The small research team from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) have been recovering and deploying moorings in several places along our route north of the Bering Strait. One type of mooring that they have been recovering are sediment traps.
PolarTREC educator Monica Nunez and researcher Dr. Craig Tweedie discuss the many projects that UTEP is involved in across the Barrow Peninsula. Collectively, these projects are helping to advance our knowledge of terrestrial, aquatic, coastal and marine ecosystem structure and function and how these systems are responding to arctic change.
Still north of Barrow, we are deploying CTDs, bongo nets, and van Veen grabs when we have time between mooring operations, which I will get to later this week.
We began DBO-5 yesterday offshore from Barrow, AK also known as Barrow Canyon. As we finished this line, I took some pictures of the biodiversity that we have seen here. Stay tuned for DBO-5 organisms in a future blog!
As the advancement in technology continues, scientific research can take advantage of these changes. Oftentimes, researchers have to hike vast distances through some of the toughest terrain on the planet, with heavy equipment.
We'll take a litte break from science talk today to chat about life on the Healy. The Healy is a US Coast Guard vessel that is 420 feet long with a crew of about 60 to 80 people and 40 researchers at a time. This means that safety is very important.
In the early hours this morning, the Healy deployed its deep CTD cast at 73.4812 north latitude and 159.1684 west longitude. It was a frenzy of activity as everyone was looking to get some samples from such a deep sampling site.
Evie Fachon and her team from the Anderson Lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) are studying harmful algal blooms (HABs) on this expedition. As the oceans begin to warm and the sea ice melts, algae has access to more light.
