All fieldwork

Did you know, as we float atop the waters of the Subtropical North Atlantic, we also sit on layers and layers of ocean from all over the globe, and that these can be decades old? The ocean here is around 4 kilometres deep, with different layers having originated in different places and made their way here by deep convection – the process by which mixed surface layers of the ocean travel to it’s interior. In this way, a water mass’ ‘age’ refers to the last time it was in conta

Today started as any other; a 2300 alarm, an apple from the galley, and a rendezvous in the main lab to prep our CTD cast (if you missed it, here’s a CTD 101). But today was an exciting CTD as I fired my own bottles! By which I mean, I pressed the button at the correct time at the correct depth 24 times, but it was a big moment for me. I again took all the samples I need - another 50 litres (10 litres per depth from 5 different depths) filtered through 0.2 micron mesh for gen

For me, the most exciting moment of a cruise is the moment the first CTD hits the surface of the water. The second, a few hours later (if you’re lucky!), is the moment the first samples hit the -80 degree Celsius freezer. This means my sampling is well and truly underway, and we’re on our way to answering some of the big questions we have about the ocean and the Earth as a whole. This happened today at 0100 hours. We typically meet in the ship’s main lab about half an hour be

Let’s talk about the triangle of filtering. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, when we talk about ‘filtering’, we are talking about pushing litres of seawater through a very fine mesh. And what’s key here is that, at least in my case, what I’m interested in is what stays on the filter. The water produced just runs back into the sea, but what doesn’t fit through the pores is what we’re here for: tiny, microscopic phytoplankton that live in seawater (about a million