Underway sampling and oceanographer skills Mariana Ribas Ribas , January 19 , 2013
Ship time is really expensive so we have to make the best use of it . Has someone wondered what we do as we go from one station to the next one ?
Progress map – map showing where we have been ( green lines ), where we started the bioassay experiments ( lavender stars ) and the long transect we are just starting ( pink line ) which we will sample particularly intensively .
In part we use the time to analyse and filter all we have from the station , but also we sample more seawater from the underway seawater supply . That ’ s a pumped supply of clean sea-water coming from an inlet on the hull of the ship about 5 m below the seasurface . This allows us to collect samples without stopping the ship . We collect water for measurement of dissolved inorganic carbon and alkalinity , salinity , coccolithophores , flowcytometry and nutrients [ or for the non-oceanographers lots of stuff ]. We ’ ve being doing this every two hours through most of the cruise but now that we are starting a long southnorth transect from the ice-edge to South Georgia , we are going to sample every hour . That seems easy during day time , but who is going to wake up and collect samples every hour during the night ?
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