The moonlight shone on the water in
a bright streak, like a yellow brick road to the horizon. Various crew members chatted
amongst themselves as they loitered on the deck. Just a few yards away, two
scientists crouched beneath a ring of bright orange floats, making some
last-minute adjustment that nobody dared to interrupt.
With one signal to the crew and a
few frantic triple-checks, the lander was ready to go. The massive metal frame
with her crown of floats was lifted over the side of the ship, released with a
tug, and sent on her way to the deep.
The respiration lander is now in
her fourth deployment of the cruise, and she is bringing back valuable data.
The lander houses three benthic chambers – white plastic boxes that are pushed
into the seafloor. By penetrating the sediment, the chambers effectively seal
off an area of the seafloor, and we can measure the decrease in oxygen
concentration over time in this isolated area. Oxygen concentration shows us
the respiration rate, and the respiration rate shows us how active the
organisms are.
Deep-sea sediments are filled with
all sorts of organisms that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Prokaryotes,
foraminiferans, nematodes, harpacticoids, polychaetes – the list of
multisyllabic names goes on. Our job is to figure out how much carbon these
animals consume and how much oxygen they respire, then compare our numbers to
similar measurements from other areas of the ocean.
While the lander is sitting on the
sediment and the optodes are measuring away, we artificially add some carbon to
the benthic chambers. The added carbon is chemically labeled with heavy
isotopes – carbon atoms that have 13 neutrons instead of 12 – so we can find it
later and tell whose bodies it ends up in. You are what you eat, right?
Kirstin Meyer beams after a successful recovery of the respiration lander. |
The lander is a complicated piece
of equipment, and the data it collects are both rare and valuable. Standing on
the edge of the deck, watching the lander sink away in the moonlight, we can
only hope she will return to the surface again. Just a handful of samples and a
few simple numbers allow us to push back the frontiers of science, one step at
a time.
Written by: Kirstin Meyer, University of Oregon/International Research Institute of Stavanger
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