Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research

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Bottom sampling

For sampling of deep-sea and shallow sediments NMF maintains a diverse selection of corers, grabs and dredges. Commonly used samplers are mono-, box-, multi-, piston- or gravity-corer; furthermore, special samplers such as vibro-corer, van Veen grabs or dredges can also be made available. Requests to utilise equipment can be addressed to: Erica Koning +31 (0) 222 369 441

Multi corer

The multi corer allows simultaneous sampling of 8 or 12 tubes of approximately 25cm long sections of the top layer of the sediment, including the overlying bottom water. Because the samples from the multi corer are undisturbed they can be used for process studies.

Boxcorer

A box corer takes a large sample of the top 40cm of the sea floor, for subsampling or sieving on board. Boxes on the corer can be of different shapes and sizes, round (30cm or 50cm diameter) or rectangular. The 50cm box corer is also available with on-line video option, allowing the scientists to select the sampling site visually.

Piston corer

The piston corer consists of 6m sections of pipe with a 10cm diameter lining that can be joined together to take long cores of up to 18m. The piston corer is used mainly for research on historical processes in the sediment.

Gravity corer

The gravity corer is an alternative for piston coring, mainly used in shallow waters.

Vibro corer

A vibro corer is a hydraulically driven corer especially suitable for sampling in sandy sediments, where standard corers do not penetrate the sediment deep enough. This equipment can be made available upon request.

Van Veen grabs

Van Veen grabs are used for quick and easy sampling of sediments in shallow waters, Van Veen grabs come in a number of sizes.

Mono corer

The mono corer is a small corer that can be deployed hanging from the CTD rosette frame.

Supplementary equipment

Supplementary equipment

Supplemantary equipment such as core slicers (for multi cores) and core cutter (for piston cores).

Bottom dredges

These include a pipe dredge and a triangular dredge to sample coarse material such as rocks from the sea floor