64PE374 - Diary 1

And again we left for another GEOTRACES cruise. We sail back eastwards through the northern Mediterranean Sea. We left the beautiful city of Istanbul, accompanied by dolphins.

Dolpin [Photo: Micha Rijkenberg]

Some of scientists and crew were already on board in the Black Sea but we also have some new crew and scientists who boarded in Istanbul. Again we have a lot of nationalities on board, from Cape Verde, England, France, India, Israel, Italy, USA, and of course the Netherlands. And for various reasons we all want to sample the blue Mediterranean waters. The cruise track will bring us along beautiful areas, Pelagia sailed through the Dardanelles (during the night) in between the Greek islands passing Mikenos and Crete. We will also pass between the Italian mainland and Sicily and between the islands Sardinia and Corsica. On this cruise we will stop 19 times to collect water with 24 bottles from the bottom till the surface using our the ultra trace metal clean CTD frame and a normal CTD frame.

Titan in the 'clean container' [Photo: Frank Maarseveen]

In following weblogs we will explain why we sample here, what we want to measure and why this is important.