Espresso club and cleaning Steve

Today was an exciting day because it was the inaugural meeting of ‘espresso club’ – aka, Team Plankton meeting outside the ship’s coffee room at 0400 to begin the gradual shift to our 0300 starts (we still had a couple of time zones to go at this point).

Making the most of the bonus hours in our day, we decided to take the opportunity to get our FIRST DATA – even if not from this cruise. The JC273 team had left us a couple of trays of chlorophylls in the hold, which we measured concentrations of. This felt like a momentous event, given how long we’d waited to start doing science.

Powered on by a gorgeous sunrise from the bridge and a run on the ship’s treadmill (god bless dynamic positioning), we spent the afternoon in our RN container (henceforth named and referred to as ‘Steve’) making up nutrient spikes for our amendment experiments. In the afternoon we deployed a further two Argo floats, before the crew spoiled us with an incredible spread at a barbeque on the aft deck – complete with a spectacular cake to celebrate Marika’s birthday.

Left: Team Plankton members outside the coffee shop. Middle: vaccum filtering rig set up. Right: Marika and chef on her birthday!

Another job on the to-do list was 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!).

Left: Frieda and I dutifully donned our clean lab outfits for the first of many times to clean our trace-metal laboratory, Steve. Right: chief scientist Jonathan Sharples gives us the run-down on internal tidal waves.

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.