After a week of sampling and spraying, thus ended not just our part of the work but the whole spring mesocosm campaign. With our supplies packed and ready to be shipped back to the US we said goodbye to everyone at GEOMAR and gave them gifts we had brought – hats and mugs from our department.
On April 2nd, our last full day in Kiel, Diksha and Vignesh headed over to the new GEOMAR building on the east shore of the fjord to finish processing some samples that will be analyzed at a German facility. Meanwhile I went back to the old building to arrange shipments and got to see the GEOMAR team dismantling the mesocosm setup!
RS ALKOR, one of GEOMAR’s research vessels, arrived to help with this process.
After detaching the sediment traps from the bottoms of the bags, a couple guys got in the water and detached the mesocosm frames from the pier – in the above photo, a few mesocosms have already been removed.
Next, Levka and Jan tied them to a small motorboat to bring them to ALKOR in pairs (see next photo).
Finally, they were craned onto ALKOR and scientists onboard cut the used mesocosm bags off of the metal frames (don’t worry, all the growth you can see in this photo is on the outside of the bags).
With the mesocosms dismantled and everything squared away in lab, the three of us parted ways temporarily before reconvening back in Hanover.