Southampton

This last blog entry is by Toby Tyrrell and Eric Achterberg. Today is the end of the cruise for most of us, and a welcome chance to relax a little, catch up on sleep and then start writing the cruise report and packing the equipment.

The cruise has gone very well, with all of our planned work carried out and much more besides. We have collected…

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!

Our blog entry today has a…

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.

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Coccolithophore blooms, almost

Today’s blog entry is written by Jeremy Young, University College London

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Warm congratulations to Pam Talbot, formerly departmental secretary for Biology, Biogeochemistry and Ecosystems, who received an MBE in the recent Queen’s birthday honours list. The award is for services to the National Oceanography Centre and its predecessors over a period spanning 45 years.

Pam, who retired at the end of March 2010, joined the…

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.

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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.

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

The exciting event today was a chance finding of pteropods in one of the CTD water sampling bottles. When we were filtering the seawater (straining it through an extremely fine mesh to see what microscopic particles it contains), one…

A fundamental prerequisite for ocean acidification work is to accurately measure seawater pH and carbon chemistry. The basic objective of ocean acidification research is to work out the impact of inputting extra carbon dioxide into seawater.

We want to establish the effect of these chemical changes on life and other aspects of the oceans. In order…