This cruise has been so wonderful from beginning to end – the science went swimmingly and the team was great. The crew and support staff on the ship made our jobs go smoothly, and it’s a treat to be able to focus on doing the science without having to worry about all the other stuff […]

The last three days have been a frenzy of activity as we break down our ship-based laboratories and prepare samples for shipping. We’ve been packaging over 2,000 diatom cultures with care so that they’ll return to Rhode Island alive and well. Meanwhile, we’re stowing away all of our important sea-going instruments and digitizing our datasheets. […]

Today’s post is contributed by Greta Shum, who is part of the multimedia team on our cruise. It’s the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That’s what it’s called. Not The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. But I am on an adventure, following after this detective as he teases out the mysteries of the Southern Ocean. […]

With the cruise coming to an end, and with everyone busy wrapping things up, it’s easy to miss a tiny rack of tubes nested in the corner a cold incubator. The tubes contain live samples of microscopic plankton collected from some of the sites we have visited. The difference – the collections in these tubes […]

After an incredibly windy night at sea, we’ve reached the largest ice shelf in Antarctica, the Ross Ice Shelf. This massive piece of ice spans 188,000 square miles (487,000 km2) and rises about 160 ft (50 m) above the water surface. If we were to look below the surface, we would find another 1,600 ft […]

Microbial populations in the Southern Ocean can live in the open water, but they can also live in the ice itself, and today we collected ice samples so that we could check whether the diatoms ice and in the water were different. After getting our choice pieces of ice up on deck, we sealed them […]

You might wonder why we haven’t been posting to the blog the last few days. It turns out that if you travel far enough south, you will, eventually, reach a region of earth with no satellite coverage. It also happens that as you near the edge of the internet hole, the bandwidth that you have […]

What do a bunch of scientists on a research cruise in the Southern Ocean en route to Antarctica do when they aren’t staring into microscopes, analyzing data, or preparing their next experiment? Well, a seminar series, of course! We’ve started “the Science Café” – a daily seminar series where one of us will give a […]

The focus on this cruise has been phytoplankton, and one of their identifying features is the presence of chlorophyll. The very same pigment that makes the plants you see outside a bright green. Therefore, measuring the amount of chlorophyll fluorescence gives us a sense of the abundance of this phytoplankton in the water. Measuring chlorophyll […]

After the niskin rosette come on board, how do we collect floating phytoplankton? We use techniques that pull those plankton out of the water.  One very common method is filtration.  We filter water onto small round filters, collect the plankton on those filters and then discard the “empty” water.   This is such a great way […]