Busy, Busy!

So I'm somewhere approximately 3/4 of the way through what will likely be an 18 hour shift. There is a lot going on at each of our sampling locations, so I will try to explain some of the procedures, though I may not get to some of the "what are you actually looking fors" til a bit later on. Basically, we need loads of sea water at each depth, at each location. For the casts that I work on, we deploy a CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) sensor, which is fastened to a rosette. On this rosette are 24 10 L bottles that we use for sampling. Each bottle needs to be propped open prior to deployment, and then it takes a team of 3 scientists, a winch driver, a console driver, and a 'restech' (someone who manages the science operations, and we have 2 aboard) to get the rosette in and out of the water. First, the entire system is dropped into the water, taking all relevant profiles using the CTD down to 500 m. Next, on the way up, the rosette stops at various depths so we can manually control the number of bottles we retrieve at various depths, which are designed to give a good overview of the water column, as well as allowing us to focus on depths of interest. Whew, I know all of that is probably hard to digest, so I'll stop here for now!