Multicorer March Madness
- Brittany R. Jones
- Jun 2, 2017
- 2 min read
I celebrated the month of March Madness by traveling to the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Seward Marine Center to check out the MC-800 Multicorer. I flew from Fairbanks to Anchorage to attend a 2-day meeting for the North Pacific Research Board's (NPRB) Arctic Integrated Ecosystem Research Project (known as Arctic IERP -- so many acronyms!). Here's a link to the Arctic IERP website if you are interested in learning more. My Ph.D. research is part of one of the main Arctic IERP projects known as (get ready for another acronym) ASGARD or the Arctic Shelf Growth, Advection, Respiration, and Desposition rates experiment project.
After the meeting, I drove from Anchorage to Seward to the UAF Seward Marine Center and saw amazing scenery along the way!
I also had a great view of the water from the UAF apartments in Seward where I was staying for the few days I was there.
The main goal of the trip was to check out the MC-800 Multicorer, learn how to use it, and take photos for an operating manual. The MC-800 Multicorer can take 8 cores at a time! The coring tubes are 10 cm wide and 70 cm long.
As part of the ASGARD project, we are going to be taking sediment cores with the MC-800 Multicorer in the northern Bering and southern Chukchi Seas this June as well as next spring. From the cores, we will analyze sediment characteristics to answer questions such as: is the sediment made of mostly clay, silt, sand, or gravel and how much fresh organic food is available for the organisms living in the sediment? We will also be identifying, counting, and weighing the critters living in the sediment. Whole sediment cores will be used to measure the oxygen consumption of whole sediment communities, including microbes, small critters such as nematodes, and larger critters such as clams and worms. I am looking forward to the cruise to collect and process these core samples. Here are some photos of the MC-800 Multicorer from my Seward visit - it was much larger than I was expecting!
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