By Anne-Sophie Fortin As we move along the 53oN Array, we are performing “CTD casts” which consist of lowering a CTD-Rosette to the ocean floor and pulling it back up on deck. A CTD is an instrument that precisely measures the Conductivity and Temperature at every Depth. We can then compute the salinity from the […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin Nature showed its artistic talents today. After a few days in the fog, we finally had a clear sky. As the sunset painted the sky and the water in warm colours, a red half-moon rose slowly at the horizon. Gradually, the milky way illuminated the sky along with some shooting stars. All […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin August 16, 2022 After the successful calibrations performed yesterday, one of the two Gliders has been deployed today. It will be autonomous and take measurements of water properties, such as temperature, salinity, oxygen, and chlorophyll until its recovery a few days from now. Koordinaten: 52.80255, -51.597367
english version below Der letzte Tag an Bord. Die ersten von uns haben heute am 11.12.2021 bereits das Schiff in Richtung Heimat verlassen. Der Rest tritt morgen die Rückreise oder den verdienten Urlaub in Quito, der Hauptstadt Ecuadors oder auf den nicht weit entfernten Galapagos Inseln an. Zum Abschied einer Expedition wird traditionell ein Expeditionssticker […]
The cruise is coming to an end, and there are 8 days left until we enter the port of Guayaquil. While some of the measurements on board can be read out directly and preliminary interpretations are presented during the cruise, there are also a lot of samples that can only be analyzed in the laboratory […]
It was a nice and sunny day, like most of our days on the Alkor, the research vessel of our cruise. Steady noise coming from the winch and anticipating buzz, which surrounded a group of students with safety boots and helmets, filled the air. Once the upcoming net broke the water surface and got „gehievt“ […]
German version below The stars at night are the same, the world keeps turning and (almost) everything remains the same in the rest of the world. But after a 23-day transit between the Northwestern African coast and the Central American coast, with few signs of civilization (only a few cargo-ships at a distance) and a […]
“How to make a group of scientists very happy and super excited?” “Oh smoke!” On the 5th working day, we were at the location near Rainbow hydrothermal vent. From the camera attached to the multicorer, we saw very strong plume and smoke at about 2000 m depth. And this, charged a whole room of scientists […]
It is a great honor to join the scientific cruise M176/2, a part of the International GEOTRACES Program as a process study. The aim of this cruise is to conduct a detailed geochemical study of the hydrothermal plume at deep (~2500m) close to the sea floor at the Rainbow Vent in the North Atlantic. But […]
Hello, my name is Chris Galley, and I’m a geophysics PhD student from Canada assisting with the collection and processing of the ship’s acoustic-based imaging data, and mapping. These acoustic methods all measure some feature of the water column, seafloor, or sub-seafloor by releasing pressure waves (sound pings) and then studying the waves upon their […]