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 :)