64PE368 - Day 6
30/04/2013 11:05
Queens day 2013! In between our daily scientific work on board of the Pelagia, we had time to watch the festivities and even celebrate a little. It was a beautiful day with all the nice images from Amsterdam. The new king gave a very good first speech and I especially liked the words "elkaar bijstaan door woelig vaarwater"* as we were just sailing through somewhat rougher seas.
On this cruise, I am looking at the health and photosynthesis activity of the phytoplankton in the North Sea. And we are studying how they react to different nutrient additions and light levels. For this we use an instrument that is called a FRRF (pronounced as furf). It sends very short, microsecond pulses of blue light into a water sample, which causes the chlorophyll of the algae to fluorescence in a red/orange color. Chlorophyll is the green pigment that all algae and plants use to capture sunlight for photosynthesis. We can determine status of the algae from the amount of red/orange light that is produced. So, if you have a very active algal cell it will shine in a red/orange color; a bit like all the orange fans that were seen on TV today.
* Literally translates to "helping each other trough rough waters"
The diverse phytoplankton of the North Sea with an orange fan [Photo: Sander Asjes]