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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