R/V Rachel Carson

U of Maryland built a new scientific cruise. It's awesomely pretty and functional. Drs. Boynton, Kemp, Bosch, and many scientists in our school contributed their experience to build this one.

I took this picture during the "Life in the Deadzone" cruise because air condition was broken on the R/V Sharp. We went to Solomons MD to fix it.

Sediment and strange man.

Today morning, 4 Delaware University journalists (newspaper publishers?) got on the cruise to see what we are doing. Maybe they are going to report our story on their newspaper.

They took lots of pictures of our works, especially, sediment collection.

This is the picture of Evan Krappe who passionately took pictures on the wet stern. To make it worse we were collecting anoxic bottom sediment which smells like rotten eggs. I'm looking forward seeing his pictures soon.

Location:Blue Star Memorial Hwy,3,United States

Scanfish MKII

his is one of coolest (I think) oceanographic equipment. It is basically towed by a boat in any aquatic environment where we want to know water properties (i.e., oxygen, temperature, etc.).

Research vessel Sharp towed it on July 9th 2010 in the middle of Chesapeake Bay and this is a part of my new research project: Life in the Dead Zone which is funded by National Science Foundation.


It literally flies up and down in the water column and is controlled by the computer package below:


After 'scanning' the water I processed data with Sea-Bird Software which convert data into available numbers. Then, I used Surfer software to draw a following pictures.

X-axis is the latitude and y-axis is the depth of oxygen and salinity

Location:6, Hoopers Island,United States

CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth)

There are so many COOL equipment in oceanography. These are generally expensive because of high precision, toughness, pressure resist, temperature, etc.

One of most essential equipment is CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth). Maybe 1st generation of CTD mainly measure the properties but nowadays scientists use for measuring lots of properties such as oxygen, light, particle concentration, etc. depending on extra sensors you attach on CTD. Also, CTD is equipped with bottles called Niskin that allow collecting water at any depth.






The bottles and all other equipment are controlled on deck.







CTD is best friend!