Back to the ice and volcano

Jeremy Young, UCL, Wednesday, 27  June 2012

As the little map in the corner of the blog should be showing, we have come right back across the Norwegian Sea toward the Greenland Margin. So far in fact that this morning, much to the surprise of most of us (not including the deck officers), we woke up with ice in sight again, as we were only a kilometre or so from the ice margin, and back in the cold Arctic Water. The strategy of course is that by sailing in and out of the different water masses we can repeatedly sample the contrasting conditions and build up a dataset to rigorously investigate how far carbonate chemistry influences the ecosystem – even if our path is beginning to resemble a drunken wander.

Jan Mayen. Credit: Jeremy Young

It was nice to see the ice again though and as a bonus the sun came out as well for the first time in what seems like ages. As a further bonus we then sailed right back past Jan Mayen, the volcano we passed early on in the cruise. This time we never got closer than 30 nautical miles but it was still a massive feature on the horizon and despite the cloud very beautiful – and this time our photos have some ice for extra interest. There were less people watching this time though – probably because it was early afternoon and a lot of people were taking a nap after getting up in the early morning to close down the last bioassay experiment.

Publication – Helen Smith and colleagues from NOC were celebrating yesterday as a study of theirs was published in the prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), subscription required – and was featured in the news section of the even more prestigious journal Science. The study based on a long series of data accumulated from underway sampling on the Pride of Bilbao ferry neatly demonstrates that simplistic models of the response of coccolithophores to ocean acidification do not match the data.  You can also read a review of the article in the Sea-surface Ocean Acidification website.