Science from the ground up

There is a new science adventure in the air. Thanks to the inspiration and opportunity provided by Quixote I will be heading to Argentina in the next week to be a solo scientist on one of their yachts. We'll be sailing around the bottom of Argentina, through some Fjords (yes, Argentina has Fjiords!) and then out to the Falkland Islands, and back. It's going to take a bit over 3 weeks. You can see the details here. The purpose of my project is to look for microplastics in the water, and potentially in some fish, but we'll see about the fish. 

South Chile/Argentina and the Falklands (though we don't call them that in Argentina.. )

Serous Fjord action going on there! (thanks Google)

So, the idea of this project is that I'm coming along as a early career scientist to do some science, in some pretty remote and otherwise inaccessible parts of the world. I've been offered a berth for the duration of the voyage, the other people on the trip are from all over the world and they're here for their holidays. 
I on the other hand will be sciencing it up! And involving the other passengers wherever possible. Which should be great fun. Everything I've done in the past has involved multimillion dollar boats and thousands of dollars worth of equipment, not to mention a strong support network of experienced scientists ready and willing to help. On this trip it's almost entirely the opposite, small ship, lone scientist and whatever equipment I can rustle up and fit into my luggage. Which has involved a lot of random inventiveness, and quite a few trips to the local hardware store, and supermarket, and fishing shop, and car repair shop, and electronics shop, and supermarket again, and hardware store again. There's some sales people out there petrified of young scientists wandering around town now. 

Option a for collecting water from the surface and 5m down

At the moment I have worked with some colleagues (and long suffering relatives) to develop 3 different experiments, with different likelihoods of success depending on the weather. It's a boat, so things are going to go wrong, some things won't work, some things will go missing, and just plain bad weather could render a whole lot of ideas impossible. Hence the level of redundancies, there's back up's on back ups and piles of zip-lock bags just in-case I hit a jackpot of specimens. Because when it comes to home-made science there's nothing like a zip-lock bag and a coffee filter to get things going. 
We can collect water from different depths to about 20m and filter it for microplastics, and we've got two different ways of collecting water. 
I've also now got the ability, thanks to the awesome kit below, to investigate the stomachs of any fish who may come onboard, and see if any of them have been munching on that tastiest of food, plastics. 

And then I've put together all the general kit for testing water parameters like pH, temperature, salinity etc. So fingers crossed it'll all work! A large portion of my bag is spare batteries for everything, because apparently it can be quite hard to source batteries in the south atlantic. Funny about that!

Stay tuned! Whilst I don't know what sort of internet access I'll have whilst onboard, I am hoping to collect some awesome photos, maybe the occasional video and who knows what else. 
(in the mean time I'm going to head off and try to get all of this to fit!)