11 June: profiling the ocean

Day 2 of D340 and we are in the Iceland basin. We are sending instruments down to depths of nearly 2000m so that we can get a profile of what is happening in the full depth of the basin. These casts are taking a good few hours to complete so life on watch isn’t the busiest. All will change next week when we make it to the shelf edge near to Scotland, where things will be happening very quickly.

On this cruise I am looking, along with quite a big group of physical oceanographers, at temperature and salinity profiles of the ocean. These two things can tell us a lot about where water has come from and how it has changed over time. This lets us track how water moves around the oceans.

There has been a very nice, gentle introduction back into sea life with the long casts and the some beautiful calm weather. It does look like the seas might be starting to get up a bit though, but we can’t complain after the millpond that we’ve had for 2 days. Not only have we had warm, sunny, calm weather we have also had a whale sighting. As we sailed away from Iceland we had a call from the bridge for “whales on the starboard bow” we saw a few pilot whales and a lot of puffins, which were both a great sight.
So overall a brilliant start to a cruise, let’s hope it carries on.

Marie Porter  



 CTD equipment for profiling water column