exploration at sea

The CTD has been recovered from its journey to the deeps, and is now working again. We are all of us relieved to be able to get back to our normal pattern of work.

Most work has not been possible today, due to a problem with the cable that the CTD is lowered on. Thanks to some hard graft from the ship’s engineers, it looks to be repaired now and we hope to be back at work tomorrow morning early.

The last few days have seen fairly high winds and big waves (see photos). Some stops for water sampling have had to be cancelled because it has been too dangerous to lower the CTD into the water.

Almost two weeks are gone

The first time I went on board the RRS Discovery I was disorientated and a bit worried about the life on board a ship. Some people were working to take on all the research equipment, there were boxes everywhere and the ship seemed to be a labyrinth!

Today our routine of collecting scientific samples has been interrupted by the arrival of the predicted rough weather. We are now heading out towards the deep Atlantic, roughly at the location shown by the red dot on the cruise map.

Coccolithophore blooms, almost

Today’s blog entry is written by Jeremy Young, University College London, who uses both a normal light microscope and an electron microscope to work out the biodiversity of the phytoplankton at each location and through the bioassays.

On the cruise so far we have already seen large differences in the dominant phytoplankton present in different places. In just the last three days we have seen some places where diatoms dominated, others where coccolithophores dominated, and another where dinoflagellates were the most numerous group (see photograph of a rather beautiful dinoflagellate).

Yesterday evening and today we have enjoyed sunny weather and calm seas, as shown in the photos. Those who were feeling a bit queasy earlier in the trip are now feeling much better. However, we are forecast to be heading into rough weather later in the week, when we will be visiting the most southerly weather forecast areas, Fitzroy and Biscay.

Today’s blog is written by the two other people responsible for measuring seawater carbon chemistry: Cynthia Dumousseaud and Victoire Rerolle from the National Oceanography Centre Southampton.

We will return to yesterday’s theme – carbon chemistry of seawater – tomorrow, but today’s blog is about pteropods.