Thursday, July 21, 2011

"Life in the Dead Zone" Cruise

I've been on a cruise before.  It was pretty awesome, we went around the Mediterranean Sea stopping in various ports.  This cruise was nothing like that, except maybe the food.  No, the food was better on what we call the LIDZ cruise.
I've never been on a research vessel before, and it was an amazing experience.  We loaded the ship at 1:00am in Cambridge, MD, July 6th, and set off up the Chesapeake Bay.
The first day was really easy for me, it was "Scanfish" day.  The Scanfish is an undulating towed vehicle that measures conductivity, temperature, oxygen, fluorescence, turbidity and depth as the boat moves through the water.  It has very high resolution and it gives scientists a real time profile of the water in the Bay.
Ginger, the lab tech from Dr. Pierson's lab (and the go-to person when you really wanted to know what or how to do something on the boat), put the Scanfish in behind the ship around 8:00am, north of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.


Watching the seagulls, pelicans and osprey from the back of the ship was a beautiful sight.  But there was trouble in paradise.  The Scanfish has technical difficulties.  With cool high-tech stuff comes not so cool high-tech problems.  The Scanfish quit monitoring, and after much struggle, the techs resorted to the old ways, stopping the boat and dropping the other CTD in and taking readings with it instead.  So, down the Bay we went, stopping and dropping the CTD every 5 miles, gathering good data, just not as easily and not as complete a profile.  Ah well, you do what you can.


More technical issues caused us to have to pump water instead of using the Niskin bottles attached to the CTD.  Not sure what the exact problem was, but it gave me an opportunity to stand very close to the edge, (properly attired in life vest) and rinse and fill several bottles of water during the day.

So what were we doing with all this water?  Me, I was filtering to determine the amount of phytoplankton and their nutrients that are in different areas and depths of the Bay.  I also collected sample bottles to be analyzed later in the lab.  We were looking at areas that haddifferent levels of oxygen.  Oxic, hypoxic and anoxic areas of the Bay exist and scientists are looking at some of the life and chemistry that is going on in them.

More to come later...gotta go wading for a scientist to measure virus counts on my hands after being in the Bay.  Exciting....

2 comments:

  1. Carol, this experience sounds amazing! Is this one of those research opportunities for in-service teachers or did you arrange through a university? Is this something you have done more than one summer? I just finished a NASA professional development conference for teachers this week and one of the main points that one of the speakers made was to always keep one foot outside of the classroom as a teacher. You are clearly embodying this philosophy through your research! I bet you have a lot of experience to draw on that is useful in your classroom during the school year.

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  2. Hi Sarah, it has been an amazing experience. The program is through COSEE Coastal Trends. They've been doing it for several years, but this is my first time with them. I agree with the speaker, spending time with actual scientists doing actual science helps me keep my perspective. It's not just about the tests, it's about stretching minds, challenging thinking, encouraging questions in students. I encourage my fellow teachers to get involved in some type of research if they can. It is refreshing.

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