Blogs from North Atlantic, Atlantic, Oceans and Seas - page 6

3rdJuly It’s another beautiful morning here at 61oN 33oW, just off the coast of Greenland. The Arctic Circle is at 66oN, so we're not too far off. Since we set sail about 17 days ago, we’ve been warned that we're in the North Atlantic, so stormy, cold, wet weather is to be expected. In the past few days, however, we hear “this just isn’t right… It’s never this nice for so long in the North Atlantic”. In fact, we’ve been very lucky, and have had magnificent weather most days. There have been a few cold, windy and grey days, but even those weren’t too bad. We were supposed to encounter a storm on Sunday, but we travelled north and it stayed put, so we missed it. Instead, we had the most amazing day. The sky was ... read more

Day 12 It’s just over a week and a half since we left Ponta Delgada, and we are settling nicely into a routine. We are traveling back and forth from areas of suspected high biomass, to areas we think have been infected by viruses, sampling along the way to see if we can catch the interesting stuff. If you take a look at the route the Knorr has sailed in the past few days (http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=8581) you'd probably think we have a problem with the navigation system, or that someone on board has a drinking problem. But no, all it is, is us trying to find 5 micron cells inside an ocean. But we are starting to see very promising initial results, so we're modifying our sampling and analyzing regime accordingly. Between sampling and experiments, ... read more

Day 9 We're out in the vast open ocean, and the biology we're looking for is also out there, diluted in throughout the water column, and mixed with other organisms that may hinder our experiments. So... we filter. We filter to concentrate the algae,the viruses and many other molecules of interest. We also use filters to separate the desired fractions from those we don't want in our samples. This filtering takes the better part of the day, and brings on all sorts of creative thoughts. Look what I came up with while filtering... If Dr. Seuss was an oceanographer You can filter in the morning, You can filter in the evening, You can filter when you eat, Could probably do it with your feet! You can filter from a syringe, You can filter and impinge, You ... read more

Here's a resume of my ocean journey, now I've reached Montreal: I arrive at the Lisbon docks by taxi to go through Immigration and then to the ship at last; it's reassuring to be met and driven by the ship's agent, he knows where he is going. We drive through a dock full of containers perched several high lowering at us, quite formidable; giant gantries stand high above, with runways like trams to go back and forth, and special carriers dart to and fro, unloading a ship up ahead. We park immediately outside Hanjin Palermo, our ship, and climb the gangway, a stairway specially netted - I guess - to catch anything which might inadvertently fall through. We're greeted by the gangway watch, welcoming grins and logging of our ID, and time of arrival. Having been ... read more

So what are we doing here anyway? Well, a lot of things. In general, we’re looking at small, unicellular algae, and the relationship they have with viruses. The interplay between the two specific organisms we’re looking at, the algae host Emiliania huxleyi and its specific virus, have a huge influence on the ocean and atmosphere. Algae are the basis for the entire marine food web, and they might even produce small molecules that can influence cloud cover over the ocean. So we mainly sample water (I will describe how we do this in a later post), some of the samples will be sent back to our land-based labs, but some can be analyzed on board. A unique part of what we’re doing is measuring the aerosols in the atmosphere, and we are even trying to characterize ... read more