Life Beyond the Beaker

Onroute towards the ice! As part of the ARISE project, Emma Burns is studying Arctic mud as part of her PhD. She uses a megacorer to depths around 3000 m, it sinks into the sea floor filling up the tubes with mud creating cores. These cores are sliced into thin sections and frozen to be sent back for analysis back in the UK.   Mud corer going down to 2500 m Looking out for wildlife whilst waiting for the corer to come back up ''We look at the sediments to determine the original source of the ‘food’ component within them. It could have originally been on land around the ocean and has been washed in by rivers or erosion of the coast. It could also have been made my marine life, little shells that are left behind when an animal dies .'' Emma Burns Louisa and Ian put the bung in to contain the sample within the corer Carrying the samples back to the lab...whilst thinking do not drop do not drop Why so serious!? Lots of concentratin...

    Snow on the deck and massive waves!!!!!     We are now a far cry away from Immingham steaming steadily North and completing science enroute. Running outside to get some sun before the fog surrounds us again! There is lots of fog in the arctic due to the warm atlantic water and the different airmasses flowing over top!  My favourite passtime at the moment is watching the birds do beat ups along the side of the ship. They also use the waves to get extra energy to get higher. Science is happening. We are currently trying to get into a day and nighttime cycle to capture the plankton that hiberate at depth (diapause). We are doing lots of CTDs which involves the probes which collect temperature, depth, oxygen, salinity and floruesence data. We then collect the water and filter it onto different sizes of filters to be analysed for POM, DIC, Fatty acids and many more biological things back at the lab!  We are in the middle of the...

Each one of these dots is our position report...between each dot is about 1/2 hours! We are steaming at a steady 13 knots. Here's the webcam so you can see what we can see, it will be more exciting in a week where you might be able to spot a polar bear on the ice: http://mx10-8-202-54.jcr.nerc-bas.ac.uk/cgi-bin/guestimage.html     We are rapidly steaming North, the air is noticeably cooler! North of Iceland and adjacent to the top of Norway we are almost reaching our first station. Today we start coring the deep benthic mud. Then tomorrow is day filled with oceanography where we collect water from the CTD and plankton from the bongo nets. My next blog will give more detail about why we are actually here and what we are studying! As you can see from this updated satellite image of the sea ice in the Arctic, there is a line of brash ice where we are heading. This is a good sign meaning that the ice is moving around the stations that we are heading to sample from. The ...

This year the three Changing Arctic Ocean cruises (CAO) are being separated. So we are kicking off this years CAO cruise with the DIAPOD and ARISE team, we will then jump off in Longyearbean in Svalbard the PRIZE team will then jump off and head up the Barents sea to complete a similar transect that we did last year then finally the last cruise will be CHAOS who will also be going up the Barents sea. The JCR will then come home to Southampton where all 4 projects will collect their scientific gear and valuable (and rather expensive) precious samples!!!! Such a mighty vessel...she's been in action for almost 28 years. Newly built containers these days only last 15 years, so it's great to see how integral the building material used on the JCR is to make it still in action at what is seen as quite old for a vessel! The X-MEN are protecting us on this cruise. I am going to spend a lot of time on this cruise looking at beasties under the microscope...will this make...

Hello from the RRS James Clark Ross..have I been here before? Yes! Last year I was on the JCR heading to the Barents sea in the Arctic... This year on the same project that's called DIAPOD we are heading up the Fram Strait to complete similar work. So lots of filtering water and plankton nets. I'm off to do the lifeboat drill but for now here's our new website for the changing artic ocean programme:https://www.changing-arctic-ocean.ac.uk/