Southampton

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.

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.

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.

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

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 are now in weather area Rockall, to the west of Ireland. Today has been a gruelling day because, in addition to normal tasks, we also started analysing some of the water we have been carrying with us since Scotland.

As promised yesterday, today’s entry focuses on cold-water corals and is written by Laura Wicks and Sebastian Hennige, who, together with Murray Roberts (all from Heriot-Watt University), are carrying out the work.

The Shipping Forecast Cruise?

We are almost getting into a routine now as we get through the second cruise day, settle into our scientific nests, complete our fourth CTD station, start preparations for the first deck incubation experiment, and converge on Mingulay for the deep-sea coral reef collection.

Today we left the dock in Liverpool quite early, at about 8:30. We were delayed slightly as waited to exit through a tidal lock. Then we were on our way, out into the turbid, brown-coloured waters of Liverpool Bay where we carried out our first CTD station at about midday.