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Time of departure: 9:15 a.m.
There was plenty of anxious chatter rounding about the ship in its departure. Matthew shared his knowledge on dolphins, telling us that they have names for one another. Mark taught us that a nautical mile (a knot) equals 1.15 statute miles, and that a degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles. Chris spoke on the oppression of women back in his day, namely how they were considered to be “bad luck” on the vessel. Once out of the port, the ship made a lengthy stop to turn around in circles. It was adjusting its compass, like how a compass would be adjusted on a smartphone.
There has been constant motion ever since. Some of us have gotten seasick, and the majority of us took naps intermittently throughout the day.
Today was another busy day. The first of our tasks was to discuss journal articles we read the night before on microplastics- a topic we need background information on for this trip.
One of our missions is to collect microplastics- plastics that have been broken up into pieces 5mm or smaller due to UV radiation, chemical degradation, wave mechanics, and the grazing of marine life. The number of plastics that are in our oceans are staggering. The accumulated number of particles in 2014 was 15-51 trillion, or 93-236 thousand metric tons. This is only about 1% of the plastics that entered the oceans in 2010!
One of the main concerns about the large amount of plastics is that the particles will make their way through the food chain and into our bodies. An example of an organism that is consuming these particles are the Myctophid fishes, which are currently estimated to hold 12-24 thousand metric tons of plastics.
Every 12 hours, the ship will be taking in 1728L of water that will run through one of its sinks and back out into the ocean. We have a few dishes in the sink with filters able to catch the microplastics we wish to obtain. Every day at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. a few of us will take whatever particles we were able to catch in our dishes under the sink and transfer them over to petri dishes to study. In the end we will have either a table or a map showing what our findings were and where we were in our journey at that time.
We also made our first destination to do some coring and CTD- two techniques Raquel explained in her post yesterday. We attached a bag to the CTD of Styrofoam cups we individually decorated. When the CTD was brought back to the ship’s deck, the Styrofoam was noticeably smaller. The shrinking occurred due to the changes in pressure the cups endured on their way down the ocean.
Posted by: Kiel Callahan- an undergraduate at Gallaudet University.
