Lab work Oct 13 2023

Today I put my computer job at the Norwegian Polar Institute aside for some hours to become a lab worker. Why? What happened?

On scientific cruises, such as with the icebreaker Kronprins Haakon a lot of water samples are taken from different places and depths. This water is then analysed in many ways. One of the main properties of seawater is the salinity. To measure this, a salinometer is used. Some of the lab work is already done on board, some later in the lab.

Yesterday I joined a meeting where I learned about how to use a salinometer and I measured the salinity of my very first two bottles ever. Today I had the opportunity to analyse twenty more bottles – first with the help of an oceanographer, than by myself. This was my workplace:

Every measurement of the salinometer involves a lot of cleaning with tissues and flushing the system to assure that no salt crystals at the bottle or water from the previous bottle distort the result. First I had to ask everything twice, then after a while I got used to the process. It is a bit like practising an instrument:  Practising means repeating what is right.

Sometimes data is stored automatically, sometimes you use paper and pencil. Here it was the latter:

Later I will add my name in the “Analyst” field. Pretty much later. It took me two hours twenty minutes to analyse twenty bottles plus two bottles with “IAPSO standard seawater” as a reference. It takes P., another oceanographer 40 minutes for 24 bottles. Well, dear students: how much slower was I?

It was very interesting to get insights into another puzzle piece about where scientific data comes from, how it is measured and how it is processed. And so this was really part of my job as a data manager.

P.S.: I removed the bottle numbers from the photo of the data with Photoshop. I just wanted to be 100% sure not to publish any data that is not ready for publication yet. Without the bottle number there is no change to know the position, the time, the depth and then the numbers do not mean anything.