Author & Pictures: Philipp Süßle It´s dark, cold and moist. Peculiar sounds are coming from one corner of the room. The plankton wheel is spinning relentlessly. In the other corner, a glooming monitor is showing a continuous rain of particles, diving the lab into a cold light. Wanja and I are wearing thick onesies to […]
Author: Gregor Börner, Pictures: Gregor Börner & Uli Kunz As parents, we know that you love us, and we never doubt it. However, we know that there are days we let you down. We wish there were not. We wish we were able to be exactly what you need every single day. We wish we […]
Author: Wanja Böhme, Pictures: Lukas Krause It’s 08:15 at the peer, the sun has been up for three hours already. People are running around, loading boxes with bottles and canisters on Wassermann, Rita and Peterchen – the boats of the KOSMOS campaign. Every second day we drive out to sample the mesocosms. Of course, I […]
Author & Pictures: Julieta Schneider We have a vivid community at the marine research station and, as such, we like to share some delicious dinner together. Though fun and cosy, it is not an easy task to cook for 40 people! Logistics start when shopping. We need to gather volunteers, a driver, and the shopping […]
Author & Pictures: Michael Sswat “We are going for another mesocosm experiment”, this sounds quite familiar, and by now, friends and family just ask “where and how long will you go?”. This time, me and my colleauges went to Bergen in Norway for 3 months to study ocean alkalinity enhancement, a potential method to remove […]
Author: Juliane Tammen, Pictures: Juliane Tammen & Michael Sswat Is there a better way to start a 2.5 month long scientific study than using a research vessel as a cruise ship? Our 10 mesocosms needed to be transported and deployed by the research vessel Alkor. As the ship is not only able to transport mesocosms […]
In my last post, I described how we take samples from our mesocosms and how the filtration for particles inside the water is done afterwards. Now, some people may ask: Why is all this done? Would it not be enough to just filter the water one time? What are all these different filters used for […]
Throughout the past few weeks of the mesocosm experiment I have been having these recurring dreams in which I was a traveling microalga. My life as a dinoflagellate named Scrippsiella had been quite ordinary before I was collected from one of the mesocosms. Floating freely in the water column, I had been capturing photons from […]
Nutrients are an essential part of every food web. Every organism on Earth needs nutrition to build up amino acids, proteins, enzymes etc. It is necessary to maintain the integrity of every cell. In the ocean, there are three major inorganic nutrients, which are important for marine primary production, but also often limited in supply: […]
Once the mesocosm experiment sails smoothly (this rarely happens, but astonishingly, this time it’s the case à knock on wood), most of the divers can concentrate on the real life as a scientist above water in their grey labs and offices – the colorful, exciting harbor life (mentioned in the first post) becoming only a […]