Friday 6 July 2012

VLIZ Ocean Sampling Day 20th June (solstice)

Leaving from Ostend at 8am with our brand new Research vessel Simon Stevin for a visit to a well studied station in the middle of the Belgian Continental Shelf.

We arrived at stat 330 at 11:15 am UTC.

We used niskin bottles to collect our water samples at 3m below surface.

Niskin and CTD are mounted together so we were able to measure a profile for temperature, salinity, turbidity and oxygen saturation during the same deployment.

From the water samples we took 8 replicates:
  • 3 for nutrient analysis and spm
  • 1 for pigment analysis
  • 4 for metagenomic analysis
We filtered the 4 replicates for metagenomic analysis using the Sterivex 0.22µm filters and put 1000mL through each of the filters. This took about half an hour per replicate. (There is definitely room for improving the installation we used. I hope there will not be too much human DNA in the samples☺)

We stored the filters at -20°C in board of the vessel and transferred them to liquid nitrogen on arrival in the harbor.

So far so good, we can start preparing the shipping of the filters!

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