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: […]
“How to make a group of scientists very happy and super excited?” “Oh smoke!” On the 5th working day, we were at the location near Rainbow hydrothermal vent. From the camera attached to the multicorer, we saw very strong plume and smoke at about 2000 m depth. And this, charged a whole room of scientists […]
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 […]
Welcome to our PRINCE blog! Here it is! Our first blogpost of the MSM103 expedition. It took us a while to get things going here on the side and we have been on board for a while, so let me give you a brief summary of what happened so far: Saturday the 11th of September […]
Making oxygen (O2) magic just looks cool, but it is also fascinating and highly relevant. This analysis looks into the amount of oxygen that exists in a water sample. As we all know, oxygen is essential for most living organisms. All of them breath it in, and some of them actually release it back and […]
It is a great honor to join the scientific cruise M176/2, a part of the International GEOTRACES Program as a process study. The aim of this cruise is to conduct a detailed geochemical study of the hydrothermal plume at deep (~2500m) close to the sea floor at the Rainbow Vent in the North Atlantic. But […]
I study MSc. Biological Oceanography approaching my 3rd semester and I‘m very happy to take part in this year’s OCEAN-NETs mesocosm-experiment on the island of Gran Canaria. Since Covid-19 made a cut to most encounters with physically present scientists, I am only now reflecting upon the impressions I get from working together with real flesh-and-blood-researchers […]
Mesocosms need upkeep as much as any other equipment. Today, a handful of divers and volunteers made their way down to the pier in the sweltering heat to scrub the walls of the mesocosms clean from the inside and out. For all mesocosms to receive the same amount of light, they need to be freed […]
As the ocean is one of our biggest allies in the battle against climate change, we didn’t miss the chance to contribute to the Global Day of Climate Action. The fight against climate change is probably one of the biggest challenges of our generation. If we want to sustain a habitable planet we need to […]
Today (Sept. 22nd), it was time for our second Science Meeting. To get a first insight on how the experiment is going, we came together to discuss the first preliminary data. It was very interesting for everyone to get an overview over the current developments of all the different parameters. Important information for everybody was […]