Hello, my name is Xuewei Jin, and I’m a master’s student from Shanghai Jiaotong University. What a crazy thing to be able to participate in the Maria S. Merian cruise to collect seawater samples along the Greenlandic coastline and in unsurveyed east Greenland fjords! The research expedition Polar Beast is my first international science experince and also my first experience to do some research in polar regions.

I am a marine chemistry student. My research focus is on whether barium isotopes can be used as reliable tracers to investigate the distribution of water masses in the fjords of West Greenland. I will therefore be assessing how barium concentrations change along our route and calculating the barium fluxes of different freshwater sources transported into the ocean. So I am very excited to be part of the East Greenland cruise! In this cruise, I will also be using U-Th disequilibria to investigate changes in carbon export efficiency. This will tell us about how sediment released from Arctic rivers, icebergs and glaciers affects carbon sinks in the ocean.

After living on the ship for a few days, I feel that everyone is friendly, the food is always good and I have a spacious room with a comfortable bed. I am confident that I will be able to do my job on the ship without any problems. This experience will be very memorable for me 🙂