And so the Research Begins...Sorta

We started sampling just after midnight after some delay (originally it was slated at 8PM last night to start).  The ice was too thick and in our way to go straight in, so the captain had to maneuver around it.  But it all worked out - I had more time to re-run a few tests and really have the lab set up the way I wanted it for my experiments.

After a few minor glitches with our sampling system, we dropped the CTD off the boat and headed down to 260 meters to start sampling.  I'll stop here and explain how this all works for you all.  Basically, we have a "carousel" from PVC-ish pipe that has 12 bottles strapped around it (like the horses on a carousel).  On the bottom of this instrument, there are different sensors that measure salinity, temperature, pressure, depth, and also fluorescence (to pick up chlorophyll in algae and other photosynthesis-utilizing organisms).  We lower this system to the bottom of what we want to sample to see a full profile of the cast (basically deploying the CTD once is called a "cast"), and then as we bring it up, we can decide what depths we want to collect water from.  So, for example, if I like what's at 100 meters, we press a button and a bottle snaps shut, capturing 10 liters of seawater from that depth.  Once all the bottles have been fired, we bring it back to the surface and I can open the ones I want and take out my samples.  Below is a picture of this CTD system going out of the Baltic Room on the ship.  It's pretty impressive, especially since that door literally looks out on the water.

The samples I collect at each station take about 6 hours to complete.  This may seem like a long time, but I'm collecting A LOT of data.  I can explain in more detail later, but basically I'm taking samples to look at the DNA, RNA, and viruses of the seawater, also looking at how active the microbial population is, how much ammonia is in the water, and finally how quickly the Archaea I study are converting this ammonia into nitrite (a process called "nitrification").  Some of these experiments require me to filter water, others I add a reagent and then read how much it fluoresces (to correspond with the amount of a certain substance in the seawater), and for others I just collect water in a test tube and freeze to analyze back at UGA.

As intense as it was, we made it through two stations by dinner time.  It was exhausting, but it felt good to get a lot accomplished.  At the third station, though, we ran into issues with our sampling system.  It had been giving us errors the whole time - mainly it was an issue where the computer we control it with would not recognize the bottles we need to use to collect water...so a big problem.  At the last two stations, we were able to fix this and move on with sampling.  But for this station...it was not working.  So we broke for dinner and the Electrical Technicians (ETs) contacted the company and tried to figure out a fix.  I took a nap after dinner since I had beeng going nonstop for like 20 hours straight (at least, sorry Mom and Dad) and hoped they would end up fixing the bottles.

Just now, I was woken up by Stian who tells me it's not going to be fixed here.  So that's a bummer.  Basically we're going to head back into Palmer Station and see if we can use their internet connection to update the software and tweak it a bit more.  Oh well.  Nothing to do now but sleep, which I definitely need after such a long day.  So it's good news and bad news at the same time...no harm done as long as I can actually catch those stations later...