Red Sea Monitoring Cruise

On Tuesday the 18th I joined four oceanographic scientists, two technicians and a skipper aboard the Sam Rothberg Research Vessel.This cruise has collected seawater samples from various depths down to 700m

from three different stations within the Israeli owned area of the Gulf of Aquaba every month for the past nine years.

The equipment used is a carousel water sampler (niskin bottles) with an attached CTD (measures salinity temperature and density of the seawater) and a flourimeter  (measures chlorophyll a/ phytoplankton concentrations).

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 I had a few tasks on the boat but the main reason I was there was to observe and learn. Since I am currently still awaiting the return of the resident lab engineer before I can carry out the copepod experiments.

When I enquired into the trends in the chemical data they have collected, I learnt that this years phytoplankton bloom was very small due to the unusually warm winter. Unfortunately this means that the annual visiting of the whale sharks is less likely to occur this year.

This cruise is just one of many monthly monitoring programmes that are launched from the IUI and my supervisor (Amatzia Genin) is very enthusiastic about getting me involved in more of these programmes.