My first cruise is done and I felt like it flew by! Unfortunately, after a week in, we encountered some engine trouble and had to return to port early. Nevertheless, it was a great experience and I'm glad we all returned home safely! The purpose of this cruise was to investigate the flux out of sediments and offshore transport of metals. Since we ended early, we only collected samples (but 200+ at that!) along the Newport Hydrographic Line, and hope to return to sample along the shelf and up the Columbia River. A typical day at sea included: Getting the ship's CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) cast in the water (pictured above). As it moves through the water, we can monitor what the temperature, salinity, fluorescence (proxy for primary production), etc. looks like and can choose depths based on our science priorities. For this cruise, we were interested in hotspots of biological production (surface and deep chlorophyll max) and a specific density gradient because that's where we expected to see material being advected off the shelf sediments. Once the CTD was recovered, everyone rushed to grab some water for their various sampling needs. This included samples for nutrients, iodine speciation, microbial filtration, and metallo-ligand filtration. After we had an idea of what the water column looked like, we could pick the depths for the trace metal rosette. This instrument is launched into the water with pre-programmed depths. That means we had to be sure of what depths were appropriate before deploying and any potential hazards (i.e. bottom topography). Once the trace metal cast was recovered, a pseudo-assembly line formed to bring the bottles inside to be filtered under trace metal clean conditions (pictured below). Ships are full of metal contamination, so we had to build a clean "bubble" out of plastic sheeting and powered by HEPA filters. The filters keep a positive pressure inside the bubble to inhibit dust from getting inside and contaminating our samples. For the shallow stations, we typically only did one CTD and one Trace Metal cast. Near the end of our transect (~2900m depth), we were deploying one CTD and 3 Trace Metal casts. At these deep stations, we attached a mesh bag full of styrofoam cups to compress and create some fun cruise momentos. The cruise wasn't all work, though! We were visited by flocks of albatross, a superpod of dolphins, grey whales, and California Sea Lions! I've compiled some highlights from our cruise in the video below. I admit I definitely was nervous for this first cruise, but I caught the "itch" and can't wait to get back out to sea!
0 Comments
|
AuthorRead more of my adventures in graduate school here! Archives
December 2021
Categories |