How do you collect samples from the ocean?

It's our first day really out at sea (in the Pacific Ocean!) and we are in the middle of processing the samples we collected from our first "station".  A station is a place in the ocean we stop to collect samples - for this trip we are planning for 30 stations, which means we will stop at least once a day.

I captured this image from my phone last night as we were passing through the Puget Sound out into the ocean.  You can see where Seattle is located (again, that's where we started) and we just west of here now, out in the ocean.  We'll try to get a map posted for you guys so you can keep track of where we are!

We got to our first station around 10:00 AM today, and dropped the CTD into the water.  The CTD is an instrument that allows us to measure how cold the ocean is, how salty it is, and how much oxygen is there at a specific depth.  For this station, we lowered the CTD down to 2500 meters, which is just over 1.5 miles deep!  The water down here was about 2 degrees Celsius, which is just above freezing.  Jade's hands got really cold holding the bottle from the deep water!

The picture above shows Leanne, Jade, and Meg collecting water from the bottles on the CTD.  The other great part about this instrument is that there are bottles on it that we can use to capture water samples from any depth we want to.  This works by leaving the bottles open when we put the CTD in, and then we can press a button on the ship and the bottle will snap shut, keeping whatever seawater was in there at the time.  Being able to tell the CTD what to do from the ship is awesome, because otherwise someone would have to swim all the way down there and close the bottle themselves!  And that would be really hard without very special equipment or a submarine because of all the pressure, so this makes it easier.

Once we have opened the bottle we want (thankfully they have numbers so we know which bottle holds water from a specific depth), we pour the water in a container to bring back into our lab on the ship.  Then we use a lot of different types of equipment to find out how much carbon is in the water, or whether we can make chemicals in it using light, etc.  For my experiments I will be mostly filtering water to bring home to Georgia where I can figure out what kinds of microorganisms (bacteria or archaea - these are tiny cells that live in the ocean that we can't see, but are very important in recycling certain chemicals for other organisms to live) are there.  Here's a couple pictures of the lab fully set up for Leanne, Bill, Feng, Meg, and Jade:

Well, back to work!  We'll update you again soon, and let us know if there's anything you want to know that we've left off!

-Bradley