Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Phytoplankton + Observation tube

Today the rest of my field group is headed out to our field camp at Lake Frxyell.  We have around 4,000 lbs of gear that will be transported via 4 helicopters!  We are all anticipating the move, when we will really start our field work.  Sadly, I am stuck back for a while so I can work a bit in the labs with my adviser, who is scheduled  to arrive this afternoon.  I hope I can get out soon, but there has been discussion of an sadly short ~2 weeks field season for me this year... Fingers crossed that I can get out sooner.

The past few days in the lab have been busy.  I have been working with one of my teammates, Heidi, to construct phytoplankton reactors, where I can sterilely incubate one of her phytoplankton cultures at extracted from the Cotton Glacier meltwaters.  After incubation at 2 different temperatures (one ambient and one at 4 deg C), I will filter the phytoplankton culture so that I can analyze the exudates (what the algae excrete) of dissolved organic matter.  When I return to Ohio, I will be using some pretty awesome machines to examine how temperature (and in the future I will hopefully be doing one based on light intensity) affects the DOM composition.  This is just an adjunct experiment to a larger incubation Heidi has set up to look at a bunch of other factors of DOM excretion.  For those incubations, Heidi will be looking at some of the more biologic aspects of the DOM formation and I will additionally be analyzing those samples for lipid content, masses of compounds, protein content, etc.
 The finished reactors growing away.  The glass tubes that allow for gas exchange are capped with filters that will prevent bacteria from entering the system.

My group was actually supposed to head out yesterday (minus me), but because of busy helo schedules, they couldn’t get out till today.  However, that meant yesterday was a slightly slower day in the lab, which was a welcomed break from the usual hustle and bustle.  We took an hour or so in the afternoon to visit the observation tube (Ob Tube) out on the sea ice.  On the way we spotted two giant seals!  They were happily napping on the ice. 

 Seal nap

Thin ice near the ob tube
 
 The Ob Tube was literally just that: a metal tube going down through the sea ice.  At the bottom of the tube there was a small chamber with windows (just big enough for two average sized people) so you could see out to the ocean.  The most striking feature that we saw were the colors of the ice.  The sun shining down on the ice surfaces causes the underside to brilliantly glow in shades of yellow and green.  The ice/water boundary is actually covered in delicate ice crystals.  As you move down below the ice, the light rapidly dissipates and the ocean just looks black.  When I first got down into the observation chamber, there was an entire school of fish hanging out near the tube, which appeared as little sparkly specks.  We actually saw a seal zip by us as we were sitting in the tube.  Pictures were difficult since it was rather dark and the glass and water tend to distort the image the camera captures, but I managed to take a couple of the ice.
 
 
Christine, on her way down into the Ob tube!

Hellooooo down there!!! -- Mike and I looking down at Christine 
(Picture courtesy of Christine Foreman, Thanks!)

Ice Crystals!

The bottom of the sea ice

A couple art-sey ob tube pics:
Mike leaving the Ob Tube!

Looking up from within the Ob tube

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