Saturday 19 April 2014

Foggy tracer hunting

(Thursday 17th April)

Our wee jaunt up into the Argentine Basin has been pretty successful so 
far! We have found higher concentrations of our tracer here than we have 
found throughout the rest of our cruise. Concentrations are a staggering 
0.03 fM (fM = Moles x10^-15.... so the highest concentrations we have 
found are 0.00000000000000003 Moles!).

The CTD is going down as I write this, we have have 6014 m of water 
beneath us before the sea floor! These are the deepest CTDs of the 
cruise and it takes about an 1 hour 40 minutes for the CTD to travel 
down to the bottom. The density layer where we find our tracer sits at 
about 1000 m.... but it is still interesting to send the CTD down the 
full depth and see what the other parameters are like near the seabed.

Yesterday was very foggy, with absolutely nothing to see but a wall of 
grey beyond the waves just around the ship. Today dawned bright and 
sunny.... but quite rough again. The swell is nowhere near as big as the 
other day, but we steam into it at 12 knots, which makes for a bit of a 
bumpy ride!

Highlight of the day - Hugh spotted a sei whale!

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