As I mentioned before, I am out with Craig Smith's team on the ship. He is studying biomass, biodiversity, and ecosystems of the fjords. Fjords are created by glaciers and generally are long, narrow inlets that have some steep cliffs The fjords have a higher biomass and more photosynthetic activity than other places in the Antarctic. The phytoplankton are much more productive in these inlets.
From start to end, the fjords were stunning and beautiful.
So to examine the photosynthetic activity he is looking for chlorophyll a. Remember the pigments? One way to measure this is to take water samples at specific points as we travel into and out of the fjords, as well as a sample out on the shelf. Craig and David have their hands full examining all the amazing little animals that call whale bones home. I find that so interesting that there are species which live only on whale bones. What a niche way to make a living.
David and Craig are collecting the animals that were on the whale bones and separating them for further analysis.
Craig is analyzing an Osedax worm and other fauna retrieved from the whale bone. These animals are fascinating when you can see them up close. Many of them are transparent and you can see all of their interior structure. Nice!
I was given the job to take the water samples at these various points and filtrate it. Which means I collect a bottle of sea water at a given transect (designated point) and run it through a filtering process that catches phytoplankton (phyto - plant, meaning photosynthetic organisms). They are then frozen to be taken back to the lab. Those of you in AP Bio will remember our photosynthesis lab when we measured the pigments by seeing how far they traveled up the chromatography paper. They will do something similar back in the labs at home. Hard day today - filtering water, watching seals and whales and, of course, taking a ridiculous amount of pictures. Ridiculous is an understatement.
Here is the wet lab on the Gould. David is at the microscope. Amy is one of the marine science techs on the ship. She's great. It's her first time down in Antarctica also so it's nice to have someone to geek out with while seeing this place for the first time.
In the evening we used that awesome contraption called a CTD. That stands for Connectivity, Temperature and Depth. What does connectivity tell us you might ask? Great question. Think chemistry, ions, and lattice structure. Hmmm, lattice structure like sodium chloride. Salt. Oh, salinity. There is a wire inside the cable that lowers the CDT down that communicates with a computer on board the ship.
Here is the CTD apparatus. Those long tall cylinders are the bottles that collect the water. If you look closely some are still open. The closed ones are filled with water samples.
You can see the CTD at the surface of the water as it is being launched. Julie, one of the marine techs, is down there to help launch and retrieve it. The winch that deploys it is operated from above.
Those cylinders are fired off at different depths. No torpedoes or destruction, just closes the ends of the specified collecting tubule to get a sample of water at specific depths. The canisters are all open as it goes down. When we hit the fire button the tops and bottoms close up capturing the seas water at that depth. We collected samples from the bottom (which was around 500 meters, which is 1,640 feet) and then at specific depths all the way up to the top.
Here are the brains of the machine. It is a whole package of instrumentation that records fluorometry (particles in the water), salinity, depth, CO2, O2 among other things. It then relay it up to us on the monitor so we can access what is happening and when to fire off the bottles to close and collect water samples.
This is the computer that reads the information from the sensors on the CTD. When it reaches the correct depth you push the button to fire off the canisters. This triggers them to snap shut and you have your water sample from the desired depth.
I got busy in my niche in this project - I collected the water samples from the CTD from each depth and ran them through the filtration process.
I collected water samples from each of the canisters. Then we filtrated the sample to look for phytoplankton. You might be thinking, stop staring at the camera and watch where the water is going already! No worries - I only needed 289 ml and the canister had 20 liters. I had plenty of time to say cheese.
Well, it's time for my beauty rest. There's lots more to do tomorrow.