December 8.Today was a day oflaboratory. What a day! I walked with a pair of rubber gloves that was too big and a white coat that was too small. And so, brandishing a pipette in one hand and a test tube in the other, I set about the task ofmeasure nitrate concentrationin the water that we collected yesterday from various points in the archipelago.
The reason: nitrate (nitrogen) is consumed by plant plankton, which produceschlorophylland it becomes the food of the krill, which in turn is what all the animals here eat. It is said in scientific jargon thatnitrate is the “limiting” element of plant plankton growth, because it is what these little vegetables need to grow.
From here to the end of the trip we will measure this variable every two or three days. Supposedly we should see that as nitrate decreases, chlorophyll increases. That means that the Antarctic sea, during the summer, becomes more productive because there is more light and heat from the sun. But since the goal of the Long-Term Ecological Studies (LTER) carried out in Palmer is to manipulate the environment in small quantities to see what happens (in this case, bottles of water), tomorrow what we will do is add more nitrate to the samples , to study what happens. In other words, we want to replicate in the bottle what would happen if suddenly there is a lot of phytoplankton in the sea or very little (something that could happen as a consequence of climate change). This is the way to learn how nature works. Then we will do other bolder experiments: we will addiron(which is a nutrient) to other water samples, and we’ll sit down and see what happens. And finally we will includekrill, to see what effects the little “shrimp” have on your handled water, or vice versa.
But if I have learned anything in this Antarctic lab session, it is that, in this work, each step puts one in danger of making a mistake that would ruin all the results from then on. For example, measure the very small amounts of reactive liquids and powders. If you overshoot or fall short by a picogram, if the pipette fills with air bubbles, if you write down a 0 instead of a 6 in your notebook, everything goes to the frustration; and the worst thing is that one does not realize it until the end. Laboratory work is delicate and requiresprecision and patience… Two elements that I sometimes lack.
Tomorrow we will learn to measure the concentration of chlorophyll in the water in our bottles. But the funniest thing is that we will go tohunt krill. And that’s easier said than done …
Angela Posada-Swafford
For more informationFollow Angela’s journey in “From Antarctica”
