Week 12 & 13: Trace metal team - Getting ready for sampling

After we had all completed our training we are able to use a lot of BAS facility’s and gear. We are now in the position to use for instance the gator, the skidoo and go out boating on our own. However the first boating trip we do is with Paul our trainer and who is also the person who will stay here during the winter. He will take over from Tim who has been here for almost 18 months, quite impressive! If you consider this, it is not so strange that life on base is so much different than being on board of a ship. Here the people have weekends which starts at Saturday noon until Monday morning. People go out skiing, boating to one of the island nearby, mountaineering or simply go for a walk around the so called point. Walking around the point is a great walk, just along the waters edge and after couple of minutes you don’t even see or hear the base anymore. In a particular location on the point you have a channel between the islands and you can see the icebergs floating by. Also lot of seals, sea elephants and penguins can be seen and if you are lucky some whales.

Gator time!	Around the point	Adéli penguin

The BAS people really helped us a lot with replacing the rotor of our all titanium electrical winch. We had some problems with it so we changed the complete rotor and now it seems to work great again. We spooled on 600 meters of non-metal cable to prevent our samples being contaminated with metal. Soon, we will be able to do our first sampling.
Friday from 17:00 – 18:00h there is a thing that everybody is involved in, and it is called scrub out. In fact it means that everybody helps to clean the communal areas like hovering the bar, mop the floors, clean windows and move frozen food from the freezers outside towards the freezers inside the kitchen. Hein and Patrick were grouped together with 2 others to hoover, mop and dust the radio tower. So everybody invest a little bit of time and in return you get a nice and clean base.

Preparing the winch	Patrick sampling for the first time!

At Monday January the 14th we were ready to go boating. This would be the first deployment of the new NIOZ homemade sample bottles. The design comes from our pristine 27L big volume sampler that we are using on research vessel. However we are now out in a small boat and therefore NIOZ developed some baby samplers all made from high purity plastics and titanium also to prevent any contamination from the materials we use. Iron is one of the main element we are interested in and it is quite a challenge to sample water without contamination. As iron is the 4th most abundant element in the earth’s crust solubility In seawater is extremely low. Roughly the concentration of iron in seawater is the same as one paperclip dissolved in 50.000 Olympic swimming pools…. Therefore it is essential that we work as clean as possible. To do so we use all these iron/ rusty free materials and we work in a so called cleanroom container. Inside this container air is continuously filtered over hepa filters to remove all particles and of course we wear special cleanroom clothing and gloves.

Back at the lab.	Scrub-out, Man at work!

Every morning at 8:30 there is a boat meeting which is a brief meeting about who is going to do what and which boats are available and of course if the weather will allow us to go out. The weather is fine, the searover is ready, the winch is in, we have permission to go out! This first station is really to get familiar with the winch, the boat, the bottles and each other. But at the end we collected 3 bottles with water from various depths! 

As the winch doesn’t have a counting wheel we now need to plan how to proceed, winch depth we want to sample and were to put markers on the cable. As we planned to do 12 depth per station we need at least 12 markers, but we also have various depth per site so more markers need to be placed and more and more and more…. So we spooled of the cable and marked the line, this sounds easy but however it took us more than 4 hours with the 3 of us. Far after midnight, mission completed! We are now ready for the real work, 12 depths per position/station, from the bottom to the surface.