Media Category: CCE

PVC filter racks: the humblest form of filter rack.

More sharpie art (white arrows)

White arrows indicate graduate student sharpie art.

This is the data we end up with – it’s called an iron profile.

Here is where we actually filter the water, it’s also in the clean van, right across from the bottles.

Here’s all of our bottles inside the clean van! We cover all of the surfaces with plastic so that no metals can touch the bottles. Right now they have seawater in them from different depths.

Now the CTD is ready to go in the water. The ropes we are holding are called tag lines, and we use them to stabilize the CTD so it’s not swinging around and getting damaged… or hitting us in the head.

Here we are getting the Trace Metal CTD ready to deploy in the water. We have to put the gray niskin bottles on right before we put it in the water because we want to keep them as clean as possible with no metal contamination! I am in the yellow hardhat, grad student Angel Ruacho is in the black hardhat, and our leader, Kathy Barbeau, is in the red hardhat.

Here’s the deck of our ship, the R/V Sikuliaq. The green arrow is pointing to the “Trace Metal Clean Van” –it’s not really a van, but there are two rooms inside where we keep our bottles and do our filtering. The yellow arrow is pointing to our trace metal CTD. We have to keep it covered when we’re not using it so it doesn’t get dirty.

Each of the ten MOCNESS nets has a plastic ‘cod end jar’ attached to the end. These jars collect most of the organisms that get caught in the nets, and bring them back to the surface for us to sample. Four cod end jars are visible here as the grey cylinders with drainage holes and duct tape bumpers.