Vorbereitungen (Preparations)

A larvae lander on Polarstern's working deck

Our first task on board is to get everything ready for sampling. A lot of people don't fully realize this, but when a science party first boards a ship, the labs are just empty rooms. Every single thing you need at sea has to be brought with you – microscopes, sample jars, disposable gloves, even bungee cords and ratchet straps to hold it all in place.

The lab didn't take that long to build up – maybe 2 hours. Our larger task is preparing the lander that will carry our deep-sea plankton pumps to the Arctic seafloor. My collaborators at AWI offered two of their own landers for our use this expedition, which I was extremely grateful for. For those of you who don't know, a lander is basically a giant stainless-steel frame with floats at the top and weights at the bottom. You stick whatever samplers you want onto the frame, release it over the side of the ship, and let it sink to the seafloor. When you want the lander back, you use an acoustic signal to command it to drop the weights, and if you've done your calculations correctly, the lander will rise to the surface again. I worked with landers at sea before during my PhD, and if you want to know more, check out posts on this blog from February-March 2015.

One of the AWI technicians, Normen, is in charge of the landers. Actually, Normen is in charge of a lot – moorings, landers, various other samplers, and a team of 4. He's an incredibly skilled, organized individual, and without him, I fear a lot of research would grind to a halt. I wanted to make sure my PhD student and I helped with the lander preparations (we should be responsible for our own data, after all), so we made ourselves available on deck and stepped in when man-power was required.

This is one of the things I love about science: it's such a diverse job. Some days, I sit at a computer. Some days, I sort plankton under a microscope. And some days, I haul heavy glass floatation spheres across the deck of a ship. We worked in a team of three and actually got into a very nice rhythm: lift the float, fit the bolts into the holes, hold the float in place when one of the bolts inevitably refuses to cooperate, add washers, screw the nuts on, repeat. I worked in shirtsleeves and was warm despite the wind – it was a lot of fun.

There's still a lot left to do, but thankfully, our transit is only half 

over. Northward we steam, forward we march.