What does one need to conduct a successful field study? Preparation, cooperation — and sometimes tolerance for ice-cold water. In this blog post, Christa Marandino and Dennis Booge from GEOMAR share their experiences from the ICEBERG field study in Akureyri, Iceland.
It’s Tuesday evening when we land in Akureyri – definitely a different climate here than the end of summer in Germany. That’s not all that’s different – a tiny airport, very few people, and beautiful scenery. We are about to make this place our home for the next month.
We, Dennis Booge and Christa Marandino, work at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany. Our plan in Akureyri is to perform experiments with the coastal waters to understand how different types of pollution influence the tiny organisms that live in the water here, as well as their functions.
In order to have a successful time on the ground, our work starts much earlier. We need local contacts, a place to set up our equipment, somewhere to store the samples, and most importantly, manpower.
Our resourceful partner, Karl Karlsson from One Health Iceland, organized a space for us in the local wastewater treatment plant, Nordurorka. This is a perfect home for us – not only are they amazing hosts with a spacious location, we are also right on the water with easy access to one of the waste streams we would like to test.
Our first days are spent getting to know our surroundings – where is our house, the grocery store, Nordurorka, the university? We have no car, so we definitely get our steps in – and spend a lot of time talking about our steps while walking around.
By Friday, we have visited all of the important sites, including three different grocery stores, and we found someone who graciously offered to help us with the experiments. The team at Nordurorka gave us everything we need to be comfy and successful, ranging from help with liquid nitrogen shipments to a water kettle for our warm tea.
Our contacts at the University of Akureyri, Andrés Tryggvi Jakobsson and Ásta Margrét Ásmundsdóttir, helped us buy chemicals, obtain distilled water, and provided us with freezer space for our samples. We are all set to start our experiments on Saturday.
The day starts out beautifully — it is the first day with full sunshine. The views are spectacular and our lab was running very well! We were lucky to receive help from Nicolas Martin, a post-doctoral researcher from Poitier University in France, who does research in Akureyri under a hosting agreement with the University of Akureyri. With the help of Nicolas, we were able to drive with our water canisters to fill up more than 150 liters of local water to perform our experiments.
We found a little beach near the wastewater plant that is a bit sheltered. We decided to obtain the water as the tide was going out, to avoid sampling the area where the wastewater empties into the fjord.
Sample taking in the fjord. Photo: Nicolas Martin.
One thing we did not think about very clearly – the temperature outside is about 2 degrees Celsius and we have to get into the water to get the samples, as our pump is too destructive and we cannot use it. After a little shock to the system — what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — we mastered filling the bottles.
After about 1 hour, we are back in the lab with our hundreds of liters of Icelandic fjord water and ready to start.
It takes about one hour to fill all 63 bottles. The experiments are water incubations. We have three water baths sitting outside so that our experiments are performed with natural sunlight. The baths are kept at a constant, ambient temperature via circulating fjord water through the tanks. Suffice it to say that getting our pump in the water for this was a bit of an adventure.
Dennis inserting samples of water in water baths. Photo: Christa Marandino.
We place our filled bottles in the tanks for seven days to see what happens. The bottles contain three different types of water: 1) a control which is just the fjord water; 2) fjord water spiked with one type of pollutant or wastewater; and 3) fjord water spiked with a second type of pollutant or wastewater. In our first experiment, we use the wastewater from Nordurorka, that is emptied out to the fjord, and wastewater from a Polish research station on Svalbard.
We sample 9 bottles daily, 3 from each treatment, right around midday. Since we had help from Nicolas, our first day started only a little bit later than planned, and we began our sampling routine.
We analyze on site for gases that are produced by the organisms in the water. These gases are called climate-active, because once they are made in the water they escape to the atmosphere where they form particles that build clouds. These particles, and the clouds, reflect radiation back out to space, so they help to regulate the regional energy budget.
Our hypothesis, or scientific expectation, is that the pollutants introduced to the system impact the organisms, which then has an effect on the climate-active gases. Therefore, we also sample for what organisms (and how many of them) are there.
Christa handling samples in the laboratory in Akureyri. Photo: Dennis Booge.
In addition, we sample for nutrients, organic matter, and different pollutant categories, such as metals and organic contaminants (e.g. PFAs, so-called forever chemicals). We compare the altered treatments to the control to understand if there is an influence of the pollutants.
Many of the samples need to be shipped back to Kiel or elsewhere for analysis, so we do not get the full set of results until a bit later. But we do see how our gases change right away, which gives us an idea about the effect of the pollutants. We are now in the middle of our first experiment – so there will be a few more days of work until we see the first results.
Saturday, 11 days after our arrival, is our first day off. We will use the day to sample wastewater streams from a cruise ship in the port, the MS Spitsbergen, then we will be sure to use the rest of the day wisely – hiking in the beautiful surroundings of Akureyri.
All in all, the beginning of our time here was a wonderful success – the people are friendly and helpful, the equipment works, the area is lovely, and the cold is not that bad. We look forward to the rest of our month here – and takk!
Text written by Christa Marandino and Dennis Booge (GEOMAR).
Main photo and photo of Akureyri town: Christa Marandino.
Get to know Dennis and Christa better by reading their introduction on the ICEBERG website.
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SubscribeProf. Thora Herrmann
University of Oulu
thora.herrmann@oulu.fi
Dr Élise Lépy
University of Oulu
elise.lepy@oulu.fi
Marika Ahonen
Kaskas
marika.ahonen@kaskas.fi
Innovative Community Engagement for Building Effective Resilience and Arctic Ocean Pollution-control Governance in the Context of Climate Change
ICEBERG has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and innovation funding programme under grant agreement No 101135130
