The women studying our seas

Celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2023

By GRID-Arendal

February 13^th, 2023

In August 2022, the RV Maria S Merian, one of Germany's flagship research vessels, left Reykjavík and made for the east coast of Greenland, surveying the deep ocean, fjords, and bays along the way. The research cruise was conducted in conjunction with the ECOTIP project, which is investigating ecosystem tipping points and cascades in the Arctic seas.

GRID-Arendal's videographer, Olivia Rempel, joined the nearly month-long cruise to document life on board the vessel and the various experiments being undertaken by researchers breaking new ground in their respective fields. To celebrate the International Day for Women and Girls in Science, we're highlighting some of the researchers who were aboard the cruise, the majority of them women! Keep reading to learn more about how these impressive researchers conduct experiments and collect samples to learn more about one of the most extreme and remote environments on Earth.

Camilla and Ingrid - UiT

Camilla Svensen and Ingrid Wiedmann work for UiT - the Arctic University of Norway. Camilla is a professor in marine ecology focusing on Arctic zooplankton biodiversity, food webs and the biological carbon pump, and Ingrid is a researcher, primarily focused on vertical flux, or the links between the upper levels of the ocean and the seafloor.

Ingrid's focus in ECOTIP includes investigating the ecological links between sea ice, pelagic, and benthos in fjords and Arctic (shelf) seas, determining the downwards biomass flux in the field with short-term sediment traps, examine the role of physical drivers on the the downward flux, as well as study biological drivers, such as microalgae and zooplankton, and their influence on sinking particles.

During the cruise, they deployed their sediment traps to capture “marine snow,” or “ocean dandruff,” which are some creative terms to describe the living and dead particles that fall from the upper levels of the water column to the lower levels.

Claudia – Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon

Claudia Schmidt is a PhD student at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon with a focus on marine carbon cycling. Her research interests include the carbon cycle in arctic regions, changes in trace metal behavior near coastal regions, and the influence of meltwater on biogeochemical cycles. She worked with the chemical oceanography team aboard the Merian.

One of the samplers she used on the cruise is called a CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth). This device gets lowered into the water, and stops at different depths to take water samples. These CTD samples can tell us a lot about the environment, and are analyzed by multiple ECOTIP teams doing different research. The researchers are looking for traces of mercury, marine fungi, phytoplankton pigments, particulate matter, and eDNA.

Anna and Phoebe - Åbo Akademi University

Anna Törnroos-Remes is an associate professor at Åbo Akademi University and Phoebe Armitage’s doctoral supervisor! They are part of the ECOTIP benthic ecology team, spending busy nights sampling the seafloor. Anna and Phoebe used a piece of machinery called a box corer, which scoops up a half-metre square piece of the surface of the seafloor. The team then searches for sea creatures in the muck, sifting to make sure they don’t miss anything. What they find is usually pretty tiny, but occasionally they’ll pull up a sea star!

But instead of focusing on the individual creatures, Anna and Phoebe want to study the bigger picture. Why are these creatures where they are, and how they all link together. How might environmental change impact the distribution of these species, and what are these creatures doing to impact their environment?

The goal is to better understand how the seafloor is changing due to changes found in both ocean temperature and the amount of organic material sinking to the bottom.

Joanna – Aarhus University

Joanna Martin Davies is a PhD student at the Department of Geoscience of Aarhus University. As part of ECOTIP, she’s focused on taking sediment cores of the seafloor to better understand the past. The two types of corers she mainly used on the cruise were the smaller Rumohr core and the much larger gravity core.

While the gravity core can penetrate much deeper into the seabed, it loses the top layer of sediment, which the smaller Rumohr core can capture. By combining the data from the two cores, she and other researchers are able to get a more complete picture of an area's history. These sediment cores can tell us about past glacial extent, changes in the ocean currents and changes in the climate. Human records only extend back a few hundred years, so these cores can help us reconstruct past changes much further back.

Marja and Sigrún - DTU Aqua

Marja Koski is the project coordinator for ECOTIP and also a professor at DTU Aqua (the Danish Technical University). Aside from the high level coordination work associated with running a large project like ECOTIP, Marja’s research focuses on the role of zooplankton in foodwebs and their role in carbon sequestration.

The type of zooplankton in a particular region impacts the amount of carbon that can be sequestered, but we don’t know why a certain type of zooplankton will be more prevelant in one region and not another, so Marja is interested in finding that out.

Sigrún Jónasdóttir is a marine lipid ecologist, also at DTU Aqua. Sigrún studies a key species in the North Atlantic, a copepod that accumulates lipids (fats), and how climate change impacts the amount of fat they can accumulate, and therefore their survival. These big copepods are a keystone species, and if they were to disappear, it could lead to the entire ecosystem collapsing.

Marja and Sigrún’s research requires gathering zooplankton samples, which they do with a variety of nets that allow them to capture these creatures at different depths.

Curious to learn more about their work and the ECOTIP Arctic project? Visit the website for more information on upcoming events, including an exhibit highlighting the key findings of the ECOTIP project in Brussels alongside the EU Polar Cluster and similarly themed H2020 projects FACE-IT and CHARTER. We look forward to seeing you there!