Joining MSM130 are scientists from 5 continents and 9 institutions. There are several teams onboard with many of the scientists working between two teams to deliver novel interdisciplinary science. We’ll introduce these teams to you properly later, but here’s a brief overview of our work at sea (no specific order!).

First up, our physical oceanographers led by Hilde, will be helping us investigate water column properties across the E Greenland shelf, most of the day they can be found in the CTD lab preparing to run profiles and making sure our sensors are performing well.

Next we have our biologists, supervised by Emilia, who will spend much of the cruise filtering water in one of the labs onboard. In addition to looking at what lives in the water column and where, we will be looking at sedimentary records of past productivity through the Holocene to see how productivity has changed over the past few 1000 years.

In our chemistry labs, overseen by Boie, we have a team of analytical experts running some difficult-to-measure or perishable parameters at sea including ammonia, dissolved oxygen to calibrate our sensors, and ammonium.

Locked inside a big plastic bubble (more about that later), Ryan will be leading a team of chemists who, using ultra-clean laboratory techniques, will be looking at the trace elements dissolved in the ocean.

Finally, a ‘dirty’ team, often to be found on deck with mud smeared here, there and everywhere, mentored by Katharina, will be conducting coring activities onboard. Short multi-cores will get us samples from the seabed to look at modern-day biogeochemical processes. Gravity cores from the fjords and shelf will tell us about how the ocean around Greenland looked in the recent past.

After 2 days of a quite rough passage from Iceland, we’re all very happy to be in the more sheltered waters of E Greenland and grateful for a stable weather window to get stuck into our demanding work program.