Ships Doctor For the last 4 years I have combined my job as an emergency medicine doctor in the UK with medicine in the polar regions. First with the British Antarctic Survey, then the government of South Georgia and…

Over the past three weeks or so we have been very busy, not leaving us much time to take stock of what we’ve actually done. We are now about to start on a 4-day transit to our next sampling site,…

Yesterday morning, November 3rd, a buzz went around the ship that we were going to witness a 90% solar eclipse as we finished coring in the eastern basin of the Atlantic Ocean. We were actually all out on deck at…

I pulled some worms out of little holes in a coral yesterday. That’s not something I’ve done before. Another successful ROV dive came up on deck.  The Isis carries five bottles for collecting seawater, and my job is to process…

We have started collecting our first few cores from the deep ocean! Marine sediment cores are like ice cores, but instead of ice they are made of sediments from the sea floor. The sediments build up in successive layers over…

Besides ROVing many more things happened since we left Tenerife on the 13th. During the 5 days transit we set up things and everyone was trained in all different kinds of gear and procedures in order to carry out multiple…

If you have been checking this blog you might wonder why we have been so quiet…it is because we have been working hard on our first sampling site with 24 hour a day operations and constant sampling. For me it…

Squishing cups! Have you ever seen what happens to polystyrene cups when you sink them to 4km below the surface of the sea?  We gave friends and families a chance to find out! Because of the hydrostatic pressure of water…

Getting ready! Our first site is about 5 days away from Tenerife. Before arriving at the site needed everything to be ready, so over the past few days we have all played a hand in setting up the different labs…

Did you know that some creatures can make their skeletons out of glass? It never fails to amaze me!  My name is Kate Hendry, and I’m a research scientist at the University of Bristol who specialises in understanding the chemistry…