Playing at wizardry

Woody and Meg have also been finding out a lot about chemistry during this trip. This involves playing around with liquids, tubes and bottles, and making pretty colours out of liquids. It’s like magic, Meg & Woody feel like wizards making brews and potions. But for Meg and Woody this is to find out about some of the properties of the water (such as how much air is in the water).

The first step is to collect the water – so we lower down lots of bottles (the Rosette) to the bottom of the sea, and then fill the bottles with water from different depths (so we can look at how much air is at different depths – usually there is a lot at the surface as the waves mix in air into the water, but less deep down in the ocean). Here are Meg & Woody helping marine science university student Stacey, to collect the water from the deep sea:

To find out how much oxygen (air) is in the water, we add different potions that attach to the oxygen and then change the water colour to shades of brown, the darker the colour the more air in the water. Here is Meg doing this in the laboratory in the ship with her safety goggles on (to protect her eyes from the potions):

Why is it important to know much oxygen is in the water?  All animals need to breathe. We breathe because we need the oxygen in air to live, animals in the sea need oxygen to live too – but most sea animals can breathe the air trapped in the water and don’t need to come to the surface to breathe. If you swim underwater you need to come up to the surface to breathe, as do whales and dolphins, but fish don't! Fish can breathe by extracting the air trapped in the water through their gills. So knowing how much oxygen is in the water is really important!

But Woody & Meg are also measuring other things dissolved in the water, like silicon (that’s what sand is made out of), nitrogen and phosphorous, these are nutrients that are also important for life in the ocean. To do this also uses potions and changes the colour of the water to pinks, yellows and blues, but using a robot machine (cooool!) – here is Woody with the potion robot:

I know it doesn’t look that much like a robot but it pumps the different potions through the tubes and does all the measurements on its own, so Woody can spend most of his time dancing to his favourite tunes on the iPod.

We only have a few days left on our cruise. In the next blog Meg & Woody will interview the ship’s captain, and describe a typical day on the ship.

It’s a bit bouncy out here with big waves, so Meg & Woody are going to have a rest for now.

Bye bye from Meg & Woody :)

Mud glorious mud

What’s at the bottom of the deep blue sea? MUD! Woody and Meg have been having A LOT of fun with the mud from the bottom of the sea, 2000m deep (200 double decker buses deep). The sea bottom is called the benthos, and to collect animals that live on the bottom of the sea we use a benthic sled (not Santa’s sled!) that is dropped very very slowly to the bottom, then towed along the bottom for over an hour, and then slowly brought back up again. Each tow takes 5 hours (half a day!) – it takes nearly 2 hours just to get the sled to the bottom of the sea! Here’s a picture of Woody & Meg with the benthic sled, and Meg helping with shovelling the mud:

The sled has a bag attached to the back of it with a fine mesh to collect all the mud and animals that are skimmed off the sea bottom. Meg and Woody’s first task is to dig the mud out of the sled and put it into buckets – this is GREAT MUDDY FUN. The mud is gooey, squidgy and oozy and feels lovely between your fingers, on your face and covering your clothes :) Here is Meg with some of her buckets of mud from the bottom of the sea:

 

Meg’s managed to keep fairly clean, unlike some of us! Hidden in the mud are lots of animals of all shapes and sizes – but mostly lots of sea stars and worms*. To find them we have to sieve all the mud, and when there are 15 large buckets of mud it takes a long time to sieve it all to find the animals! Here is Woody with some of the larger animals that he found – mostly sea stars (star fish):

But Woody’s favourite animal that he’s found is an anemone (like the animals that the clownfish Nemo lives in) – he doesn’t know what type of anemone this one is, but he’s calling it the nobbly nose anemone:

Yes, that’s a very creepy looking deep sea animal! Most of the animals on the bottom of the sea eat dead things that sink down from the surface, but this anemone is predatory and eats other deep sea animals. 

Meg & Woody say a muddy goodbye until the next update!

* and lots of forams (single celled animals with a hard 'shell' - I'll get our friend Jodie to do a guest post about forams sometime!!)