Here we are again, sailing, sampling, studying the ocean, and overall enjoying the adventure of living on a floating island with a diverse group of people and learning from them. Today we are working on the most northern station and ready to bring back home samples and measurements. During my second cruise and third in the NAAMES project saga, I have developed this feeling of getting familiarized to our long transect through the North Atlantic. I will expand this, last year was like driving for the first time on a new highway or being in a different country, at the beginning it’s uncertain but at the same time exciting to be in a new place. That first time I tried to be aware of different references during the trip. Different to a new highway or city, our references are not transit signs, gas stations or a grocery store; ocean scale is just a little bit bigger. Ocean references can be as big as the Gulf Stream, eddies, or even the different population of organisms living in different regions. Paradoxically, because of the ocean’s big scale, it is hard to see them. Standing outside on the ship’s deck while sailing through our transect without any information, you will see the magnificent blue ocean four weeks straight with some subtle temperature, wind and motion changes, but without noticing the whole different ocean ”worlds” we are passing by. Reading ocean characteristics is a huge task that needs a wide collection of tools from thermometers to satellites. With the collected information my colleagues on board can accurate map and unravel ocean complexity.

From a microbiologist perspective, the ocean can be an intricate universe. Microbial diversity and their interactions in the different ocean “worlds” is the main focus of my research. Analysing the correlations and links between the micro and macro scale dynamics is a challenging feature of our work, but also the most fascinating. How can these tiny but numerous creatures influence earth and its geochemical cycles? Well, for example, some ocean microbes can harvest sun light as energy source and create their own “food”, we called them photosynthetic organisms (yes, just like the plants) and most of the ocean life and the food chain rely on these hard-working organisms. As you can imagine, this crucial first step in the micro scale universe affects the organisms that graze them and also the organisms that eat these grazers and so on. We can trace this chain up to macro populations of organisms as fish or whales and analyse how the amplified disturbances of the microbial scale are affecting them. As this example of micro – macro interactions, we can find many more that seem to be science fiction, but they aren’t. For example, ocean microbes can affect cloud formation and also the transformation and sinking of atmospheric carbon into the bottom of the ocean in a global scale. In a changing planet, how microbes behave under global disturbances will dictate in great proportion the future of earth, just as they did creating an oxygen atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago.

Meanwhile, we will keep an eye close to these organisms and looking forward for our next cruise in March 2018.

Written by Luis Bolanos

Tags: NAAMES-III 2017