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

Arctic Science!

 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 the productivity is at it's highest throughout the water column. The other depths are deep and shallow usually dependant on what you are studying. So when the CTD rosette is brought back up we ask the computer to fire certain niskins at whatever depth all of the scientists desire.

 The big project that I am doing is a vertical tow of the water column to capture zooplankton. There are hundreds of copeopods here, these are full of lipids and fats which are feeding an entire lipid based foodweb!

So many!

Crazy how filtering water can tell you so much!!1

The big one in the middle with antenna either side is what I am researching...a copepod! The deck crew call them coco pops, I quite like that! You can also spot a brittle star and a few other exciting things under the microscope !

Today we saw hundreds of Ctenophores, another of my favourites! Also, jellyfish that keep getting stuck to lots of the equipment!

So much water being filtered by everyone!!!!

 After the pelagic work the benthic work begins! A day grab is used to determine the type of sediment and ensure there are no big rocks to break the multi corer. This multi corer takes cores of the sediment.

 With all of this sun, its basically sunbathing weather

 Being British, lots of cups of teas have been getting us through the long days!

Everyone is supportive of everyone here, especially as lots of people cross over between a few of the projects but we are all basically working together to get lots of science done!! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look at the excitement! Love it

 Hopefully in the next week when we go past Svalbard when we should start seeing more ice and polarbears!!!!! We are currently at Station B4 heading to B6!! Not sure how long the internet will last, hopefully for one more week !

We have crossed the Arctic Circle!

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!

Transiting to Tromso.

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 organisms at the bottom to large predators at the top (the ARISE project), how warming influences the single main food source at the bottom of the food chain (DIAPOD)---this is the one I'm working on, the effect of retreating and thinning sea ice on nutrients and sea life in the surface ocean (Arctic PRIZE) and on the ecosystem at the seafloor (ChAOS).''

These are the scientists that are currently on the cruise with the rest joining us in Tromso...including DKA Barnes who I blogged about a year ago when we put a sea ice camera up near Rothera!

Great sidekick Sian Henley and I participating in the grueling circuits that took place in an empty hold at the bottom of the ship

Heading due North - exciting stuff. Our Speed over the ground (SOG) is actually very slow at the moment as we are taking our time getting to Tromso to save money on fuel and not to get there before the 7th!

Guess where this was taken? Ha yes adjacent to the Northern part of Scotland...it poured down!

 

This is a great place to sit out in the sun out of the wind and watch the world go by. It's very easy to not go outside when you are on a ship as the accommodation, dining room, bar and labs are all inside. I love watching the waves go by and the birds race past the waves and use the ship for lift so I make sure that I have my breakfast outside in the morning and sit outside between doing my various jobs!

 

A large part of my job at Rothera was to filter water to fractionate plankton...it's the one job that kept me in the Bonner lab until 3am some mornings waiting for the water to drip through the small pore size....now I find myself again watching water run through a filter but this time for fatty acid and pigment analysis..one of the jobs for when I get back to Oban in September!


I am one of the only scientists that is sampling on the way North to Tromso, most people are starting their sampling when we get to B1, the first of many Barents sea sites.  4 times throughout the day starting at 7 am and finishing at 5 pm I sample, in-between filtering I have been trying to finish my microplastics research paper...I hate scientific writing mainly because I am not very good at it so I am persevering and learning to adapt my writing style to the art form that is scientific writing!

  

 

 

 

 

My most important job on the ship as I see it is LABELING. If I don't label all of the samples that I take correctly and keep a good log of what, where and when then the samples are taken then it will be completely useless. Yes this sounds obvious but I can guarantee that lots of research has been lost over the years simply due to an error in labeling!

Wear green in the office day....these girls get it, here they are preparing their sampling bottles by starting to label everything... who can blame them when they have up to 800 different sample bottles i think it was they said!

Can't wait to watch the ship go into it's natural environment of ice breaking!

Filling the bunkers with oil!

Awoke to the beautiful mountains of Norway just on the horizon!

I'm very happy to be back at sea, as most of you know I'm not very good on land and as I've said before I am so lucky and grateful to be on this expedition. I'm so excited to see icebergs, I miss them....hopefully there will be a polar bear too...that really would be the tip of the iceberg !!!