marine biology, oceanography, science communication, science journalism, research, phd, fieldwork, university of ocford, climate science, carbon cycle, plankton Entry 06 February 22 2025 4am espresso club, data analysis, argo floats and sunset birthday BBQs 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. back to diaries home page 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. previous entry next entry

marine biology, oceanography, science communication, research, phd, fieldwork, university of oxford, climate science, carbon cycle, plankton Entry 01 February 11 2025 Come along with us on our trip from Rio to Namibia via the mid-Atlantic ridge looking at the role microscopic photosynthesisers play in absorbing carbon from our atmosphere and storing it away in the ocean depths Hello! If you're new here, I'm Ari, a PhD student at the University of Oxford, an avid science communicator and video reporter/producer for new scientist . I'm about to embark on my second research cruise, for the expedition that will provide me with the bulk of field-data for my DPhil (that's the Oxford term for PhD). Before joining the ship, I spent an incredible week in the Amazon Rainforest - I couldn’t miss the opportunity whilst in Brazil! But I'm now on my way to join the ship and my team in Rio de Janeiro, from where we will sail to Walvis Bay, Nambia, over 47 days at sea. The cruise, aboard the Royal Research Ship James Cook, is sailing under project CarTRidge . The overarching project is looking into the role the mid-Atlantic ridge plays in carbon export. I'm part of Team Plankton, looking at the role these microscopic photosynthesisers play in absorbing carbon from our atmosphere and storing it away in the ocean depths. We are a team of four: Professor Alex Poulton (Herriot-Watt University), Dr Ben Fisher (Herriot-Watt University) and Frieda Schlegel (The Marine Biological Association/Southampton University) ... and me! back to diaries home page I'm going to be sharing about my own experience of being a PhD student at sea - the ups and downs, night shifts and hours at the filtering rig. If you're interested in more information about the cruise at large, our chief scientist Professor Jonathan Sharples is keeping a blog I'd highly recommend a read. previous entry next entry

marine biology, oceanography, climate science, science communication, research, phd, fieldwork, university of oxford, carbon cycle, plankton Entry 03 February 19 2025 Containers, rigs and a fond farewell to Rio Our containers arrived which means not only do we have equipment but, in our case, we now have a lab. One of my most asked questions is whether the labs are built in to the ship and the answer is yes, many are, but some are also built into shipping containers which can be mixed and matched according to the needs of the specific expedition. That called for a 0500 start today, which was easy due to the excitement we all felt at finally getting going, and all hands on deck (now I understand where that phrase comes from!) to get everything unpacked, set up and tied down to enable us to sail the next morning. The first order of business was building filtering rigs - we have 8 in total with capacity to process 45 samples at a time, which might seem excessive but is absolutely necessary to do everything we want to do. Most of our rigs are towers connected to a vacuum pump, which uses negative pressure to draw the samples through the filters, but I also brought a peristaltic pump to filter my cartridge filters in-line, which required some clever DIY rigging to stay stable and easy to use. back to diaries home page We finished early and headed out for one final night in Rio - which was bittersweet as we'd come to miss it but we're absolutely ready to get going previous entry next entry

marine biology, oceanography, climate science, science communication, science journalism, research, phd, fieldwork, university of oxford, carbon cycle, plankton Entry 11 February 28 2025 'Drifting over the Lake District in an airship at a height of 3000 metres and trying to drop a rock onto a barn roof. At night' ~ Chief Scientist Jonathan Sharples Having transited overnight to our ridge site, we arrived around 0400 and immediately set about getting the CTD in the water. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get it out before dawn but it was a good day to have a bit of a play with methods - I was able to try out my new filtering rig, with the consensus being that you cannot filter 5L of seawater through a 0.2um filter under vacuum (at least, not in less than 5 hours!). So, lesson learned (the long way). Filtering in hand, it was time to measure some chlorophylls - we were measuring total and size-fractionated chlorophyll, to enable us to understand the structure of the phytoplankton community in the water. We measure this with a spectrophotometer, once the filters have been in acetone for around a day after sampling. This measures the absorbance of light through the sample, from which we can understand how much of the chlorophyll pigment was present in the original filter. Today we also dropped our second mooring – this time on the ridge. This works much the same as the first (see 25th Feb entry) except now we’re trying to drop the anchor on a specific location on this underwater mountain range. To quote our chief scientist, Jonathan, ‘it’s a bit like drifting over the Lake District in an airship at a height of 3000 metres trying to drop a rock onto a barn roof. At night.’ These two sets of moorings, together, will enable us to observe differences between the two sites – on and off the ridge. In the evening (or, our version of evening, which is essentially 4-5pm) we were lucky enough to witness a part of the planetary parade - seeing Venus, Jupiter and Mars while the wirewalkers were deployed over the side. back to diaries home page previous entry next entry

@ScienceForMyMum In this section you can see copies of my social media posts from @scienceformymum on Instagram . Please follow along if you have the app in support of my work. Originally started as a science communication outreach project for my Masters Degree, this has quickly proved popular with a following over 50,000 followers. The root of the name 'scienceformymum' comes from video blogs I used to send to my mum (who is not a scientist) to give her a glimpse of my days in the lab, and these clips that I recorded 'for my mum' evolved into the posts and reels you can see now. Once I began to post publicly it seemed to reinforce my belief that our science should be communicated in a way that anyone can understand ... even my mum!

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