NAAMES-II Expedition: May 15, 2016

May 15th, 2016 by Kristina Mojica

I am a part of the Saltzman research group. Tom, our fearless yet cheery leader, and Jack, our resident optimist, night owl, and my lab mate, man the instruments day and night. They make sure that every piece, from the Mustang supercharger to the tiniest of valves, runs smoothly. None of this would be possible without the electrical genius of Cyril, our invaluable engineer. We should really make bets on the number of instruments he saves by the end of the cruise.

Half of our measurements are made in the aptly nicknamed trailer park. We occupy one of the “vans” two decks up from the main deck of the ship. Our van is a mobile lab in which we strapped down instruments for a week before we left for the cruise. Our instruments are so heavy that, to me, this is the most difficult part of the cruise.

Our decorations on the mast are probably the most intricate and time-intensive parts of our set-up. They wouldn’t have been possible without our mast-builder, Clayton. In order to measure gases and aerosols, we need to bring them into the lab. We have a tube going from the top of the mast to an instrument in the trailer park that continuously measures dimethyl sulfide (DMS). DMS is a gas produced by plankton. DMS measurements will help to examine the relationship between plankton blooms and cloud formation. Tom, Jack, and Cyril (the guys) will talk about the intricacies of this in a later blog post.

My job is to collect aerosol samples. Aerosols are pumped through my sampler and collected in vials of clean water. I will take ~2,000! of these vials home to measure more obscure plankton-produced organic chemicals. These chemicals get into the atmosphere when bubbles come to the surface of the ocean and burst.

I spend a lot of my time listening to the guys’ in-depth conservations about the functionality of their custom-built instruments between very short Jenga games and running sample vials to and from the trailer park. Running up to the vans at night is a bit of a surreal experience as you fight winds in the dark on your way to the red-lit bouncing trailer park. At least the van hasn’t sprung a leak like it did on the cruise in November (yet!)!! Fingers-crossed!

Written by Mackenzie Grieman

NAAMES-II Expedition: May 14, 2016

May 14th, 2016 by Kristina Mojica

Creature comforts

What does it take to be comfortable on a ship? Good food? Check. A cozy cabin? Check. Diligent captain and crew? Check. We are very comfortable on our ride out to our first station, anticipated on Tuesday evening, May 17th. Before then, we have to cross a field of icebergs which excites the tourist in some of us but puts considerable uncertainty in our planning as we do not know how quickly we can progress through the iceberg area. Such uncertainty is completely standard on a research vessel, so we are indeed all in good spirits and very comfortable.

However, I was not really concerned with human creature comforts, but rather wanted to relate the great lengths we go to, to make sure the plankton we sample are comfortable! Plankton are microscopic organisms that are key to making Earth habitable. Like organisms on land, some plankton act like animals, eating others and some plankton are more like plants. Together, plankton provide the fish and seafood some of us like to eat and make about 50% of the oxygen we breathe. So every other breath you take, a ‘Thank you plankton’ is in order. We study these microbes because although they are small, they are more numerous than the stars in the heavens. There are literally millions in a drop of water. A number of researchers on the ship are out here to understand how fast plankton grow, eat, and die. Since they are so small, and the water moves so quickly, we need to bring the plankton aboard and fool them into hopefully behaving like they would in the ocean.

We don’t really know all that is necessary to make a plankton comfortable, but we know it is essential to maintain the same light and temperature as where they were sampled from – similar to how you would treat your pet turtle. To keep the plankton happy, we have brought a bunch of clear, plastic boxes that are hooked up to the ship’s seawater system to maintain temperature. Then we wrapped the incubators with mosquito screen (like you have in your home) to shade the inside. It gets darker the deeper you go in the ocean and so by wrapping the incubators with multiple layers, we reproduce the different depths we sample. And then we do a bunch of testing of the plankton themselves before and after our experiments to make sure that indeed they were happy and healthy. Too bad you can’t ask the plankton directly how they are doing but starting with our first trial experiment last night (Friday 13 May), we have begun the dialogue.

Written by Susanne Menden-Deuer

NAAMES-II Expedition: May 13, 2016

May 13th, 2016 by Kristina Mojica

Day three at sea!

The ocean has decided to get livelier as we get into day three at sea, although I’m told it’s still tame compared to November. Personally, I have become Dramamine dependent and almost always have a mint in my mouth (if you can’t tell, this is my first time on a research cruise). Despite my difficulty with the motion of the ocean, activity has been steadily increasing as we get closer to our first station.

This morning Cyril and Jim had a practice run of sending a radiosonde balloon up to measure barometric data. The crew also laid out the apparatus for the net tow; this is a long, large sock of mesh used to catch fish and we could probably fit half the people on the boat in it if we tried. We also got some training on a microtops machine from James. We get to point a handheld device at the sun and record data. It’s a little like playing a video game; you find the sun spot on something like a level and hold it there (while the ship is moving over the waves) for five seconds. Easy right? These descriptions are pretty basic, but I am a food web person, so anything occurring in air is pretty alien to me.

It also seems that the birds just keep appearing on board. Our little stowaways are going to have a very interesting experience once we get into higher winds if they attempt to fly too far away. We’ve also been seeing plenty of marine mammals, although they’re too elusive for a simple phone camera to catch.

My job on this expedition is pretty simple, I assist everyone with their projects, since I don’t have my own to do (yet). It’s mostly a lot of filtering seawater through different sized filters. I am collecting nutrient samples, which will tell us what the ‘good stuff’ for the microbial food web and I am also responsible for taking ATP and NADH samples, which tells you something about how much energy a cell for growth at the time they were sampled (although I’m sure having all the water around you taken away while you’re stuck on a filter is not a normal part of a phytoplankton’s day-to-day). Other than that, I am at the other scientist’s ‘beck and call’, which is still pretty awesome; I get to see and help with a lot of research vastly different from my own back at Oregon State University.

Living on a ship is a pretty surreal experience. I’m still half convinced that if I just walk around to the other side or go just a bit further, I’ll see land and something familiar. Watching the horizon does help with sea sickness, and it’s kind of fun to see the waves moving that far away. I’m also really confused about how tall people sleep on this boat. I fit in the bunks perfectly, but I am not a large person at all. I’m pretty sure they have to do some contorting, or just hang their legs off the edge to even fit, let alone sleep.

Doing these cruises, you are brought in to this odd little family where everyone wants to make sure you’re doing ok and talk to you and show you everything that’s going on. Everyone on board, science or crew has no problem plopping down next to you at meal times and starting some random conversation that has everyone at the table in stitches at some point. Even though I’m one of the newbies, I’ve been adopted in as though I’ve been here since the beginning, and that makes even the seasickness bearable (14 hours of sleep also helps greatly- at least for now).

Written by Kelsey McBeain

NAAMES-II Expedition: May 12, 2016

May 12th, 2016 by Kristina Mojica

The R/V Atlantis doesn’t sail, as much as it moves the water out of its way. The waters so far have been calm, and progress is steady. We are still relatively close to land, as evident from a couple stowaways we picked up this morning, such as a summer tanager and 3 grey catbirds! Hopefully, these birds leave before we get too far out or they might be joining us the entire trip. I doubt Greenland is very hospitable this time of the year. Or any time of the year for these fellas and it would be a long trip home.

The scientists have largely gathered their sea legs and have already begun to work. This is relatively easy given the current calm weather conditions and clear skies. One part of the NAAMES project is understanding how particles in the air (aerosols) relate to cloud formation. Marine aerosols consist of a complex mixture of sea salt, non-sea-salt sulfate, and organic species formed through a variety of production pathways. The relative contribution of each aerosol type changes across the particle size distribution and exhibits a strong seasonal association with ocean biological activity. By sampling marine aerosols and associated particle size distributions during the several phases of the bloom we hope to get a better understanding of how changes in the burden and properties of atmospheric aerosols alter Earth’s radiation balance, and hence affect climate.

Generally, there is some background concentration of particles in the air at any given time, even on clear days like today. You breathe them in, you breathe them out, and you are not even aware of it. Most of these particles are too small to been seen with the naked eye, these are in the size range of ten to a few hundred nanometers. Visible light is about 400-700 nm, which means that these particles are smaller than a wavelength of visible light, and therefore your eye can’t discern them. They exist in a suspended state for two reasons, first is because they are so small and small particles fall slowly, and the atmosphere has many updrafts available to keep them from reaching the ground, and second is they are too large to move over great distances through diffusion like air molecules such as oxygen. This makes them ripe for cloud making.

If you could ask only one question about the water drops in a cloud, you would ask “How many?” Solar absorption, chemical processing, and even a little precipitation can be gleaned from this question. If you could ask two questions about water droplets in clouds, you would next ask, “What size?” Knowing both number and size reveals significant information about cloud lifetimes, and dynamic processes like rain formation. This is information we can obtain from using radar and lidar technologies.

Our group focuses on the third question, “What are they made of?” The chemical composition of particles near the earth surface can provide information about how many particles will form into cloud droplets, and ultimately how many will be returned by rain. Our instrument exposes particles to water vapor concentrations typically found in clouds, and can count directly the number of aerosol that have cloud forming potential. Obviously, we cannot walk the instrument out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, hence the expedition.

Sea life is a lot like lab life, except now the lab moves a little, and there is potential for hurricanes and icebergs. I am consistently surprised by the lack of complaining from the group. Measurements at 04:00 don’t seem to bother anybody because these are THEIR projects. They specifically wanted to do this, and here we are. I still stumble into walls from time to time, but the food is good and so are the people. In life, what more can you ask for?

Written by Joseph Niehaus

NAAMES-II Expedition: May 11, 2016

May 12th, 2016 by Kristina Mojica

This morning started out full of excitement. The weather was beautiful, sunny and relatively warm. The first nice day many of us experienced since we began trickling into WHOI over the last week or more. The day had finally arrived, we were leaving to start our expedition. Everyone was on deck, many skipping breakfast to witness the lifting of the gangway and the slow departure from shore. Then, to our dismay, we noticed that the gangway was being detached from the crane while still on the dock. We were soon informed that a technical problem had arisen on the ship and could not be corrected in time for us to leave within the small window created by the slack (low) tide. Unfortunately, this meant that we would have to wait 7 hours for the next window. During the science meeting that followed, chief scientist Mike Behrenfeld informed us that we would set sail during the coming high tide which would occur around 1500, irrespective of whether the technical problem could be solved. We have a 7 day transit to our first station and we are anxious to get there while the phytoplankton are still blooming. Needless to say, we are closely monitoring the event using ocean color satellite imagery.

The aim of the NAAMES-II expedition is to capture the peak of the bloom in the northern region of the North Atlantic and its’ inevitable decline as we progress southward. The hope is that the data obtained during the cruise will demonstrate underlying regulatory factors responsible for both bloom formation and decline. The underlying hypothesis being that the acceleration of the bloom occurs due to the positive affect of increasing availability of light on phytoplankton growth rate occurring in nutrient replete (rich) waters, and the offset between these increases in growth rate and parallel increases in mortality processes (such as viral lysis and microzooplankton grazing). In contrast, the deceleration would be a consequence of either phytoplankton growth rate stabilization when they achieve their light saturated maximum growth rate or growth rate decrease due to nutrient limitation of surface waters. In either case, mortality rates can “catch up” to phytoplankton growth rates. Once this occurs, mortality rates exceed growth rates and the bloom declines.

The delay did little to dampen the work occurring on board. Aside from the general science meeting, there were small meetings within groups which covered how measurements would be taken, the person responsible and the timing of schedules to make sure all bases would be covered and everyone would still get adamant rest while at station. There was also a general ship safety meeting which covered different alarm signals and how scientists should react to them. This was then followed by a fire and abandon ship drill. During the fire drill, scientists don life vests and muster in the main lab equipped with hats and survival suits in the event that abandoning the ship was required. During the abandon ship drill, several scientists wiggled into their survival suits to make sure they are capable of dawning them were the need to arise. This is always a humorous situation as it makes everyone look like big red gumbies.

After what seemed like an eternity, 1500 finally arrived. Once again, all scientists were on deck to watch the event. And there was nothing but smiles and high sprites as we moved away from the dock and waved our goodbyes to colloquies watching from shore. Finally, our expedition has begun. On our way out, we were blessed with calm seas and of course a beautiful sunset.