Deck Crew!

SQF getting ready to recover the array.

Thursday was an awesome day!  I love working on the deck.  For the whole day our group was responsible for the deployment and recovery of everything put into the water.  This included all of the CTD/niskin rosette casts, the productivity array, and optical instrument casts.  The day started at 11:30pm (the night before)!  Our first cast was at midnight and it included 3 different optical instruments plus a small CTD that were attached to the same metal cage.  The optical instruments included a LISST (Laser In Situ Scattering Transmissometry), AC9, and ACplus.  These are active optical instruments which means that they analyze the optical properties of the water using laser and light rays opposed to using light from the sun.  This is why we can do the cast in the middle of the night.  We also deployed a productivity array which contained bottles of sea water spiked with the radio isotope 14C and other bottles spiked with tritiated leucine (an amino acid with the radio isotope 3H).  These bottles were placed on a line at different depths and then put into the water at sunrise and then floated around attached to buoys and an Argos transmitter.   At sunset we tracked down the array and hauled it back on deck.  The samples were then analyzed to determine the rate of CO2 uptake (primary productivity) using the 14C label and also the rate of protein synthesis /bacterial productivity using the tritiated leucine label.  

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Recovery of the productivity array.