SAMW21_team

We've teamed up with Plankton to figure out the secret ingredient in a special type of water that flows from the Southern Ocean toward the equator. This water feeds plankton all the way up to the equator, so it's important to understand what secret ingredient is making them grow happily! This secret ingredient might be some kind of trace metal, a special mix of nutrients, or some other special mix which we're hoping to identify through the experiments carried out during this cruise.

We haven't been studying microplastics on this cruise, but it is an important field! To the best of our knowledge, scientists are still trying to understand how microplastics can affect plankton. A lot of work in the field right now is developing standards and coming up with ways to measure microplastics! You can find more information from our collaborators at WHOI--specifically in Dr. Kara Lavender Law and Dr. Neel Aluru's labs.

We went through one patch of water that didn’t have large amounts of phytoplankton. However, on the way back when we passed through the same area, there was a huge bloom of the phytoplankton we were looking for. We are constantly monitoring the water by measuring backscatter, the light that’s bounced back by particles. When we went though the bloom, that value increased by 6 times. Chief scientist Barney Balch was giddy to see the bloom and we studied many other properties in that area.

This is a really exciting question that scientists on this cruise are very interested in. We're hoping that some of the data we collected on this cruise will help answer it, but answering these kinds of complicated questions takes large teams of scientists many years. The data and water we've collected on this cruise are just the first steps in that process.

Plankton don't migrate from ocean basin to ocean basin, but they do move from the surface to deeper water over the course of a day (they're usually at the surface at night and then move deeper as the sun rises). This migration is called the diel vertical migration, and is the largest migration in the world in terms of biomass!