Our station is full of high-tech equipment. And all of the machines have really fancy names.

Just to mention some of them: There are the Accuri and Cytosense, two flow cytometers to count the smallest organisms in the ocean. Just next door you can find the QuAAtro, an autoanalyzer for nutrients, or the Airica, which measures dissolved inorganic carbon.

I have to apologize to everyone who is now excited to learn more about these machines and their related methods, but this blog will not cover any of that.

Now, for everyone still reading this, we are about to go to the place, where the real science is happening…..Ahhh, I see that the excited faces are back, good good. Well then, let’s leave the lab through the door on your right.

Now please follow me for fifty meters down this small road…

…and voilà, we finally reached the place were the KOSMOS magic is happening: The boathouse!

Oh I see, now the concerned faces are back. You might be sceptical, but without the things happening here at the boathouse, there would be no KOSMOS experiment! This is the place were we create our high saline and high CO2 solutions for the additions to the mesocosms.

For the CO2 solution, we bubble a large amount of fjord water with compressed CO2 for several hours. And our way to test, wether the water is sufficiently enriched in CO2, is real down-to-earth science:

We taste it.

If the water tastes anything similar to a salty diet coke, its about right, but far from delicious…

Now the only thing left to do, is pumping it into some of our mesocosms. Here’s a link to some impressions of that: http://www.oceanblogs.org/kosmos2015/back-in-the-fjord/

Until next time,

Paul