September 27, 2011
I got up at 1:30 am today, because the ship arrived at a sampling station, and they do not wait for daylight to collect the data. I was helping a scientist specializing in contaminants fill bottles from the rosette. This is an instrument used to sample ocean water at different depths. The scientist was measuring the mercury content in the water. I had to hold the bottles and was not allowed to touch anything else to avoid contamination. We took the samples to the ship’s clean room, where the air is filtered and the samples do not get contaminated. I helped the scientist set up a series of filters so he could determine the quantity of both phytoplankton and mercury in the ocean water.
After getting a few more hours of sleep, I went on a Zodiac with the contaminants team. This is because the water near the ship is contaminated because the ship is made of metal, so to sample the first 20 meters of the water column, they need to take a Zodiac far away from the ship where they can collect samples. I wrote down numbers for them while they were filling bottles with water from different depths. The officer drove the boat really fast on our way back to the ship, so it was a lot of fun.—Karen Butt ’12