12 June Approaching "India"!

John Allen

Now we approach the historical ocean weather station ‘India’, some two hundred or so miles south of Iceland, it seems strange that we only left Reykjavik two and a half days ago.  Leaving the Vestmanjar, the group of islands on Iceland’s southern shores of which the young island of Surtsey (born in 1963) is a part, far behind us, the night’s are just beginning to get a little more dim, although there is still only five hours between sunset and sunrise.  Tomorrow we break our regular station work to attempt to recover four moorings left attached to the seabed two years ago to collect a time series of the biological particles, mainly microscopic plants and animals , that rain down from the sunlit surface ocean to the floor of the Iceland basin some one and three quarter miles below us.  Looking like giant funnels, the sediment traps on these moorings collecting this particulate material support our quest to discover how efficiently the microscopic plants of the surface ocean lock up carbon dioxide, through photosynthesis, and the cycle of life and death transports this carbon to the ocean sediments.  In the meantime we continue to make water column measurements of temperature, salinity and a vast range of other seawater parameters every 10-30 miles along our track.  Between these ‘stations’ we also make measurements of ocean currents to depths of up to half a mile below the ship by examining the Doppler shifted scattered sound from a number of acoustic transducers in the ship’s hull.  Much has been learnt since Martin Frobisher (~ 440 years ago) and Admiral Irminger (~150 years ago) first began to note the complex currents in these northerly regions of the Atlantic Ocean, but there is still much more to learn and the spirit of ‘Discovery’ is still as keen as ever.