Tag Archives: phytoplankton
Back in the Blue Room

Keep It Going: Recycling in Phytoplankton Blooms

Dr. Adam Kustka has been wearing the same gray-and-black windbreaker for about two weeks. He doesn’t appear to sleep at all except for short naps, which consist of pulling his hood up and putting his head down on his desk in front of his computer monitor. His hands remain over the keyboard so that when […]

Read more
Hefty appetite

Sizing Up the Food Chain

The microscope room on the Palmer is just big enough for a slide preparation table and two bulky microscopes. It’s dark inside, and the microscope tabletops are designed to rock back and forth on an air cushion to counteract the ship’s rolling. As they do this, they make a deep sighing that sounds like Darth […]

Read more
Have we found MCDW in the Ross Sea?

Checking in With Our Hypotheses

We’ve been on the Palmer for 20 days, we’ve been to 49 sampling stations, taken thousands of water samples, flown three separate gliders, and started dozens of incubations. So, have we learned anything? It’s not a rude question—for decades oceanographers have been mostly unable to look at the results of their work until after they […]

Read more
Cup art

A Cupful of Smelly Gooey Phytoplankton

It was the color of the ocean from space that brought us here. We knew it was a gamble, a dogleg away from our main sampling plan. But satellites were telling us that phytoplankton were flourishing here, over deep water, where no one could explain it and no one had ever been to study it […]

Read more
Loading the light box

Going Deep With Photosynthesis

This morning was Feb. 2 for us–Groundhog Day. I looked out the window but saw no groundhogs. I didn’t even see any ground. The really odd part was that in the afternoon we crossed the International Dateline and the date turned back to February 1st. That means that when I wake up tomorrow morning, it’s […]

Read more
Two meters of sea ice

Plants That Eat Food

At 5 a.m. we came to a stop at the sea-ice edge about 10 miles north of McMurdo Station. A single emperor penguin was asleep about a quarter-mile away, its head tucked snugly out of sight. In the patch of open water our ship had created, a minke whale surfaced. Underneath the ice plain before […]

Read more
Ashley New in the Blue Room

Where Biology and Chemistry Meet

After three days of overcast skies and whitecaps, today the wind settled and the sky cleared. Sun warmed the observation deck on the bow, and stiff-winged snow petrels flittered among the waves as if impatient for the wind to return. We had steamed south about 120 miles to get some more information from an interesting […]

Read more
Filtering particles inside the Bubble

A Little Iron Goes a Long Way

We love getting questions from people reading along on our blog or in classrooms. Yesterday we heard from Shiquan at Monument School, who asked why iron makes plants grow. That’s a great question that gets right to the heart of biological oceanography, so let’s take a day and explore the answer. If you remember from […]

Read more
Flight of Antarctic petrels

How Scientists Look for the Truth

Today I toured around the work stations of each of the scientists studying Modified Circumpolar Deep Water: Drs. Josh Kohut, Chris Measures, Phoebe Lam, Angelicque White, Allen Milligan, and Adam Kustka. They’re all here because they have a hypothesis about how MCDW contributes to the summer blooms of phytoplankton that provide so much food to […]

Read more
Josh & glider

Robots under ice

Josh Kohut talks about nutrients, deep currents, and how robots will be used to scout water masses in the Ross Sea.

Read more
Skip to toolbar