The R/V Sarmiento de Gamboa (CSIC, Spain).
The HOTMIX (Dark-ocean water mass boundaries and mixing zones as "hot-spots" of biodiversity and biogeochemical fluxes across the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern North Atlantic) project counts with first class microbial oceanographers and biogeochemists like Javier Arístegui, Pep Gasol, Pepe Álvarez-Salgado and Celia Marrasé, among very promising PhD students and postdocs and professional lab techs and engineers.
The goal of HOTMIX is to link microbial diversity to microbial activity in the deep layers of the Mediterranean Sea, focusing in the boundaries between water masses, where organic matter acumulates and "hot-spots" of microbial activity are likely to appear. Some of the scientists onboard characterize the microbial community by "omics" approaches, some characterize the largely unknown dissolved organic matter (DOM) pool by high resolution mass spectrometry and ultrafiltration approaches, some measure bacterial production with radioisotopes, some quantify bacteria by flow cytometry...
The track of the HOTMIX cruise.
Our DIADOM project partly collaborates with HOTMIX scientists to measure N2 fixation in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea. Our colleague Nauzet Hernández (see picture below) has been taken samples across the Mediterranean in a dark container placed on the fantail of the Sarmiento de Gamboa during the HOTMIX cruise.
Nauzet filtering seawater samples in the darkened container. In the ocean, light disappears at approximately 100-200 m. Thus, if your samples come from deeper layers like 500 or 1000m, you must find a dark way of filtering them to avoid disruption of the microorganisms. In good commitment with his duty, Nauzet is using a headlamp to minimize light-shocks, well done! (Picture taken from the HOTMIX blog, by Javier Arístegui).
The samples will be analyzed in July 2014 at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography in Marseille (France). Keep updated for more results!
Mar
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