By Anne-Sophie Fortin After one week of measurements, the glider was successfully recovered today. As it is a somewhat delicate instrument, some of us took a zodiac to bring it back to the ship. The member of the expedition had to wear a survival suit in case someone would have fallen into the cold water […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin Lately, our work is mostly about the maintenance of the moored instruments of the 53oN array that are near the Labrador Shelf. The maintenance of the 53oN array consists of recovering and cleaning the moorings, refurbishing or replacing the instruments and calibrate them, and finally, deploying the mooring at the same location. […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin After mooring recovery, maintenance, and calibration it is now time for mooring deployment. The moored instruments are fixed in intervals on a very long cable as we want to measure water mass fluxes from the surface to the ocean floor. Thus, to deploy a mooring, we need to steam slowly as we […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin As we move along the 53oN Array, we are performing “CTD casts” which consist of lowering a CTD-Rosette to the ocean floor and pulling it back up on deck. A CTD is an instrument that precisely measures the Conductivity and Temperature at every Depth. We can then compute the salinity from the […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin Nature showed its artistic talents today. After a few days in the fog, we finally had a clear sky. As the sunset painted the sky and the water in warm colours, a red half-moon rose slowly at the horizon. Gradually, the milky way illuminated the sky along with some shooting stars. All […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin August 16, 2022 After the successful calibrations performed yesterday, one of the two Gliders has been deployed today. It will be autonomous and take measurements of water properties, such as temperature, salinity, oxygen, and chlorophyll until its recovery a few days from now. Koordinaten: 52.80255, -51.597367
By Anne-Sophie Fortin August 15, 2022 To measure the ocean circulation, mooring arrays have been deployed since 2014 in the Labrador Sea as part of the OSNAP program (o-snap.org) and are serviced every two years by scientific expeditions like ours. Today we successfully recovered the K8 moorings and the measurements that it took over the […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin August 14, 2022 As we transit toward the next station with a speed of about 8 knots, we are taking continuous profiles of the upper 100 meters of the ocean. To do so we use a Moving Vessel Profiler (MVP), an instrument measuring temperature and conductivity (from which salinity can be derived) […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin August 14, 2022 Today was entertaining as Paul, Félix, and Christian calibrated the buoyancy of two Gliders. Gliders are autonomous underwater vehicles using buoyancy to move around. As they can change their pitch, i.e., angle, they can glide horizontally while moving up and down the water column. Calibration of the Glider’s buoyancy […]
By Anne-Sophie Fortin August 13, 2022 Today we (purposely) throw some scientific instruments overboard, the firsts of many. In the picture, you may see Paula lowering a Hereon Drifter with a rope. A Hereon Drifter is a Lagrangian surface drifter, which means that it follows the water mass where it has been deployed, under the […]