Hello, all!

I made it into Honolulu last Sunday, and have spent this past week getting the lay of the land at the University of Hawai’i Manoa to learn all about how the HOT team prepares for their cruises. They’ve done this a lot, roughly every month since 1988, so they were pretty much already all set for our upcoming trip leaving next Sunday, Cruise HOT 367.

The HOT team collects the same measurements every single cruise within the time series to very precise levels of detail to provide a consistent record of how the ocean changes over seasons and time. Getting to meet the team, one collecting nutrients, another oxygen, another chlorophyll, has been a really cool chance to get to put faces to each component of this amazing dataset.

Below are a few pictures I took as I spent this past week in the lab:

Grabbing the Winkler Oxygen Titration rig from the “Beach Lab,” the UH Marine Center with storage and lab space directly on Pier 34.

We brought the Winkler Oxygen Titration rig mack to the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education (C-MORE) building on main campus for calibration. Here we see two samples running: (left) neutralized and (right) acidified, showing color changing with pH to find the specific O2 concentration of seawater.

Just outside the C-MORE lab space, this extremely technical piece of equipment is critical to the HOT research mission.

To mix up 15N2 tracer for Nitrogen fixation experiments, the team pulls all oxygen out of a batch of seawater under vacuum before spiking a chilled bag with 15N2 gas and slapping to dissolve all gas.

Our first view of the R/V Kilo Moana, back from her many different projects and now waiting patiently for us to leave for HOT 367 on Sunday.

My pictures make it look like a ghost town, but know there are many people hustling just out of frame to get everything going. With so much going on to get things cruise-ready, I’ve been snapping photos in the brief moments I have without stuff happening.