I volunteered in a research cruise led by Professor Jonathan Sharples at the University of Liverpool. The project, Enhanced carbon export driven by internal tides over the mid-Atlantic ridge (CarTRidge), is to test the effects of internal tidal waves on the phytoplankton, which is an important part of the oceanic biological carbon pump, over the mid-Atlantic ridge. Thanks to Tony Payne and Andrew Meijers for supporting this voluntary opportunity.
The cruise was about 7 weeks at sea, starting from Rio De Janeiro, Brazil and ending in Walvis Bay, Namibia. We flew to Rio De Janeiro and boarded the RSS James Cook on February 9th. However, there were some unexpected accidents and then a big delay. We ended up waiting in Rio for 10 days and finally set sail on the 20th. By the way, Rio is fantastic.
I was in charge of oxygen sampling and analysis, which was a significant career shift — from an ice-ocean modeller who never worked in a chemical lab to an oxygen analyst. My team was very happy with the oxygen measurements, which fit a perfect linear regression. We did a good job on oxygen calibration. Thanks to Claire Mahaffey at University of Liverpool, who gave me training on how to titrate oxygen samples and gave us help remotely during the cruise, and Alex Poulton at Heriot-Watt University, who made the chemical reagents, we could manage to calibrate CTD sensors. The cruise gave me, an oceanographer with no prior cruise experience, first hand experience of how observational data is collected and how oceanographers work in a real ocean (as opposed to a virtual ocean). It was truly amazing when my fingers felt the cold seawater taken from below 500 m (though I still prefer to be a modeller). I now value the observational datasets more than I ever did before.
The author of the article - Jing Jin (University of Bristol)
Image credits: jonathanatsea | Ocean research cruise blog of Jonathan Sharples