March 11, 1 Day before heading to sea (D -1)

...or, how to build a clean room in <1 day.

To study plankton in the ocean, you have to be clean and careful. These bugs are pretty sensitive, and are not adapted to life in jugs on the back deck of a ship. It’s like trying to grow a plant out of season or in the wrong zone – even if you do everything correctly and give your plants plenty of nutrients and light, they don’t always grow.

In this case, Mark (my former boss) is interested in growing plankton and studying their use of the nutrient iron, which it turns out may be as important to these tiny floating plants as it is to us. The difficulty is, not only are plankton hard to grow, but there really isn’t all that much iron in the ocean to begin with. So again, cleanliness is key- if you want to measure iron, your lab must be iron-free. But the average steel research vessel just doesn't clean up well enough to measure iron. So what is your average iron-and-plankton obsessed oceanographer to do?

First, find a bunch of undergraduate and graduate students that can be coerced into going to sea for months at a time.

Second, assemble the necessary materials – the keys here are lots of lumber, plastic sheeting, and HEPA air filters (similar to home air filters but much larger).

Finally, release the students! A wooden frame is attached to the ship’s struts and covered with plastic sheeting. All plastic surfaces are then cleaned with water and isopropyl alcohol, and the air filters can be installed to remove particles from the air. Eric here uses a HEPA filter to demonstrate that bench-pressing is a practical skill for grad students at sea.

End Result --- a giant trace metal clean bubble.