctic Ocean. Little is known about how Calanus will respond to these changes, making it difficult to understand how the wider Arctic ecosystem and its biogeochemistry will be affected by climate change''. Hence, the need to study this area of the Arctic insitu. You can read more about the DIAPOD project here and it has a bit more information about the little beauties that I will be studying when I get back to Oban. http://www.sams.ac.uk/diapod