Benthic sample

Guest

Susan,
How is the trip so far? Is the ice what was expected? The 4th graders spent yesterday exploring the photo album in computer lab here in Port Aransas and really enjoyed all the pictures.
In Mrs. Cie's pictures dated May 20th there is a benthic sample in a big bucket. We have a few questions so far...
What are the steps used for collecting this sample? (Who, what, when where, why and how?)

What were you looking for?

Thanks!
Gina

Joined: 20 Apr 2004 Posts: 7

Hi Gina!
Thanks for writing. I know this is a busy time of the school year for
you so I especially appreciate you remembering us out here in the middle
of a frozen arctic sea.

I have great help this trip in the form of a graduate student named
Craig Aumack who you may have met through the GK-12 program. I also
have the teacher, Patty Cie, who helps us process samples in addition to
her busy schedule of taking pictures and interviewing Coast Guard
members and the scientists for her online journal.

In May 2002 the ocean was frozen when we got on the ship in Nome and we
did not see any open water until we came back south through Bering
Strait six weeks later. This May we did not see any ice until we were
quite a ways north of the Bering Strait. It is a very warm spring up
here. On our trip north we saw piles of walrus laying around on the ice
floes as well as several polar bears. One of the bears was eating a
freshly killed seal.

Craig, Patty, and I have a project where we are looking at the flow of
carbon and nitrogen through the food web. We use chemical methods to
figure out who is eating who. The organisms you see in the sieve came
from mud at bottom of the ocean. We sent a piece of equipment called a
van Veen grab on a long cable all the way down to the seafloor. The
grab bit a piece of mud from the seafloor then closed to hold the mud
while we used a winch to bring it back aboard the ship. We put the mud
into a box with a mesh bottom and squirted it with water to wash away
the mud to see what animals were living there. The picture shows some
of the clams, polychaetes (sea worms), snails and other animals that
call the arctic seafloor their home.

Hope to hear from you again.

Take care,

Susan