Entry 07
February 23/24 2025

Today’s job: cleaning Steve. Steve is a metal-free laboratory, fit for doing experiments with trace metals like iron. This means Steve himself is free from contaminating metals – hinges and screws are covered, benches and worktops are made from plastic – but we need to keep him absolutely clear of dust or grease: anything that might carry trace metals and elements from the outside world. Perhaps counterintuitively, we don’t clean with cleaning solution – deionised water or 0.5% HCl solution will do for our purposes. So we donned our lab coats, hair nets and nitrile gloves, and attacked with our cloths and blue roll.

A couple of hours and much AC/DC later (Alex’s contribution to the group playlist), Steve was clean and ready to be connected to his trace-metal clean water supply. Unfortunately we had some problems with the deployment, so I’ll leave that to another day (edit: head to the 2nd March for successful deployment!).

In the afternoon Jonathan held a science talk for the crew, which many of us attended. The next day also brought the first instalment of science mini talks, an initiative organised by Ric Williams, as an opportunity for us all to talk about previous or ongoing work we’d done outside of the cruise, which was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon. It’s really valuable for everyone to understand the aims and objectives of the cruise, especially when we are from such a broad range of scientific backgrounds.