What is happening in the benthos?

Louis Byrne, British Oceanographic Data Centre, NOC

The seas picked up again on Saturday and unfortunately again a few members of the science crew have been feeling a bit green, however the strong winds left us on Sunday and we had our first days’ proper sunshine of the cruise, complete with the obligatory sunset photograph, but not the fabled green flash!

The focus on this cruise is on processes that are happening in the benthos – meaning the environment above and within the seabed – and how these processes change as the seabed moves from sandy sediment to muddy sediment. To do this we are investigating four sites which are characterised as sand, sandy mud, muddy sand and mud. We managed to complete the NIOZ coring of the sandy site (Site G) over Sunday night, giving our sedimentologists some sandy samples to analyse along with the muddy sediment collected from site A.

A sample of sandy sediment ready to be sliced

Natalie Hicks (SAMS) is using the samples collected by the NIOZ corer to investigate the dynamics of benthic carbon cycling, including how deep and for how long carbon is stored in the different types of marine sediments, and how much is released back into the water column. She is collecting sediment samples from the seabed to a depth of 25 cm and then slicing it into cross sections, with each slice containing sediment from a different depth. These will then be stored in a freezer until the end of the cruise, when they are taken back to the laboratories in the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) to be analysed.
 

Natalie slicing her core into cross sections

Back at SAMS, the sediments will be analysed for their porosity, which refers to how much space there is for water between the grains in the sediment. Muddy sediment has smaller grains which fit together more tightly than sandy sediment, leaving less space for water between them. This makes it easier for pockets of water deeper in the sediment to be cut off from the sea water above.

Once this happens the water in the pocket will quickly run out of oxygen (there will be more about this later in the blog), making it impossible for aerobic bacteria (they are the ones requiring oxygen for respiration) to consume the organic matter in the water. This organic matter will then be stored in the sediments, unless it is resuspended through physical water movement or animal activity.
 

A NIOZ core about to be dropped into the Celtic Sea

Apart from the porosity and grain size, the carbon (both inorganic and organic) is measured as well as the amount of the lead isotope, ²¹⁰Pb. The carbon is measured so that we can have an idea of how much biological material is buried within the different sediment types.  ²¹⁰Pb is measured as it can be used as an indicator for how often the sediment at each depth is being resuspended or accumulated. Putting all of these measurements together, can give you a better understanding of benthic carbon cycling, and how this differs between the different sediment types

All of this is important so that we can determine whether each sediment type is a source or a sink of carbon. If we can understand better how deep carbon needs to be buried in the different sediments before it is sequestered (stored permanently in the seabed sediments) and how long it will stay the sediments for, then we can know how much carbon they will absorb over time. This will help us predict how much atmospheric CO₂ may be buried in our marine sediments over a certain timescale.

The rains and rough weather returned on Sunday, however I think most of us have our sea legs now!
 

Sunset on Saturday

Deploying the large yellow torpedo!

Louis Byrne, British Oceanographic Data Centre, NOC

Thursday was an exciting day for this cruise as we were finally able to deploy Autosub3, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) which looks like a large yellow torpedo. Autosub3 was developed at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, and can be pre-programmed to survey a site for over 24 hours at a time. For this cruise the main objective of Autosub3 was to collect images of the seabed at the 4 sampling stations to look for what animals are living on the different sediment types.

This is done by pre-programming the vehicle to complete a mission in a ‘lawn mower’ style pattern where images are taken along 5km tracks at more than one per second!! Meaning thousands of images are collected in one mission. We are also able to collect information on the seabed morphology using two different scientific methods (bathymetry and sidescan) allowing the creation of biological map. This is a new method being used for monitoring of Marine protected areas and thus is at the cutting edge of science.

 Mini-STABLE deployment (photo by Richard Cooke)

Autosub was the first instrument deployed at Site G, which is approximately 26 miles west of site A. Once in the water we returned to Site A to deploy a Lander called ‘Mini-STABLE’.  Landers are pieces are frames which sit on the seabed at a given location and dependent on the needs of the study have different instruments attached. The instruments attached to this particular instrument are being used to measure sediment transport. Autosub and Mini-STABLE are two high tech pieces of equipment, and illustrate how the ocean can be investigated in different ways dependent on what you are trying to find out.

Recovery of Autosub3 (photo by Richard Cooke)

After deploying Mini-STABLE we travelled back to Site G to pick up Autosub3 after its mission.

The day of dolphins and trace elements

Louis Byrne, British Oceanographic Data Centre, NOC

Wednesday was our last day at Station A before heading to station G.  Half way through our third CTD of the day we were ambushed by a pod of common dolphins. The dolphins stayed around the boat for most of the morning and into the afternoon, with one theory being that they like the way the waves break around the ship. Aside from all that cetacean excitement some science also got squeezed in to the day’s events.

Common Dolphins around Site A in the Celtic Sea

Today was a day of trace elements, complete with their ultra-clean CTD, ultra-clean labs and ultra-tired scientists! For some background to the marine study of Iron, including why we are looking for it and why it is so hard to measure, there is an excellent summary written for this blog by Jonathan Sharples during one of the previous cruises – see post titled ‘Sampling Iron’ written on 15th November! 

Trace metal scientists at work in their ultra-clean lab.

As mentioned in Jonathan’s blog post we believe that one major source of Iron is resuspension from sediments on the continental shelf. The edge of the continental shelf can be thought of as similar to a vast desert on the edge of a gigantic cliff face, with the water depth increasing from just a few hundred metres to distances measured in kilometres as you move from the shelf edge towards the open ocean.
   

The broad, gentle pitch of the continental shelf gives way to the relatively steep continental slope.
continental shelf. 2015. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 13 April, 2015, from https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/134970/continental-shelf/285032/Origin

Currents and waves cause particles of sand and mud on the sea floor to be lifted off the seabed and mixed into the water column above, and these can then be transported off the shelf edge in giant plumes of resuspended particles. The last cruise found evidence of currents along the sea floor of the continental slope which were pulling sediment off the seabed and causing it to mix in the water column above.  

On this cruise one thing we are measuring is the concentration of Iron in the shelf sediments, which can be compared to Iron concentrations in sea water above to work out how much Iron the sediment is supplying the water column each year. As phytoplankton growth (and thus, primary productivity) is limited by Iron in 25% of the open ocean, a better understanding of the processes which supply Iron to ocean waters is important to understand how primary productivity in the open may change in response to climate change.

Charlie Thompson, Natalie Hicks and a
man in a hard hat pointing at the location of Site A.