Greetings my fellow intrepid explorers! Are you as excited about the expedition as I am?! We have been tirelessly preparing for the Denman Marine Voyage for the last two years! What began as early planning and logistics quickly turned into intense ordering, prepping, and packing over the last five months! We started with a general idea about what we wanted to do – collect air and water samples over the Southern Ocean and Antarctic coast – and then had to develop a plan to do so!
Spoiler – as you’ll see in the pictures, it involves a lot of tubing! We make these “towers” (Picture 1) with tubing and pumps to pull air through the filter over the course of 24 hours while the ship is sailing! Cool, right? We will have two towers on board the Nuyina, one for ice nucleating particles (INPs) and one for DNA. Yes, the same DNA that you’ve learned about in biology! Biogenic materials like plant debris, phytoplankton, algae, and more are very efficient at acting as ice nucleating particles, so we take DNA filter samples to identify which are active in the Southern Ocean.
