(English below) In den vergangenen Tagen haben uns mehrmals Fragen erreicht, wie es aktuell mit der Meeresforschung weitergeht, was mit Expeditionen passiert usw. Natürlich können wir hier in diesem Blog nur Aussagen für die Kieler Meeresforschung treffen, heute noch genauer zum GEOMAR. Aber ein paar Antworten wollen geben. Dafür hole ich ein bisschen aus. Als […]
I started writing this blog post on t15, the day of the deep-water addition. I had some thoughts that I needed to write down. Yet, I never found the time to go over the post again, to make it publishable. Shortly after t15, COVID-19 hit Peru. I want to put the thoughts that I had […]
Our lives, my life, have been halted in so many ways. But nothing, not even this, is black or white; and amidst the uncertainty and heartache, life keeps unfolding before our eyes. The blood-red and golden hues of every sunset keep shining just as magnificently, the reflections of the sunlight on the ocean keep dazzling […]
Here we are again, travelling on board of RV Alkor around Europe and hunting microplastics. You all must have seen the litter that floats around in our environment: plastic bags, water bottles, and much more. If you spot those items, it could be your good deed oft he day to pick them up und dispose […]
Due to the coronavirus situation in Germany, the GAME preparation course at GEOMAR was stopped on Monday March 16th. So, instead of going on the Baltic Sea excursion, which was scheduled for Monday to Wednesday of the same week, the GAME participants stopped their activities and prepared for their journey home. By now, all external […]
A small excursion leads us to the ocean floor. In numerous sediment samples we find foraminifera, microscopic single-celled organisms with calcitic shells, attached to hard substrates on the sediment surface. These samples were taken in the Strait of Gibraltar. The cibicids shown in the picture colonize elevated substrates in these regions to collect food transported […]
I first heard about the CUSCO project when Dr. Mar Fernández-Méndez approached my advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Krause, about sending a member of his lab to participate. The project itself is investigating how changes in a certain physical process, upwelling, will affect the world’s most productive marine fishery off the coast of Peru. Upwelling, for those […]
Net hauls have so far provided valuable insights into the gelatinous zooplankton communities along our transect from the Mediterranean Sea into the North Atlantic Ocean. While our sampling sites in the Strait of Gibraltar were mostly populated by pelagic tunicates (salps), several hydromedusae (A. Liriope sp. with abundances of up to 1 ind. m-3), the […]
The weather is beautiful off the Portugal coast right now, and we’re having lots of sampling success. We just finished deploying various nets to sample microplastic particles, zooplankton, and gelatinous zooplankton. The net sampling starts with this 1.5m diameter WP3 net. The net is dropped to 100 m, and towed vertically to collect gelatinous zooplankton […]
It is 8 am in Peru, the sun is shining up in the sky and the boats are out on the water sampling. I relieve Toralf, who has been awake since 5am, from his position as watchman for the next 4 hours. Little by little the members of the KOSMOS-CUSCO team are trickling in and […]