Not only dinosaurs, but also marine phytoplankton and terrestrial plants were deposited and metamorphosed over time into oil. Some of that oil has been made into plastic that eventually made its way into the ocean. The basic chemical building blocks of plastic are well-known in nature, but anthropogenic long chain polymers are extremely difficult for […]

Every time we use the nets to sample the water we find a lot of interesting stuff, ranging from fish and critters to heaps of sargassum seaweed, and often a number of fragments which appear to be plastics. But are they really plastics though? Can we distinguish for example between a piece of plastic foil, […]

After the OFOS profile finished on 15 December, SONNE transited to Station 4. We arrived on 16 December at 4:00 in the morning and immediately began our sampling program. The box cores returned with rather strange sediments—fine grained carbonates that behaved somewhat like a non-Newtonian fluid. The sediment was soft when gently pressed or shaken, […]

Our 4-day transit to our next sampling station was finally finished on December 13 where we arrived on station no. 3 west of Madeira and the Canary Islands. The weather was as promised, with relatively calm seas, bright sunshine, and air temperatures approaching 20°C. The afternoon was dedicated to net-sampling. Erik Borchert from the Project […]

Even though we had a bit of a swell, we were able to sample our first station on December 8. Besides a successful deployment of the CTD/Niskin rosette, which collects water throughout the water column, the underway seawater system, and pumps that filter in situ, we also deployed the box and multi corer for sediment. […]