AMT Blog

Generally speaking I’m one of those people who thinks of 4:30 as the hour before finishing work for the day or, on occasion, the time in the morning that my teenage son brings his Boeing Fiesta Zetec into land outside the house and gives the engine one torturous final kick, which rattles the windows in a 50m radius before the thing finally dies along with the Rap Band in the boot.

This is  my second AMT, having participated on AMT-18 last year, doing essentially the same analysis with a colleague from PML but with a greater number of analysers. As I sit here, two/three weeks out of Falmouth waiting for the mid-day Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) sample, I take the opportunity to look though the port-hole of the Chemistry Laboratory at the sea with the sun reflecting off giving it a silver grey colour, PML and home seem like a different world.

Carolyn doing an early morning pre-run check on the nutrient analyser.

For this member of the AMT team, activity concentrates around two contrasting times of the day: in the dark hours before dawn, when the zooplankton nets are deployed; and at or around local solar noon, when optical profiles of the water column are made.

Recovering the optical profiler on a sunny Sunday

After 13 days at sea, getting up for the pre-dawn conductivity-temperature-density (CTD) trace sampler now feels almost normal.  

Sophie Richier (National Oceanographic Centre, Southampton) collecting pre-dawn water samples

Although starting so early (04:00) is a tad difficult, it’s worth it. This morning was warm (24°C) and calm and the sky was festooned with stars. The sea is warming up nicely – currently 26°C – and inviting. However, we aren’t allowed to take a dip and for good reason. Yesterday morning the ship’s Bosun, Tiny spotted a large shark. Perhaps like me it was attracted to the smell of fresh croissants and cooked bacon!

6 days of packing equipment, a sea survival course and 7 weeks at sea, what a hectic and fantastic way to start my PhD at Plymouth Marine Laboratory!

Now its day 12 on the James Cook and AMT19 is well under way. I have found my sea legs and am having the best time. I have very recently started my PhD with Jo Dixon as my main supervisor and we are locked in, together with Claire in our radio-chemical container (which now has working air conditioning – a must!).

Making great friends

I have been kindly asked to give an account of life at sea from the perspective of a PhD student and first time cruiser and was more than happy to accept. The reality of living and working in remote regions of the open ocean is just unbelievable and an experience I will never forget.

We are now about two weeks into the voyage and during this time I have developed a daily work routine I am comfortable with. My day starts at 3:45 am, unless I decide to lay in which means the alarm sounds at 4 am. Over the next two or so hours my science includes the initiation and maintenance of on deck incubations to determine the rate of nitrogen fixation at different depths.

Nitrogen fixation incubations

Right, where are we and what day is it? We had fish for dinner last night, so that was Friday. Therefore, I guess today is Saturday. Difficult to tell when you get into a routine and you are doing pretty much the same things every day of the week, starting in the dark and often finishing as it’s getting dark.

The Remote Sensing Group (RSG) at Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) process the raw satellite data received at Dundee

This is the 10th day of sampling on board the James Cook on the 19th Atlantic Meridional Transect cruise, on our way towards Chile, although that is still a huge distance away! Today we have sampled from the 25th, 26th and 27th CTD (Conductivity-Temperature-Depth) casts, the first two pre-dawn and the third at solar noon.

Well, having never written a blog before and I don’t really know what to say in this, so I shall try and give a few more personal ‘clips’ about life onboard.

Coast of the Azores

I was awoken this morning, albeit after sneaking a little ‘cat nap’ after the pre-dawn CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) sample, to my mobile phone bleeping telling me that I had a text. Rather blearily I found that quite odd as we haven’t had reception for days. A quick glance out of my port hole told me that we were nearing the Azores.