51茶馆儿

Trip preparations (inaugural posting!)

Well, we have less than a week left, and we are finalizing and shipping the chemicals and equipment we will need for sampling below the sea ice in the Ross Sea. We have already shipped out several hundred pounds of gear, and more await us in storage down at McMurdo Station in Antarctica....

Going west!

After saying good bye to our new friends in Rostock/Warnemünde I was looking forward to coming back to Swedish waters, this time a bit saltier, on the west coast. There are two marine field stations on the Swedish west coast belonging to The Sven Lovén Center for Marine Sciences. Our first...

In the bloom...almost

Cyanobacterial blooms during the summer are reoccurring phenomena in the Baltic Sea. This summer we have already encountered the two main species responsible the blooms, Aphanizomenon sp. and the toxin producing Nodularia spumigena (see previous posts), but so far not in the abundance that...

In the Deep

After the brief stop in my hometown we continue our journey southward in the Baltic proper. Our first sampling site was the Landsort deep, the very deepest part of the Baltic Sea (459 meters!)  and a long-term monitoring and sampling site for various Swedish and international scientists...

The Midnight Sun and Fermented Fish

We returned from Abisko on Thursday July 9th around 10 p.m.  The next morning was very busy for the crew as we had to put the science gear back together, prepare the boat, and do local newspaper and radio interviews. Read the interview: paper Like the transect north, our...

ROAD TRIP! Watch Out Arctic Circle...the Sorcerer II Sampling Team is Coming Your Way!

After we arrived in Luleå, Jeremy, Karolina and I started packing for our road sampling trip to Lake Torneträsk, a freshwater lake located in the Arctic Circle.  Dr. Erling Norrby had contacted Dr. Christer Jonasson, the deputy director of the Abisko Scientific Research Station, to help...

Sunset at Norrbysk盲r

It was another beautiful morning in the Gulf of Bothnia as we left Härnösand. We stopped at another sampling site before meeting with a boat from Umeå Marine Research Station (UMF).  We were greeted by UMF scientist Dr. Johan Wikner and a television crew. We docked at Norrbyskär, a...

Heading north with more daylight

After spending a couple of days visiting with my family in Stockholm, I boarded a ferry boat to Blidö and rejoined the Sorcerer II crew to head north to the Bothnian Sea. Before departing, we sampled in the bay outside Dr. Norrby’s summer house. The last days of fantastic summer weather had...

The last leg of the Volvo Ocean Race, the Swedish Archipelago and the Gulf of Bothnia Sampling Transect

The morning of June 25th we left Stockholm and followed the Volvo race boats into the Baltic to watch the start of the last leg of the race to St. Petersburg. Once again there were hundreds of boats on the water to watch the start of the race. As the race began we saw someone waving to Dr....

Projects aimed at collecting big data about the ocean鈥檚 tiniest life forms continue to expand our view of the seas.

J. Craig Venter, PhD, argues scientists have 鈥渁 moral obligation to communicate what they're doing to the public,鈥� and that more studies deserve greater public criticism.

The discovery could sharpen scientists鈥� understanding of which functions are crucial for normal cells and what the many mysterious genes in these organisms are doing

The 51茶馆儿 is the recipient of three awards totaling more than $1.5M to study SARS-CoV-2 and heart disease

A new wave of research is needed to make ample use of humanity鈥檚 鈥渕ost wondrous map鈥�

U.S. researchers have been slow to perform the genetic sequencing that will help clarify the situation

He has been a fixture in San Diego science for decades

Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton announced completion of what was arguably one of the greatest advances of the modern era: the first draft sequence of the human genome.