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How even ideal conditions at sea can be a challenge for a research vessel. The R/V Falkor is currently stationed at 1° North and 170° West, heading North, conducting a 10-day time-series, looking at small scale mixing throughout the Equatorial Pacific. Jennifer and I have been onboard for long enough to realize that conducting science … Continued

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the news in the last, say, two decades, you will know that the temperature of the ocean is increasing.

The eDNA team’s role on the Voyage to the White Shark Café expedition is not to look for any organisms themselves, but instead to use what the organisms may have left behind to infer their presence. We collect three liter samples of seawater from different depths in the water column using the CTD rosette – a … Continued

Today’s work was a study in classic oceanography that took the team to the source of the lower-oxygen water that is the focus of the expedition—and it all came with some beautiful views. There are more and more whale sightings, and albatross are constantly skimming the surface of the waves, which remain reasonably calm. During … Continued

Our time on the R/V Falkor is nearly finished, the last samples have been collected, our equipment has been washed and dried in the afternoon sun, and the pace of work on the ship has slowed. The scientists have transitioned from the busy, physical work of deploying and recovering the CTD-Rosette, MOCNESS and ring net to … Continued

The science team continues to pore over the fire hose of data they’ve collected from CTD casts and the Moving Vessel Profiler (MVP). As they’ve begun to delineate places where upwelled deeper water seems to make it onto the continental shelf, they’ve had to constantly readjust plans in hopes of mapping out the most critical areas. In … Continued

Dr. Mak Saito, chief scientist of the Life Without Oxygen expedition, opens the daily morning meeting with good news: “The water has been really interesting and we’re ahead of schedule. I’d like to add one more CTD cast station.” With everyone’s attention, he elaborates, “The O2 in the water is lower than we expected. We … Continued

Scattered along the barren ocean floor lie uncounted hydrothermal vent sites—oases of hot, chemical-rich, life-nurturing fluids. These oases are a submarine version of Yellowstone National Park. Cold seawater in deep cracks is heated by cooling magma, becomes buoyant, and rises to the seafloor. Instead of forming a warm pond, as at Yellowstone, the hot fluid … Continued

So, we are at the halfway point of the trip already! As mentioned in my previous blog, we are off the coast of Exmouth (Western Australia) on a voyage aiming to document the biodiversity of the Ningaloo Canyons (Cape Range and Cloates). These submarine canyons are unexplored ecosystems, therefore this expedition has the potential to … Continued

Researchers in the Dry Lab are able to examine the most recent Virtual Reality simulations created from holographic photos taken in each CTD cast. With this experience, it is clear that every single drop of water in the ocean contains huge amounts of life. Microscopic organisms constantly carry out processes that maintain the atmosphere, air, food webs, and life as we … Continued