And "Life in the Dead Zone" Cruise goes on...

The research vessel had a few technical issues this cruise, but everyone pulled together to get the job done.  On the fourth day of the cruise, we were looking for a hypoxic but not anoxic area of the bay and thought that they were at one this morning, but not so.  Turns out the CTD had not been giving correct oxygen readings and what was thought to be hypoxic turned out to be anoxic.  So reading were taken by hand and we "inched" down the bay looking for an area that was hypoxic but didn't have sulfide at the bottom.  It took a long time, and we had to redo measurements and tests because of the equipment foul up.  Ah well, just more fun in the sun and the lab.

Looks like there are more anoxic areas that expected, but not really considering the amount of runoff into the bay this year.  All that runoff brings lots and lots of nutrients into the bay which causes lots and lots of algae growth, which increases zooplankton growth, but not enough to eat it all and when all that algae dies and falls the the bottom of the bay, the bacteria uses up all the oxygen down there decomposing it.  That's not all the story though.  Cold salt water from the ocean and warm fresh water from runoff set up a density stratification that prevents oxygen from the surface from reaching the bottom of the bay.  This is called the pycnocline, and in places in the bay, it is a very sharp change in density from the bottom to the top.

One of the scientists on the cruise has designed a really cool apparatus for pulling water along a very narrow pycnocline to look at water changes in both chemistry and organisms.  Daniel Lee has designed a syringe apparatus and is testing it out.  Pretty exciting stuff.

Each day of the cruise brought new challenges and learning experiences.  Listening the scientists share their work and passion for it was truly amazing.  I feel very fortunate to have been a part of this adventure.

"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....

COSEE - Centers for Ocean Science Education Excellence

I have finally arrived.  After driving and playing at being the tourist for several days across the USA, I am finally at the Horn Point Laboratory, (HPL), in Cambridge, Maryland.  This is my first visit and I'll be here for six weeks for research and developing an educational module to go with the others already on the COSEE Coastal Trends website.  It has been an exciting week here, but, unfortunately, a rather disconnected week.  I am just recently again connected to the internet.  So I have quite a bit of catching up to do in Web Tools and my chemistry course, as well as get up to speed on all the interesting things going on in my PI's lab.  Next week, I'll be in the Chesapeake Bay, on a "cruise" helping to gather samples and data on what is going on with plankton and bacteria in the Bay.  As in the gulf, there has been quite a rise in the hypoxic area in the Bay and this has lead to some interesting observations, such as bacteria using sulfur instead of oxygen as a terminal electron acceptor.  In other words, using sulfur instead of oxygen to respire.

I'm working with Jamie Pierson, the Principle Investigator, and a graduate student and an undergraduate student. Together, we will be writing an educational module using a content management system that the IT people have written here at HPL.  So I think, in a way, it fits in a bit with the Web Tools class.  I'll be using Inkscape to bring together diagrams using pictures we take and pictures developed by the group Integration and Application Network, (IAN).  I've already learned the difference between a roster or bit map image and a vector image and how much more versatile vector images are. 

I'm excited about the coming weeks, but a bit anxious about the intermittent internet.  I'm sure it will all work out as most things do: a lot of worry over problems that don't really happen.