Measuring growth of the microbes

Ocean research cruise blog of Jonathan Sharples

 

Yesterday started with another of our pre-dawn set of measurements. Fundamental biological measurements we need from these pre-dawn CTDs are how fast the microbial plants (the phytoplankton) are absorbing and using carbon and nutrients, and how fast the bacteria are growing by using the organic matter available in the water. Think of these as the two ends of a food chain, with the phytoplankton converting the inorganic elements into organic material, and the bacteria breaking down the organic material back into the inorganic. Between them we have the zooplankton, and other marine animals, eating the organic material provided by the phytoplankton, and in turn providing waste material that the bacteria use.

Radioisotope lab1

Measuring uptake of elements by phytoplankton and bacteria requires very careful laboratory work. The method involves using tiny quantities of radioisotopes of the elements we are interested in (carbon, nitrogen, phosphate, silicate) and incubating samples of seawater that have been treated with these isotopes. After a set period of time the sample is filtered to collect the phytoplankton or bacteria, and the activity of the samples counted to tell us how much of the element the organisms used. We have two laboratories dedicated to this work on the ship. Alex Poulton (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton) and Kyle Mayers (University of Southampton) are working in one to measure the phytoplankton rates. Sharon McNeill from the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban is dealing with the bacteria rates.
We steamed quickly over to the deep ocean side of the shelf edge yesterday afternoon, and at about 8 pm we started the second of our line of sample stations to measure iron in the seawater. This line started in a deep canyon, and we are working up the wall of the canyon back towards the continental shelf.

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Radioisotope lab2

22 November, 2014 08:49

Ocean research cruise blog of Jonathan Sharples

 

We had a very successful day yesterday – managed to get through all that was planned, plus most of what I’d planned for the next day as well. Deploying the moorings began shortly after 0800. This tends to be a long, careful process as the mooring wire is gradually unwound over the stern, instruments are clamped onto it at the planned depths, buoys are slotted in at key stages to hold it all up in the water, and then finally the 500 kg clump of chain is attached and dropped into the sea. By lunchtime we had deployed the long temperature/salt logger mooring and also the bedframe with the current meters. The second current meter mooring has been delayed until today, while the techs sort out an issue with the memory cards that it uses. That allowed us to go and hunt for the wandering wirewalker mooring and also the glider that we deployed when we first got here from Falmouth, but which has refused to dive.

Both the wirewalker and the glider have been sending us regular position information via a satellite link, which meant that finding them and getting them on board was very quick. We arrived back at the mooring site just after sunset, ready to do some more zooplankton work.

It’s a lovely day today – a glorious sunrise (complete with dolphins) and an almost flat sea. However, we’ve just heard that the long-term forecast is looking a little grim. A particularly nasty-looking low pressure system is due this side of the Atlantic next weekend. Forecasts that far out tend to be a little uncertain, but it’s worrying enough for us to think carefully about when we can get back to this site to recover the wirewalker and the 2 gliders that are here.

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21 November, 2014 09:05

Ocean research cruise blog of Jonathan Sharples

 

We arrived at the central Celtic Sea mooring site yesterday at 0930. Recovering the moorings was delayed a couple of hours while we waited for the wind to drop a little, but we began pulling them out of the sea shortly after lunch.

We have a fairly complex array of instruments on the moorings out here. There’s a weather buoy, provided to our project by the UK Met Office, plus a Cefas Smartbuoy that samples the surface biology and chemistry. The Met Office buoy doesn’t need servicing – they are designed to stay at sea sending back weather information for about 2 years. The Cefas buoy is looked after by Cefas scientists also working on this project. That leaves 3 other components that we need to service. The first mooring is a vertical line of acoustic current meters, anchored to the seabed and stretched upward by large buoys. These current meters are being used to measure turbulence in the sea, which allows us to calculate the supplies of nutrients towards the sea surface and how carbon is being mixed downward.

curretn meter buoy recovery

The second mooring is a relatively simple steel frame containing two acoustic current meters; this frame sits on the seabed, with the current meters looking upward and every 5 minutes measuring the flow of water in a series of 4 metre thick layers throughout the entire depth. Finally, the most complex of the moorings is a line holding about 25 temperature and salt loggers, anchored to the seabed and stretched up towards the sea surface by several buoys. These loggers, sampling every 1 minute, show us how stratified the water is, where in the water the thermocline is, and also if there are any waves running along the thermocline. All 3 moorings came up OK, though the string of loggers popped up about 1 km away from where we expected it to appear, requiring a bit of nifty ship manoeuvring by the captain to grab the mooring before it drifted onto the Cefas buoy. Once everything was on board, the National Marine Facilities engineers, along with Jo Hopkins and Chris Balfour from the Oceanography Centre in Liverpool, downloaded data, re-batteried instruments, and got the new mooring wires wrapped onto the winches ready for deployment.

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bedframe recovery

Off to collect the moorings

Ocean research cruise blog of Jonathan Sharples

 

We finished off the work at the shelf edge station with a set of samples collected using the Marine Snowcatcher. Quite a long process, with a good few misfires of the sampler, but all of the samples needed were eventually collected. At 0200 this morning we did another of the “pre-dawn” samples, collecting water from different depths to measure plankton growth rates and nutrient requirements, and the nutrients dissolved in the seawater. This was earlier than we would normally carry out pre-dawn work, but we need to get back up to the moorings further on the continental shelf with sufficient daylight to recover them all. We are due at the mooring site just after 0900. We’ll first collect a CTD profile of data adjacent to the moorings, which can later be used to help calibrate the mooring data, and then we’ll begin what will likely be a full day of manoeuvring and collecting the 3 mooring components.

 

Rainbow

We have a couple of hitchhikers aboard. Two storm petrels were found resting in the hangar by the CTDs last night. Both are currently having a sleep in a cardboard box, and Clare Davis is hopeful one of them will be OK to fly off later today. A few days ago we had an owl flying round the ship. Very exotic – cruises out here usually only attract tired homing pigeons.

Here’s a question for the year 3 ocean dynamic students back in Liverpool University. The water out here by the moorings will soon be completely vertically mixed, and I want to estimate the date when that will happen. The water is 150 metres deep, with a surface layer 60 metres thick and density 1025.6 kg m-3, and a bottom layer 90 metres thick and density 1026.0 kg m-3. The average tidal current amplitude is 0.45 m s-1, average wind speed is 12 m s-1, and the heat flux across the sea surface is 100 W m-2 (a heat loss to the atmosphere). That’s all the information you need, along with a handful of constants that are in your notes!

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Looking for particles (again….)

Ocean research cruise blog of Jonathan Sharples

 

We deployed the last of our gliders yesterday afternoon. This one is being piloted to patrol between the shelf edge and our mooring site, 100 km further onto the continental shelf; it will do this continuously from now until earl March when it will be picked up during another cruise. We then had a very successful night looking for particles. Starting just before sunset we deployed our two “Stand-Alone-Pumps” (SAPS). These pumps are lowered on a wire to a fixed depth, and programmed to pump water through large, dinner-plate sized filters typically for 1 or 2 hours.

Clare and SAPS

 Clare Davis, from the University of Liverpool, will analyse the filters to measure the ratios of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in the tiny organic particles caught on the filters – a vital part of the story of how carbon and nutrients are cycled through the sea, ultimately supporting the marine food chain and also absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. We also tried the large Marine Snowcatcher again, this time after some modifications carried out by the Ben and Tom the National Marine Facilities Engineers. It worked at last! Both the SAPS and the Marine Snowcatcher were deployed, first close to the sea surface and then at a depth of about 100 metres. This is quite a relief for us – knowing the make-up of the particles in the ocean is a vital part of what we are trying to measure.

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SAPS over the side

Shelf edge station begins

Ocean research cruise blog of Jonathan Sharples

 

Work at the shelf edge has started well. One big difference between the work here and the work that we did at the first station on the cruise is that we have no moored instruments here. The shelf edge is the most heavily fished part of the seas around NW Europe, so long-term deployments of moored instruments tend to be unsuccessful as the chance of moorings being snagged by fishing gear is very high. For the duration of our work at this site we instead hang a chain of instruments from the ship. Jo Hopkins and Chris Balfour, from the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool, spent the previous day setting up about 40 temperature, salt and chlorophyll loggers so that their clocks were all synchronised and they all take measurements at the same rate (once per minute). The instruments were then clamped every 2.5 metres on a 200 metre wire lowered over the stern, with a 300 kg ball of lead on the end of the wire keeping it vertical in the water.

Jo with chain instruments

We are using this chain of instruments to track a particular feature of the shelf edge. As the tide moves onto and off the shelf, the steep slope in the seabed causes the tide to push the thermocline up (tide flowing onto the shelf) and down (tide flowing off the shelf). This up and down motion generates waves on the thermocline that move away from the shelf edge, both onto the shelf and away into the deep ocean. These underwater waves can be very large, 100 metres from peak to trough and 15 km long. They are important because they result in a lot of mixing at the shelf edge, bringing nutrients from the deeper water up towards the surface. Our chain of instruments will track this up and down motion of the thermocline wave, so we have a picture of how rapidly the physics of the water below us is changing as we collect all of the biological and chemical samples
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t-chain deployment

Dolphins everywhere

Ocean research cruise blog of Jonathan Sharples

 

We had an astonishing display of dolphins last night. While sat carrying out a couple of measurements with the CTD for the iron work, lots of small fish had been attracted to the ship probably because of the deck lights. They in turn attracted something like 40-50 dolphins, cruising up and down the ship, accelerating to chase fish, and leaping out of the water to catch fish that were trying to escape. The acceleration and the rate at which the dolphins could turn through 180 degrees were incredible to watch. [A good question for the Oceans Sciences and Marine Biology students back at Liverpool University – the dolphins were reaching easily 10 metres per second, what Reynolds number were they operating at?] With the light from the ship we could see the dolphins 2 or 3 metres below the surface, streaking along after their food. Two sharks also turned up for the feast – much more sedate than the dolphins, cruising slowly into the foray and just wandering about as the dolphins flashed around them. We got a good look at one of them as it passed right below us at the side of the ship – at least 2 metres long. Dolphins and sharks paid each other no attention at all. This whole theatre lasted a good 90 minutes. My camera wasn’t quite up to the task of night-time photography, but the best effort is below.

dolphin watching

A glorious morning for us today. The wave height has dropped below 3 metres for the first time this trip. We have now started our 3 day stint at the station at the shelf edge.
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dophins at night