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
english version below Der letzte Tag an Bord. Die ersten von uns haben heute am 11.12.2021 bereits das Schiff in Richtung Heimat verlassen. Der Rest tritt morgen die Rückreise oder den verdienten Urlaub in Quito, der Hauptstadt Ecuadors oder auf den nicht weit entfernten Galapagos Inseln an. Zum Abschied einer Expedition wird traditionell ein Expeditionssticker […]
The cruise is coming to an end, and there are 8 days left until we enter the port of Guayaquil. While some of the measurements on board can be read out directly and preliminary interpretations are presented during the cruise, there are also a lot of samples that can only be analyzed in the laboratory […]
It was a nice and sunny day, like most of our days on the Alkor, the research vessel of our cruise. Steady noise coming from the winch and anticipating buzz, which surrounded a group of students with safety boots and helmets, filled the air. Once the upcoming net broke the water surface and got „gehievt“ […]
German version below The stars at night are the same, the world keeps turning and (almost) everything remains the same in the rest of the world. But after a 23-day transit between the Northwestern African coast and the Central American coast, with few signs of civilization (only a few cargo-ships at a distance) and a […]