Ah, going to sea. How awe-inspiring it can be. Some might call it romantic, the call humans have to explore the vastness of the oceans that connect us all. We have conducted quite a few cruises in our time, from short day-long jaunts just offshore to 3-month voyages transiting the entirety of the Pacific basin.
Why? In search of the underlying principles that govern marine biogeochemistry and the ocean’s role in climate, of course. And to see whales. And maybe a Mola mola.
At sea we perform a variety of measurements, from incubations with isotopically heavy tracers to directly quantify the transformations of one substrate to another to filtering vast amounts of water to extract the DNA and RNA to investigate which metabolisms are functioning at any depth. We further measure the nutrient chemistry in seawater and apply geochemical principles to understand what is going on. And sometimes measure the air itself. And maybe an intrepid lab member will conduct an experiment with marine snow particles, bringing our microfluidics setup to sea. In short, we can do so very many things at sea, limited only by our own creativity.