• Question: What kind of equiptment do u have/carry on the ship/boat ?? xxx

    Asked by charlie456 to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 29 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by teenie.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Hi charlie456 and teenie,

      I don’t work on a boat for my research, but some of my colleagues work on a couple of boats which drill cores of sediment from the sea bed, so they can find fossil plankton called foraminfera, which allow us to work out the tempertaure of the seas millions of years ago.

      These ships have a massive drill rig, and a hole in the bottom of the ship, so they can drill through the ship! The one pictured here is called the Joides Resolution:

      As well as the drill, the ship contains a number of laboraties for doing analysis of the cores on board ship, so they often have a lot of microscopes (for finding the plankton types), chemical equipment for dating the sediment sections to find out how old they are, and lots of simple equipment such as sieves and sinks for washing sediment and cleaning up samples.

      This website tells you more about the Joides Resolution (or “The JR” as she is called in the trade) and it’s really interesting to learn about her! There are lots of videos from the scientists on board, and knowing some of them as I have met them, I can confirm some are a bit weird 😉

      http://joidesresolution.org/

      If you were to be a scietist sailing on the JR, you would spend 8 weeks at sea, working in one of 2 shifts, which can run for 12 hours. The scientists work 24 hours a day in these shifts getting the work done, but you can learn all about that on the website videos!

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Hey charlie456,

      We can carry lots a different types of equipment on board a research ship it just depends on what we want to find out!

      I think the piece of equipment that you will always find on a research ship is a CTD profiler and it measures Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth. We throw it over board and let it sink down to the sea floor. It has lots of bottles attached to it and on its way down these bottles close at different times. This means that we are able to take measurement from the surface right to the sea floor. Its really important for us to be able to do this as it means we can understand what is going on below the surface. i have included a link for you to have a look at a CTD if your interested :

      http://cires.colorado.edu/education/outreach/interactions/gallery_science/ctd.html

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