In recent days, we have been spending a lot of time just off the coast of Santorini. The Greek archipelago of Santorini is the second main destination of our voyage, alongside the underwater volcano Kolumbo, and the RV METEOR can be spotted here at least every few days. The archipelago consists of the crescent-shaped main […]
Christmas greetings from the FS METEOR
Christmas aboard the Meteor: for many, it is a first, and yet it is the last time that the FS METEOR will experience Christmas as a research vessel. Next year, the ship will cease research operations, and so the mood is even more festive than usual. In recent days, in addition to the work on […]
M215 (MMC-3): MULTI-MAREX returns to Santorini – Το MULTI-MAREX επιστρέφει στη Σαντορίνη
The third voyage of the German Marine Research Alliance (DAM) joint project MULTI-MAREX has officially begun. On 17 December 2025, the RV METEOR set sail from Heraklion on Crete, Greece, and will spend the next four weeks conducting scientific measurements off Santorini and near the nearby underwater volcano Kolumbo. In addition, innovative monitoring and early […]
Egg hunt!
Hello again, I hope you had a nice easter holiday if you are celebrating and that you found time to enjoy spring if you aren’t. For me this year’s easter egg hunt came early and happened onboard of Alkor. Well, at least in some way it did, except that I replaced actual eggs with tiny […]
Multinet Madness!
Fresh off RV Alkor and back in Kiel, I’m excited to share another blog post about our scientific research cruise AL630. I’d like to tell you something about one of the sampling methods that we used during the cruise. To track the daily movements of zooplankton in the water column at our station BB23 – […]
From Models to Research Cruises, an exciting journey: Eggs and larvae finding their way through the Baltic Sea!
Hello blog readers, It’s another exciting day aboard the ALKOR630 cruise! The sun is rising, and the bongo nets and water samplers are ready to go. Greetings from Station BB23—one of the most sampled and ecologically important hotspots for phytoplankton, copepods, and fish eggs/larvae. Today, we’re exploring a technique called Lagrangian particle tracking (LPT)—a powerful method for tracing the path of a water parcel in […]
AL630 successfully completed, but…
Hi readers, We have successfully completed cruise AL630 on April 16, 2025. After one day without work due to strong northwesterly winds 7-8 Beaufort, during which we entered Rönne harbor on Bornholm Island, the last 5 days of the cruise were packed with work, running continuously in 24-operations in shift work. We therefore were not […]
Flatfish!
Hello again from Alkor! We are on day 9 of our research cruise in the Baltic Sea and today we would like to tell you more about the flatfish world. But let’s start from the beginning. Have you heard about metamorphosis before? It describes the transformation of a body form and structure after hatching, just […]
AL630 now posting from the Baltic Sea!
Hello from Bornholm Basin in the central Baltic Sea! With a team of 12 scientists and 11 permanent crew, we are currently operating in Baltic waters (see Figure 1) with research vessel Alkor to improve understanding of this beautiful but also heavily impacted and rapidly changing system. For this purpose, we measure physical parameters (temperature, […]
from SO308-Geotraces G107 Blog
Catching some rays
On a summer day in the south Indian Ocean, it can seem like the sunlight supply is endless. But even on the brightest day, most of the ocean stays dark. Only the upper layer of the ocean receives enough light for phytoplankton to perform photosynthesis, a process that uses light energy to convert the inorganic […]