Day 13 - It ain't over till the fat mollusc sings

Today is all about group work for our final reports. Our groups have been allocated the projects that we are going to be writing up. Our group drew the coveted “shrimp project”, you remember all the analysis of the stomachs? Yep, that’s going to be us.

So most of today is group meetings to work out who’s going to do what, what we need to do etc. etc. The excitement of the day is the deployment of a mooring in Kongsfjorden. I’m hoping to see that, cause it should be pretty cool to see a tonne of gear hanging off a line. 

These are parts of the moorings that are going to be located around Svalbard collecting a huge amount of information about sedimentation rates, and types, at different times throughout the year. As well as other information about the water column. I think they are a pretty awesome piece of kit. 

You can't rush the deployment of a mooring, there's a lot of bits and pieces to test to ensure that it will work as planned when planned. Mostly that the mooring will be released to float back up to the surface when it is called. The silver tube below is the release, and it had to be tested a number of times at different depths to ensure that it was at least working when deployed. Whether or not it would still be working in a years time after being iced over and attacked by salt water is a different issue (though from what I can gather they tend to be pretty successful)

The old pieces of chain and wire hanging below are what will be used as an anchor for the mooring. 

Additionally, very excitingly there was a tall ship sharing the dock with us this morning. If that ain't awesome I don't know what is. 

You might also remember that we had to draw a cartoon for the death defying nutrients/acid/chlorophyll experiment. Or you may not. Either way, this is our cartoon, we were quite proud. 

Rocking the stick-figures

And here I will wrap up for the ship board blog. From now till we got off the ship it was mostly just cleaning tidying and cleaning. Nothing overly exciting, although cleaning was highly satisfying. 
Don't despair though, it ain't over till it's over! 
We've still got two weeks, one report and two exams to go. I've got a reflection to write and then it will be down to the business of identifying these creatures! Most importantly remembering their latin names, wooo! Who's with me?