IMCS Blog » RV Tangaroa cruise austral Spring 2009

Scott (chief scientist) and Pete (deck hand) showing off some of their best outer wear. They tell me that the jacket and the sweater haven’t been washed in at least 10 yrs! We are almost done! The mooring is deployed, all our gear is on board, and we’ve gotten all the samples...

Life on a Ship…excitin...

Michelle: Life is never boring on a ship…usually. Although, you do desperately hope it isn’t TOO exciting, as well. As you may have read from Liz’s blog, Friday we filtered water on the Northern Biophysical Mooring site, just as before. And it seemed like we had been doing...

The mooring first, now t...

Yesterday we were supposed to bring in the northern mooring but the weather was too rough and the wind too high. So the plan was changed, the mooring was due to have all the line swapped out so they spent all day yesterday creating a “naked” mooring array – measured out the...

What a difference a few ...

Michelle Hardee: Wednesday was a bit less intense of a workday. As you may have read from Liz’s blog, we put our incubation array experiment over the side on Tuesday night, and then headed to bed for some much needed rest. After a 12-hr incubation cycle during the day, our incubation...

Rough weather with a lon...

Today was another long day’s journey into night… After we steamed north the wind just kept blowing heavy—gusting up to 40 knots and the seas built ‘til they were getting close to 5 meters (~15 ft). There is little we can do in this weather and unless the weather...

It was a long day…for ...

Michelle Hardee: As you may have already read from Liz’s blog, we’ve been a tiny bit busy these past few days at the Southern Mooring station…and so has everyone else on board. To collect enough of the phytoplankton cells we’re interested in so that we can measure them,...

Satellite image shows Sp...

This image on October 25, 2009, from the MODIS sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite shows the phytoplankton Spring bloom in waters east of New Zealand along the Chatham Rise. The image is NASA’s Earth Observatory Image of the Day. You can read more at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=40924 Spring...

Steaming north into a hu...

We also get a few zooplankton and whatever else is in the water. You can get a rough guess at how full the water is of organisms by a quick look at the filter when you open up the rig. The darker the filter the more is in there. Surprisingly the water itself always looks beautifully...

The incubation array, an...

Crewman Mitchie throws the grappling hook to snag the line between the top floats on the array. It’s important that you have someone with a good arm and good aim – so the job of tossing the grappling hook usually goes to one of the crew. And we’re glad of their help. Mitchie...

Our first big station: T...

We filter about 100 liters of water through one of these single filters to catch all the little tiny cells and particles in the water, which are the phytoplankton that contain the compound that we want to measure We spent all day today collecting water. Well, actually we spent all...