Last Thursday I, Kätchen Lachmayr, education intern here at
BIOS, was presented with the unique opportunity to venture aboard the Atlantic Explorer and
join them on a short two-day cruise to Hydrostation S and BATS.
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| Saying goodbye to BIOS |
The AE departed from BIOS at approximately 11am on
Thursday, after a safety meeting where we were instructed on where life
jackets were, how to deploy a life raft, and practicing how to put on a
survival suit. The there were a total of
22 people on this voyage, five of them were other BIOS interns: Michel Chang,
Ashley Berry, Will Halliday, and David Picton.
The first stop was Hydrostation, which took about 2 hours to get to from BIOS. Once the AE arrived at Hydrostation, a CTD (left) was lowered into the water, and down to 4,000 meters! On the outside of this contraption were about 40 jugs that open at different depths to collect the seawater. Inside one of the labs on-board there is a computer that displays the depth that the device is at, the temperature and salinity of the water. It took a total of three hours to collect all the samples. The water samples are then used in number of the different labs back at BIOS, including CDOM and biogeochemistry.
The next stop was BATS, 50 miles off the coast of Bermuda! When the AE arrived at BATS a similar operation was
conducted and the CTD was again lowered into the water to collect samples,
this time only to 1,500 meters. By the time
all the samples at BATS had been collected it was midnight. A few other samples
were collected for various labs, however I was not awake to see them. In the
morning, we began our voyage back to BIOS a six-hour cruise from BATS.
Thankfully we had calm sea during the whole trip. This was quite the experience!
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