Today, it is Dr. Victoria “Vicky” Bertics birthday, she was born July 1, 1982 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. In 2004 she received a dual Bachelor’s degree with honors in Biology and Earth Sciences from the University of California in Berkeley. She then started her PhD thesis at the University of Southern California (USC) in the […]

As mentioned in the previous blog entries, the area off Peru is very special, because parts of the water column contain low oxygen concentration or oxygen is even completely absent. I am  interested in the very small inhabitants of the water column which adapted to live in the oxygen rich as well as in the […]

Usually, when talking about greenhouse gases, one would think of carbon dioxide, which indeed is very important regarding the Earth climate and human made climate change. But there are two greenhouse gases, which are actually much stronger than carbon dioxide: Methane, with a warming potential 30 times as strong as carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide, […]

Since three weeks we are sampling the waters off Peru, which is an area we explore since almost ten years. We came here for several large scale surveys, the first one took place in 2008, then 2012, 2013, 2015. From the beginning of this cruise on, we observed a lot of plastic trash in the […]

Following this attitude we are not getting tired of collecting water. After 17 days on sea we have sampled 80 CTD casts containing roughly 19200 L of water. We usually collect the water from as deep as 2000m up to the surface. The water from each single depth gets analyzed for standard oceanographic parameters like […]

A group of three, we’re the zooplankton-and-nekton-people on board. We are interested in how environmental drivers such as oxygen, temperature or light shape the distribution of pelagic animals. “Pelagic” means “in the water column”, so most of these animals hardly see the seafloor or the ocean’s surface, but occupy the three-dimensional space in between. If […]

Photo: Christian Rohleder

Gestern haben wir erfolgreich IFM 07, den ersten von zwei Glidern, geborgen. Er ist schon ein alter Hase unter den GEOMAR Glidern und hat sehr zuverlässig viele Messfahrten im Pazifik und Atlantik absolviert. Ähnlich wie Segelflugzeuge in der Luft, schweben Glider durch die Ozeane und können unterschiedliche Parameter messen – je nachdem, welche Messgeräte man […]

In order to understand Ocean-Atmosphere exchange processes, Tim and I went off the Meteor and did a sampling of the top 10 m of the water column with the Zodiac.   We took water samples with a Niskin bottle and a pump system in order to understand the structure of the surface layer in a […]