What, why and how we do it – part 2

Hi! Here comes some more information about what we are doing here on the research vessel R/V Skagerak!

Elin plugging in the Aqualogger to retrieve data.
Elin plugging in the Aqualogger to retrieve data.

There is one more instrument I want to tell you about that wasn’t mentioned in the previous post about what we do here on R/V Skagerak; The Aqualogger. Apart from the other instruments, we use the Aqualogger deployed on one location and then leave it for a day or two to collect data on its own. Among other things, the Aqualogger measures the turbidity, or ”cloudiness”, in the water. Instead of doing many measurements every second like the CTD and LISST, we use it to do small bursts of measurements once every minute. It is therefore better suited for being deployed attached to buoy in the water,  and left to work for a longer period of time.

Elin, the President of the Aqualogger, has put it on the ocean floor at a depth of about 90 meters outside of a water intake. The intake has been placed there by a company that works with mariculture, growing and harvesting marine life for human use. This, however, has been a bit problematic and there are theories that this might be due to changes in the water chemistry that happen too quickly for the cultivated organisms to handle. This is where the Aqualogger comes in: by collecting data for an extended period of time it will be possible to tell if these changes occur!

To sum up, we use the CTD and the LISST to learn what happens right there and then on many different places, while The Aqualogger lets us know what happens at one place for a longer period of time. Both of these ways of collecting data are important when conducting studies both on land and in the sea.

 

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