PICCOLO: Unlocking the Antarctic's Carbon Secrets

Karen Heywood (UEA), Tom Bell (PML) and Katrin Schmidt (University of Plymouth)

So, now that the dust has settled, and most of the team have arrived back in the UK, it’s time to take stock and see what we achieved during the PICCOLO field campaign:

• Distance travelled: 5650 nautical miles, southernmost latitude 67.59°S
• 141 profiles of ocean properties obtained from the ship, covering a vertical distance of 245 km!  That’s equivalent to Norwich to Birmingham.
• 7500 water samples collected for analysis
• 10,230 litres of seawater filtered for biogeochemistry
• 24,700 litres of seawater sampled for trace metals and isotopes
• Six glider deployments, 434 glider dives of data
• 19 seals tagged (241 profiles and counting…..)
• Two mooring recoveries and one redeployment
• Six floating sediment trap deployments
• 44 nets to collect zooplankton and krill
• One Argo float deployed (eight profiles and counting….)
• 37 optics rig deployments
• One autonomous surface vehicle deployed and recovered carrying ten sensors
• Two days of intensive on-sea-ice campaigns
• 40 drone flights
• Maximum roll only 9.66°; fastest speed over ground 18.6 knots
• -8.5℃ lowest air temperature experienced

In addition to the numbers (we scientists do love our stats!), now is also a time to reflect on the practical and human elements that have made our research campaign so successful. The Royal Research Ship Sir David Attenborough (or SDA for short) is considered one of the most advanced polar research vessels in the world. SDA had her maiden voyage to Antarctica in 2021, yet the PICCOLO research cruise was the first real test. She passed, and we successfully made extensive use of her various capabilities (see the previous blogs!).

A successful research cruise requires more than modern equipment though – it requires expertise to run, fix and support the science needs associated with that equipment. The support provided by BAS during PICCOLO has made a big difference to the outcomes of the cruise. This has come in many forms, either through practical support of the multiple gear deployments we made every day, or by the just-as-critical IT and data support that enabled well-informed decision making. Similarly, the unwavering enthusiasm and positive attitude displayed by those helping us to communicate between science and ship (before and during the cruise!) helped us to plan effectively and make reasonable demands of the ship and her crew.

We are indebted to the ship’s captain and company. There was a very good atmosphere on board among crew and scientists alike, and this was a direct consequence of the leadership and approach taken by all aboard. What a privilege the PICCOLO cruise has been, and this privilege can only spur us on to start looking at the mountains of data that have been generated! When asked about the good atmosphere onboard, everybody mentions the captain, but he just laughs and says ‘… it’s because we all enjoy being in Antarctica’.

After almost two months, beginning in mid-January 2024, the PICCOLO research cruise returned to Chile. Here, some members of the team share their thoughts on the expedition.

15 March 2024 - Prof Karen Heywood

The PICCOLO field campaign was more successful than we ever dared to hope. We were delighted to achieve all our objectives. It was exhausting, but exhilarating. On such a voyage, everyone works seven days a week for two months, many people on 12 hour shifts, so everyone deserves some time to relax now. But we’re excited to begin looking at the data together in the coming weeks and months, and we're already planning a workshop for September.

The UK’s new polar research ship is an excellent platform for multidisciplinary science. When we sailed back into port in Punta Arenas, we were thrilled to see the UK’s old polar ship, the Noosfera (formerly the RRS James Clark Ross, now owned by the Ukrainian Antarctic programme) alongside us in the dock. We were invited to look round. Many of us have sailed on that ship many times, and felt quite nostalgic about the old ship - but we came back thinking that the new ship is so much better, with more and better laboratories and enhanced scientific facilities. Old friend, new friend.

Best of all were the team of people onboard. You can have the best facilities in the world, but what makes a field campaign successful is the team of people. Our PICCOLO science team was enthusiastic, friendly, and always good humoured. There were no complaints from anyone, even when we were asking people to work overnight or to omit their own instrument from an upcoming deployment. Everyone was positive and happy to help others. Furthermore the atmosphere onboard was excellent, and all the officers and crew were helpful, interested and cheerful day and night.

On a personal level, I’ve been glad to get home, and to meet my grandson for the first time!

Embracing uncertainty

9 March - Elise Droste (Alfred Wegener Institute)

A ship is its own little cosmos. It is isolated, has its own routine, and resources are limited. Then we put a bunch of enthusiastic scientists on board with an ambitious mission, and send them to Antarctica, one of the most remote and extreme places on Earth. What could possibly go wrong?

PICCOLO has scientific objectives to fulfill, and each scientist will have additional smaller ones. Opportunities to steam to the Southern Ocean and to do research around Antarctica don’t come around every day. It could be a once in a lifetime experience. We leave families behind for months to sample seawater. We put our lives back home on hold to be here. Driven by curiosity and wonder for the natural world, we choose to be on this ship and are grateful for it, but of course, there is a pressure to come back with lots of data. Good data.

We’ve brought with us hopes and expectations for what we want to achieve. Sharing these with each other fuels the excitement and increases the ambition. However, from the moment the ship left port in Punta Arenas, all the promises we made in proposals and plans were placed into Poseidon’s hands. It rapidly becomes clear that our circle of influence, the things we have direct control over, is very small in this place. It is dwarfed by the waves, the weather, the ice, but also limited by (un)available resources on board, and people’s energy to keep going despite constant change.

What was true an hour ago, might not be true now. The plan we made only works if the sea ice cover doesn’t change too much, but the winds and currents don’t care. The plan was to go south and then north, but a storm forces us to first go north and then south. And even when everything is going swimmingly, that’s when your analysis instrument in the lab decides to misbehave and screams for hours of troubleshooting. Say goodbye to that one hour of social time you were looking forward to.

There is some irony in struggling with uncertainty as a scientist, seeing as science revolves around uncertainty and the unknown. We speak its language, understand its implications, and accept its presence, but when it comes to our own lives, how well do we really deal with it?

It’s human nature to avoid change and uncertainty. It can be stressful and unwanted. When we find ourselves on a (very sophisticated) floating piece of steel in the middle of the ocean and plans tend to change from hour to hour, we want to find a way to navigate that constant change. People on board are in constant adaptation mode. It’s a given, flexibility is key, and we soon find that creativity becomes an extremely helpful – or even necessary – skill to have.

When change is sudden and threatens work into which we’ve already invested many hours of our time, it can be painful and difficult to accept. However, the more extreme the situation, the more we are forced to see it from a larger perspective. A medivac caused us to literally instantly drop our preparations to jump onto an ice floe found half an hour previously, and strap all equipment down to steam to the other side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Within minutes, emotions leapt from almost child-like excitement with the prospect of stepping onto the Antarctic ice, accompanied by some pressure to get all the preparations done in time and the anticipation of something new and epic, into a void where there was only concern for the patient and uncertainty as to what was going to happen next.

The shift in gear in the attitude and atmosphere on board was just as swift as the shift in gear of the ship’s engines to steam full speed to the nearest base. The most important thing was to take care of each other. Science could wait. We would make a new plan soon.

In this case, the highest priority was crystal clear and easy to accept. In other, perhaps less dramatic scenarios, priorities can be more challenging to identify, and different perspectives are harder to see. But without fail, the people on board manage to do so anyway. They see change as opportunity. With it comes the attitude to make the best of the given situation. We can’t change the circumstances, but what can we do with the little things that we do have control over?

I identify this resilient attitude with life and science on board, because this is where I’ve been hyper-aware of it being put into action. Certain challenges feel intensified on a ship. We don’t have the usual people in our lives around us who we can turn and rant to about our struggles, we can’t extract ourselves from our surroundings to get away from it all, and we certainly cannot let off steam in the pub.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether these challenges are any different from the ones back on land. Do we find it easier to deal with the ones on board only because we feel like we don’t have a choice? Maybe none of it is easy at all, but we are just willing to embrace uncertainty more in some situations than in others. It is then a nice reminder that if we can embrace the uncertainties when in unpredictable seas and ice, perhaps we can embrace the uncertainties of our lives on land a bit tighter, too.

7 March - Prof Karen Heywood

We must have discovered a new force of nature – the attraction between ocean gliders and ice!  When we are piloting our gliders, we typically rely on satellite imagery to tell us how much ice is in the region.  However, what the ice looks like on the satellite images is sometimes quite different to what it looks like on the ground – or on the water I should say.

Ice – whether sea ice (frozen seawater) or icebergs (bits of glacier from the land) – is hard. Rock hard.  It moves with the waves and the currents. It doesn’t take any prisoners. Gliders are small (about as big as a person), and they have delicate antennas, sensors, wings and rudders. Every few hours, when the glider comes to the surface to communicate with the pilots back in the UK, sending back data and receiving instructions, the glider is at the mercy of the ice. Our gliders are quite smart – if they come up underneath ice, they try to call home a few times, and if they don’t get a signal (just like your mobile phone when you’re out in the wilds), they go back down and carry on with their mission.  We don’t panic if we don’t hear from the glider for a few dives – we know it’s probably under the ice and will come back eventually.  We cross our fingers and hope…

 When we want to recover the gliders back to the ship, however, we have to get the glider to the surface. That’s the most risky part of the glider’s mission. Our glider pilots liaised closely with us, aiming to have the glider at the surface as we arrived on the ship to pick it up.  Arrive too late, and the ship wastes valuable time waiting for the glider to surface.  Arrive too soon, and the glider is in a vulnerable spot for longer.

 Two of our gliders communicated regularly every few hours, every time they surfaced – until the very moment when they were told to come to the surface for recovery.  The ship arrives to collect them, but there are no calls from the gliders. I’m on the bridge coordinating the recovery, reporting on the gliders’ locations. There are large sea ice floes around the ship. The chance of the glider coming up underneath one is low, as there is mostly open water around us, but we know what gliders are like. “The gliders should be calling any minute,” I say confidently to the Captain, “they’re due at the surface now”.  A few more long minutes go by. No calls on my computer. “Probably, the gliders came up under one of those ice floes and have gone down for another dive, they’ll be another 20 minutes or so,” I tell Will, the ship’s Captain. We go quiet. Minutes tick by.  We make a cup of tea. Then, suddenly, both gliders start calling at once – they’re both at the surface!  “Just like buses,” comments one of the pilots back at UEA in our group chat. The glider GPS locations appear on my computer and I relay these to the Captain – we set off to lift the gliders out of the water and onto the ship.  Another glider encounter with ice has ended well!

 One of our gliders surfaced beautifully, on time, and was easily spotted not far from the ship ready for us to collect. But then it began to drift towards a large nearby iceberg, as if drawn by an invisible force of attraction. We held our breath. The ship’s turbulent wake pushed the glider further towards the iceberg as we inched nearer to it. Then the glider went beneath the overhanging side of the iceberg. It looked very vulnerable and small in comparison with the huge iceberg. “Don’t worry,” Captain Will said calmly, “we’ll just wait until it pops out at the other end.” And so we watched for a few minutes as it bobbed along past the iceberg and made its way into the open water.  There we safely recovered it, and breathed a big sigh of relief.

 Sometimes things don’t end so positively. Another glider had been profiling away in relatively open water. We approached during the night, located the glider, and waited for daybreak. On approaching the glider, we found that it had drifted into a patch of broken up iceberg – technically called bergy bits.  What is the chance that a glider will find its way into the only bit of ice for miles around? Well you know what those pesky gliders are like…. The bits of ice were moving up and down with the swell, and the poor little glider was being bashed between big lumps of ice. It would have been too dangerous to deploy a small boat to try to extricate the glider. As we tried to manoeuvre the ship in to get it, the glider became more difficult to see, disappearing for a few seconds, and then it was gone for good. We kept hoping it would reappear outside the patch of ice, but it didn’t. It was heart-breaking to have been so close to getting it back safely on board after its multi-month mission, only for it to get crushed on its last day. Thankfully, gliders send their data back throughout their missions, so their scientific work is done.

 In ocean science, we risk losing our instruments every time we put them into the ocean – perhaps from bad weather, waves or strong currents.  With gliders, however, we have another hazard to consider – the glider’s unerring affinity with ice in its many forms!

6 March - Lars Boehme (University of St Andrews) and Gui Bortolotto (University of Aberystwyth)

One tool PICCOLO has in its toolbox is a so-called seal tag. The real name is Satellite-Relay-Data-Logger or SRDL. We also have them in different versions on board, some have 'only' a miniature CTD (for temperature, salinity and depth), others also record fluorescence, oxygen or light levels. As the name suggests, these loggers or tags are deployed on seals.

An oceanographic measurement from the SDA can tell us a lot about that one specific location, but what does the ocean in Antarctica look like in the winter, when it is practically impossible for ships to sail in the area, and are our measurements really representative? The tagged seals spread out and provide data from places that we have not visited. The tags stay on until the next yearly moult, so we hope to get data until the end of this year. 

Lars Boehme and Gui Bortolotto are the seal scientists onboard. They had to secure multiple permits and go through ethics reviews before they could tag any animals. Tagging these seals serves two purposes: the data collected paints a picture of the oceanographic conditions in the western Weddell Sea, but also records the seal’s behaviour to understand how these charismatic animals live in this harsh environment.

Lars and Gui tagged two Southern Elephant Seals, six Crabeater Seals and 11 Weddell Seals during the PICCOLO cruise. The spread across species helps us to look at the different behaviours of these top predators in this region as they find their own niches in the ecosystem.

What kind of data do we get?

We get two types of data using the tags. We get data which describes the physical environment like temperature, salinity and oxygen, and we get information about how the animals behave, like where they go and how long and deep they dive.

The environmental data can be treated like coming from a ship as we get the information along the seal’s track from the surface of the ocean to the depths they dive to. We can then analyse it and use it in conjunction with all the other data sources we have.

The behavioural data has many different forms. The first information we get are the seal locations. While this seems to be very rudimentary data, it is very important as it can help us to distinguish hotspots for the different species and how they find their own niches or how their living space overlaps.

The future

While the PICCOLO cruise is coming to an end, the data collection will go on. The seals will send us daily updates on where they go and what they are up to. Most importantly, they will provide us with more environmental information about this interesting region of the western Weddell Sea that PICCOLO is so interested in.

5 March - Prof Karen Heywood (UEA)

One of the last activities of the PICCOLO cruise was what we called a 'supersite' – an intensive study of one location over 24 hours, to study how the ocean varies in small time and space scales. We deployed an ocean glider in one place, and a freely-floating trap nearby to collect the particles of biological matter raining out from the plankton in the surface layer. The ship performed lots of CTDs (conductivity, temperature and depth) – collecting water and measuring biogeochemical and physical properties of the seawater.  Excitingly, we also deployed an autonomous surface vessel, UEA’s AutoNaut called Caravela.  We have been looking forward to deploying Caravela for the whole cruise, so it was marvellous that we got permission from the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to send her on a mission.

Caravela is powered by waves – she has fins rather like the tail of a dolphin that move up and down with the waves and propel her forward.  All of her scientific sensors are powered by solar panels, and she is very quiet; she really is an environmentally-friendly ocean observing system for the twenty-first century.  The Captain of the ship, Will, commented during our supersite that this was the most simultaneous science he’d ever seen – three different autonomous platforms out surveying at the same time as the ship was measuring everything it could in the ocean and the atmosphere.  Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses so they complement each other.  This is probably what the future of ocean science looks like.

Piloting Caravela for the 24 hour deployment was quite a task. Although she is equipped with a collision-avoidance system, this only works for ships that are emitting a signal called AIS (automatic identification system).  Of course, icebergs don’t have AIS installed so we had to rely on the ship’s ice radar and the expertise of the officers on the bridge to change the heading of Caravela so she didn’t have too many encounters with icebergs or large sea ice floes. We were really grateful to all the officers for their skill and advice which enabled Caravela to safely complete her first Antarctic mission. We think this is the first autonomous surface vessel to be deployed in the Weddell Sea.

We named our autonomous surface vessel Caravela because it is the Portuguese word for the Portuguese man-of-war, a type of jellyfish that carries a community of organisms beneath it. Caravela was designed to carry an ocean glider, and release it at a selected time. For our Antarctic deployment, we deployed the glider from the ship. We attached a whole host of other sensors to the underside of Caravela for her to carry during her mission. It was a real joint effort with many people onboard contributing a sensor – for pH, dissolved carbon dioxide, chlorophyll and so on. Caravela’s own sensors measure the wind, air temperature and solar radiation, as well as surface temperature, saltiness and currents. Putting all these data sets together is going to be fascinating!

Laurel and Lucy: the carbon chemists' friends

28 February - Gareth Lee (UEA) and Elise Droste (Alfred Wegener Insititute)

Is it odd that scientists anthropomorphise their instruments? When you consider that we spend at least 12 hours a day with them alone in a lab container out on deck, day after day, and they just happen to have quirky behaviours (and we might be a little quirky ourselves), I think it becomes more understandable. In our case, we’re referring to Laurel and Lucy, our two instruments that measure total alkalinity and dissolved inorganic carbon. In scientific manuscripts, we call them by their serious official name: VINDTA, which stands for Versatile Instrument for the Determination of Total inorganic carbon and total Alkalinity.

On board the SDA, we (Gareth and Elise) run these instruments 24/7, each doing 12 hour shifts a day. The first thing we ask each other during our hand-overs is, “How are the girls?” Often, this question seems to be loaded with a little bit of dread and anticipation, because our VINDTAs are a little… how do I put it… temperamental. Plug-and-play instruments? Forget it. They need constant love and attention. Their manuals actually state that to operate them, you have to ‘like’ them. The more we work with them, the more aware we are of their sensitivities. Treating them with patience and gratitude is the way to go. Swearing at them only makes it worse. Yes, science is supposed to be objective, but the dark art of carbonate chemistry certainly is not.

While they’re technically fully automated, except for switching between samples, our ladies are a handful. You can spend 23 ½ hours watching the instruments intensely and the moment you leave them they create a seawater puddle all over the floor. Erratic reproducibility means hours of trouble-shooting. They also like to throw up any of their numerous ‘one-off’ errors when you least expect it and are not watching their every move.

You may think we’re exaggerating. Surely a bunch of valves and switches, driven by a PC cannot be that bad?

You’re wrong.

I mean, look at it. Fifteen pinch valves amidst a metre or two of tubing and two peristaltic pumps channelling water into two pipettes, a titration cell and a stripper to strip the gas out of solution before entering the coulometry cell. It is fraught with errors. Our VINDTAs are antique, and will only work with Windows XP, boggling the mind of our on-board IT support, who asked, “Why do scientists like to work with such old operating systems?!” This was after we asked him to help us install software on the PC from a CD…

Anyway, with the total alkalinity (TA) and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) measurements from our instruments, we can determine any of the other marine carbonate system components, including pH and the partial pressure of CO₂. During the PICCOLO expedition, we, the UEA CO₂ team, are quantifying the DIC and TA in the water column of the Southern Ocean to find out which mechanisms are important in oceanic uptake of atmospheric CO₂. We aim to determine how deep in the water column the CO₂ is stored and, therefore, for how long it is kept out of the atmosphere. Understanding how the ocean takes up atmospheric CO₂, which processes are responsible for this uptake, and where in the water column the CO₂ is stored will allow us to understand how the ocean will behave in the future.

Given that we have treated Laurel and Lucy with love during PICCOLO, we have some exciting data that – combined with the other fascinating interdisciplinary datasets collected on board – will allow us to explore processes of the carbon cycle happening in this special part of the ocean.

Outreach and research

23 February – Isabel Seguro

What do you think researchers are like? Probably, the first image that comes to your mind is someone in a white lab coat, working with colourful chemicals. Or perhaps it’s someone in front of a computer plotting some data. These scientist stereotypes mainly come from films – since most scientists carry out their work away from other people’s daily life it is hard for many to see the real variety of researchers and their roles. If we don’t challenge this stereotype, however, we risk a generation of children seeing a science career as something that they could not do because it is so niche or difficult to relate to.

Part of a researcher's work is to do outreach, and make our job open, accessible and useful for a wider audience than scientists themselves; research cruises are an excellent opportunity to show an enticing side of our work. This year, one month before getting onboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough, I visited a primary school and asked the children to form groups and draw something about Antarctica.  They could paint about what they think we do in Antarctica and/or include themselves in the painting! They loved this idea and one month later I came back and spoke with them about climate change. I brought with me some Antarctic photos from the previous expedition, which seemed to inspire all sorts of scientific questions.

I believe we are more prone to feeling we can do something if we can see somebody else doing it, especially if that person is part of our family, our gender, our race, or shares our culture or life experiences. Women in science are typically underrepresented, so I was especially pleased to see that seven-to-ten year old girls were particularly interested during the talk. We finished the activity with the kids explaining their paintings to me and I promised them that I would take the paintings with me to Antarctica, so part of them could reach the most unexplored continent!

A few weeks later, a colleague helped me to take these photos and I sent them back to the school.

The teachers said the kids loved the entire experience and they felt part of the research expedition. Hopefully, some of them will consider a career in research one day, because we bring back more than science from the cruises: we bring back stories we hope will inspire future researchers.