Life Beyond the Beaker

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 fuell...

 We arrived just outside Tromso last Friday, the remaining scientists were dropped off to the ship by a ferry! Looked like an exciting ride. It was great to see land after a week of sailing up the north sea. Norway looks beautiful, it has some fantastic mountain ranges that I think I will have to come back and climb/hike! You can read Celeste's blog here:http://celestethelion.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/  We arrived at the first station that evening so we got to work straight away. We did a shake down CTD (Conductivity Temperature Density) system which measures all the way from the surface down to just above the sea floor. It is winched down at a steady rate. This piece of equipment is actually called a CTD rosette as mounted around it are grey bottles called Niskins, these allow us to capture water at what ever depth we want. Busy deciding what depths are most interesting. One of the depths we measure mostly is the deep chlorophyll maximum, this is where ...

Yesterday we crossed the Arctic Circle!! As you may have spotted in the photo above...I wore my Polar Bear PJ's as an omen for us to see polar bears this trip. Fingers crossed. Tomorrow we will be collecting the remaining science crew in Tromso and then heading straight to our first site for a bit of pelagic and benthic sampling! I am very excited about this trip. It also really hit me yesterday about how many miles and the amount of time I have spent on a boat in order to cross the Antarctic Circle, the equator and now the Arctic circle within 3 month- crazy and extremely lucky!

We arrive for boat transfer of the remaining scientists on the 7th of July, from there we are heading to our first station in the Barents sea. After that we are going to steam ahead to try and get to the furthest site up the Barents sea and along the sea ice, sampling at a few stations on route. Then on the way back from the furthest station we will be sampling the in-between sites. For a bit more information about what we are actually doing on this cruise here is the SAMs article: https://education.sams.ac.uk/news/sams-news-changing-arctic-oceans-cruise.html Next time I need my wide angle lens so I can capture the whole ship it's that big! This Arctic Research program is funded by NERC and is affiliated with SAMs, Liverpool University, Leeds University, The National Oceanography Center and as the article above explains,'' four projects cover different aspects of the programme’s goals: the way change in the Arctic is affecting the food chain, from small o...