Over there, close to the little beach, they used to float for half a year: Our ten giant test tubes. Nine painted bright orange, one black, their transparent plastic hoods reflecting the sunlight. They had become a familiar sight to the fishermen and the yacht folks. And to all the KOSMOS 2013 participants who went […]
Filtrations are fun. Well, for a short while, yes: filling up filtration bottles with a specific water volume (as large as possible to get sufficient particulate matter on your filter and as small as possible to stay in the recommended time limit of ca. 30 min per filtration, avoiding possible modifications of filtered particles), upending […]
You know what? When I was a kid I wanted to be Indiana Jones. Well, I changed my mind when I turned into a teenage (history lessons were too boring) and decided that I will be a rock star. In the meantime, I discovered rock’n’roll with a life changing experience listening to “High Voltage” from […]
Congratulations to the KOSMOS 2013 team! You did a terrific job!!!! Precisely 5 months after we first entered the Gullmarsfjord on board R/V Alkor we have crossed the finish line of what has turned out to become an amazing run. An experiment that I suspect none of us will forget so soon. It wasn’t all smooth […]
Previously on ”Das sea urchin experiment”: One month ago, a crazy Belgian scientist has added sea urchin embryos into the mesocosms. A few days later, he was surprised to see that they survived “into the wild”. Will urchin babies survive into this fierce environment? It’s been a month now. Every week, I checked into the […]
For more than 13 weeks now the plankton communities enclosed in our ten mesocosms live their own lives. They don’t know of each other and have no idea of what’s going on in the sea surrounding them. Yet, they all seem to follow the same pattern of species succession, of biomass build-up and decline. Think […]
Diatoms like it turbulent. They grow fast as long as silicate is available and sink rapidly when inorganic nutrients get exhausted. This is what you read in textbooks. Well, Coscinodiscus doesn’t seem to care about what it says about diatoms in the textbooks. The waters enclosed in our mesocosms are measurably less turbulent then the […]
About every two weeks “Dana´s Kochstudio” opens. On the menu card: POP, short for Particulate Organic Phosphorus. Analysing POP filters, resulting from sea water filtration, starts with cooking them with an organic dissolving reagent in a normal household pressure cooker. In the hot water steam of the pressure cooker temperatures higher than 100°C are reached, […]
For those enjoying the first warming rays of the sun in Kristineberg it may have escaped your notice that an historic threshold has just been crossed in Hawaii. The first records above 400 µatm have been made in Mauna Loa. Not to be outdone we have looked at some of our recent data courtesy of […]
….well….actually the temperatures are not THAT high yet, but soon. Öhm, probably. Spring is finally here, which is actually the topic I wanted to write about. Choosing that headline as introduction was just for the purpose of getting as many clicks as possible and breaking the current click-high-score 🙂 Yet, the idea is indeed worth spending […]