GREEN VISIONS - GREEN IDEAS

Special: Follow us on the Alkor, a research vessel

• Green Alsion, Denmark

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Follow us on the research vessel Alkor
We spent a week on a research vessel, following several experiments to sample and detect plastic particles of micrometer and nanometer size in the western Baltic Sea. During this time, we talked to the scientists on board and we give you some insights to live on board a research vessel.
You can use the markers to jump to the different parts of this podcast.
A transcript in English is provided and you find one in German and Danish here.
DE:
Folgen Sie uns auf das Forschungsschiff Alkor
Wir haben eine Woche auf einem Forschungsschiff verbracht und mehrere Experimente zur Beprobung und zum Nachweis von Plastikpartikeln im Mikrometer- und Nanometerbereich in der westlichen Ostsee verfolgt. Während dieser Zeit haben wir mit den Wissenschaftlern an Bord gesprochen und geben Ihnen einige Einblicke in das Leben an Bord eines Forschungsschiffes.
Sie können die Markierungen verwenden, um zu den verschiedenen Teilen dieses Podcasts zu springen.
DK: 
Følg os på forskningsskibet Alkor
Vi tilbragte en uge på et forskningsskib, hvor vi fulgte flere eksperimenter med at indsamle og opdage plastpartikler i mikrometer- og nanometerstørrelse i den vestlige del af Østersøen. I løbet af denne tid talte vi med forskerne om bord, og vi giver dig et indblik i livet om bord på et forskningsskib.
Du kan bruge markørerne til at springe til de forskellige dele af denne podcast.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Follow our project PlastTrack on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/94159517/
and under https://PlastTrack.eu

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E-Mail: greenalsion@alsion.dk
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The scientific ship Alkor and life on bord

K: Welcome to a special edition on our research voyage in the coastal waters of Northern Germany and Eastern Denmark. The ship is called ALKOR and belongs to the German Ministry of Education and Research. The ship is operated by GEOMAR, Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, and that's where we set off this morning. I will talk to some scientists, and we introduce you to life on board and the problematic of micro and nano plastic that it poses in our coastal waters.

As always, we are very grateful for the support of AllGoodSpeakers.com who help us a great deal to make these podcasts possible. And today I would also like to thank Interreg Deutschland-Danmark for their support of the PlastTrack project. Without them we would not be on this ship today.

I introduce you now to the ship Alkor on which we are right now, and I have as a special guest of us today Jonas Silva Moreira. He is the second mate on board of this research vessel. Welcome Jonas, and please tell us a little bit about yourself.

J: Hi, I'm Jonas. As you mentioned before, I am the second mate here on Alkor. Sometimes, I am also the chief mate. That depends on my colleague when he goes to vacation.

K: So now you're here on the Alkor, and this is very special. What do you think? What makes the difference between a research vessel and a cargo vessel?

J: Oh, it is a huge difference. First of all, every new voyage, we have new scientists on board. So you have a lot of people working on this vessel, a lot of different people, and also from different nations. And the work itself, it's quite different for us, as nautical officer. It's much more about the handling of the vessel than the paperwork on a general cargo ship. We also have paperwork, a lot of paperwork, but the dream to sail a vessel to handle a vessel, it's much more fulfilled here on this kind of ship.

K: Well, that's very good to hear. And yes, you have a lot of laboratories here. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about this special ship.

J: We have, four different laboratories. We have a wet lab, a dry lab, a chemical lab, and a cooling lab. It's about 42 square meters, the dry lab and 28 square meter of the wet lab, nine square meters for the cooling or freezing lab. And then additionally, we have about 15 square meters for the chemistry lab. And then 22 square meters for multipurpose.

K: What are the main destinations for the Alkor?

J: Mostly the Alkor is on cruise in the Baltic Sea, and sometimes we’re also heading to the North Sea, North Atlantic. And a few years ago we also went to the Mediterranean Sea.

K: Okay. But that that was an exception.

J: Yes. For the moment that was an exception, but I think it will come up again sometime.

K: Does that depend on which research projects you get or does it depend on collaborations?

J: Both, I would say. The coordination center for our vessel, collects all the scientific applications and then they look for the perfect fitting vessel and then we get our plan to do it. And if they tell us to go to Iceland, we will go to Iceland.

K: That is good. What would you recon, what was the most exciting expedition? Was it more towards the Mediterranean, or rather Iceland or other areas?

J: For me it was Iceland. We stayed there three weeks, and the nature there and also the chance to go onshore in Iceland was quite amazing. And we saw a lot of whales there, it was great.

K: What would you say? How is life in general on board and can it get boring?

J: The life on board? It's quite good, especially if you if you compare it to life on board a cargo vessel. We have a good cook who makes quite good food. We are all together like a family, you still have hierarchy on board, but also this kind of family. And I wouldn't say it could get boring. It could get a little bit exhausting because all crew members will stay on board quite a long time. And they also are missing their families. They must do their work, and they do want to do a good job. So, it could get a little bit exhausting, but it would be never boring.

K: What do you think about exhausting? I mean, you are here on trips, it's a couple of weeks, two weeks, three weeks, maybe not longer.

J: But this is only for the scientists. The crew members, stay on board much longer. They stay on board several months and they have maybe two days in the port. And not everybody is coming from our home port. A lot of people just stay on board for several weeks.

K: Oh, this I didn't know. Okay. So, this trip is a rather short one that we're doing right now, correct?

J: Yes. This is quite short in the mean, this minimum two weeks, just a scientific voyage and then the next voyage starts.

K:  And this ship was built in 1990. Was it renewed since then or you probably needed some updates on some of the instruments.

J: You have to get state of the art equipment to handle a ship. It was built almost 30 years ago but she is up to date.

K: How many crew members do you need for our test expedition here? And later, to the coast.

J: We have for this voyage ten crew members, three people working on the bridge and four on deck. The cook and the engineer.

Thank you very much, Jonas. That was very nice that you took the time for this interview. 

 Interview with Prof. Anja Engel and Bjarke Jørgensen about the cruise

K: It's really an exciting day today. And we have with us today a couple of scientists and also students as part of the entire project, PlastTrack. Today we do a day trip and in the afternoon people will change. And the next trip that starts, tomorrow, will be a three-day equipment test trip. With me here, I have Professor Anja Engel from GEOMAR and she will explain us what the PlastTrack project is about and why we are on this ship today.
 Welcome, Anja. Very nice that you could join this podcast.

A: Thank you, Katharina, and welcome to Alkor. It's really nice to have you on board today. My name is  Anja, as you said, and I'm a biological oceanographer, I am working at GEOMAR, Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research and I’m also professor at Kiel University. And today we are here to study micro and nanoplastics in the Baltic Sea, and this is the focus of the PlastTrack project. 

Every year thousands of tonnes of microplastics are released into the sea and a lot of them are also released in the Danish German border region. So, we really want to learn more about the distribution of these micro and nanoplastics and therefore the plastic project which is funded by the European Union as part of the INTERREG project, Germany, Denmark have a joint INTERREG program, and I'm really grateful that we can work together within this program. The PlastTrack project is investigating the distribution and the potential danger of the plastic particles for the environment and for us humans and with the work that we hopefully can achieve in the project, we aim at contributing to the prevention of further uncontrolled micro and nano plastic release. We want to deliver tools that track the path of the plastic waste in the ocean, and we want to develop new methods to better quantify the particles in the ocean.

K: Well, that's very interesting and a very necessary work. I heard it is still not clear what micro and nano particles are, there is no real classification. So maybe you can also contribute to this part.

A: There's actually not a clear separation between the different definitions and sizes of plastics. We know that we can of course see plastic floating plastic at larger sizes, and we have microplastic, which is only a few millimeters to hundreds of micrometers and larger. But the problem is that larger plastic and also microplastics, they degrade further and disintegrate further in the environment. They become even smaller and smaller pieces. And we know very little about these particles, the microplastics, which are larger than a few micrometers in size. We can detect them with a microscope. But there are even smaller particles which we cannot currently determine. So these smaller particles, the so-called nano plastic particles, are potentially a danger for living organisms because they can penetrate cell membranes and this makes them potentially dangerous because they interact with a human body on with the body of living organisms.

To understand the problem of disintegration of plastic into microplastics and to nano plastics, we want to come up with solutions because it's highly important that we find better and faster methods to detect and to quantify micro and nanoplastics in the environment.

K: Very good. And actually, today we are many of the project here on the ship, we have representatives from NanoSYD, Mads Clausen Institute and GEOMAR, and also from Alfred Wegener Institute. We have NEWTEC here on board, they have a special designed apparatus, a multispectral camera that will do also analysis of the particles or of what we fish out of the sea.

And we hope that we can test our instrumentation and then come to a real good setup for the next real exhibition that will take probably two weeks next year. But you just explained that it's necessary to investigate, micro and nanoparticles. What is GEOMAR’s role in the project?

A: As you mentioned, there are several partners, and they are really expert in their respective scientific fields. And GEOMAR has a long tradition in seeking research. Our role in the project is that we want to contribute to the development of standardized projects for the sampling of plastic particles in the ocean, and in particular with the focus on the on the nanoparticles. There are currently no sampling strategies for such small particles, but it is really important that we are able to accurately record these tiny particles in liquid systems, in marine brackish and freshwater systems, and therefore it's also necessary that we have feasible methods, feasible standard procedures, and that we are able to detect these particles without contamination. So the role of GEOMAR is to come up with new methods, with new ideas to  better sample microplastics from the environment.

And here on Alkor, we want to test our methods for the first time using natural samples.

K: Yes, exactly. And I think you will have the chance for this for the next three days. What would you say, what information do we miss? We have no sampling methods, so we have problems with that. But what information do you actually want to get?

A: In the end, as I said, it's currently not possible to accurately quantify nano plastics in the environment. So, our future aim and the vision is, that we come up with a method that allows us and other scientists and other partners, not only in the project but also beyond, to have feasible methods to sample nanoplastics in the ocean and to be able to quantify these particles. And if we have accurate numbers, if we are able to quantify the particles in the environment, then this is the first step that we need to get a better idea on the distribution and the fate of these particles in the ocean.

K: Fantastic. Thanks a lot. Now I move over to Bjarke Jørgensen. He's also here on board. He's from NEWTEC Engineering, and he will explain us what NEWTEC contributes to this project and maybe also a little bit on why he is doing this research.

B: Well, we had the opportunity to test our hyperspectral camera here on board, and it's the first time we actually bring it on board a ship. We have had a lot of experience using hyperspectral imaging for analyzing plastic samples, but that's normally pristine plastic samples. So, the question is, can we detect microplastic in samples that have been recorded at sea?

K: Very interesting. What do you expect? I mean, during the day you will get all sorts of samples here. Do you have any idea of what could come out of this?

B: The short answer is no. But the interesting part is to test the technology and to see all the challenges that we can work with. I expect we will be able to detect the plastic. And I also think we'll be able to identify a lot of the polymers in this plastic.

K: That would be really great. And your method is very fast. I mean, usually analytical methods take a long time. Will you be able without a big sampling effort to detect plastic particles in the micrometer range?

B: Yes, that is the ambition, and I think it can be done within a few seconds. So, the sampling time will be very short once we have developed a technique for it.

K: That sounds very promising. Anything else you would expect from this journey?

B: Actually, it's about this sampling. How to prepare the samples for hyperspectral imaging. Do, we need to prepare them or can we take the samples directly from the filters. That's some of the things that we'll learn on this trip.

K: Fantastic. Many thanks and I hope this trip will be very successful. Thanks a lot.

Sampling micro- and nanoplastics in our coastal waters

K: Welcome to part two of this special edition of a podcast where we are on the ship Alkor, The ship is operated by GEOMAR, Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel. And that's where we set off this morning. I will talk to some scientists and we introduce you to life on board and the problematic of micro and nano plastics that it poses in our coastal waters.

As always, we are very grateful for the support of allgoodspeakers.com who help us a great deal to make these podcasts possible. And today, I would also like to thank Interreg Deutschland- Danmark for their support of the PlastTrack project. Without them we would not be on this ship today. I welcome Stefan Dittmar, Lisa Roscher and Kevin Becker here on board and they will explain us what we expect for the first day here on the ship and what tests we're doing or why we do specific tests.

I will start with Kevin, welcome Kevin to this podcast. I'm really glad to have you here. Kevin is from GEOMAR and he will tell us why we exactly are at Bocknis Eck.

Kevin: Thank you so much. Yes, Bocknis Eck is actually a very important time series station where GEOMAR samples now since the fifties and it's actually one of the longest continuous time series stations in the world. And we're interested in understanding how environmental change will affect the biology at this particular place, which is at the coastal Baltic, Southwest and Baltic Sea, Nowadays we go there actually once a month to sample four different parameters, which includes, for example, to look for how much organic carbon is in the water column. particulary organic carbon, which is the combination of living and dead particulate material, which tells us about how much material is actually in the water column. And then we also sample for something like Chlorophyl A, which is an indicator for phytoplankton biomass. So, how much biomass do we have in that exact place? And we also look for other parameters such as biogenic silica, which is the most abundant biogenic mineral that we have in the oceans, which forms, for example, the cell walls of diatoms. And all these parameters change with environmental change, but also with biology that of course all interact. And we get very interesting insights how antropogenic change and environmental change will affect the biology at this particular place.

K: Well, it's really good. And you have to sample water in different depths, or how do you do the sampling?

Kevin: Yes. So, we have a regular sampling scheme that we follow. So we sample the water column at from the surface all the way to the bottoms of the water depth. There is around 27 meters. We start with the surface and then the deeper sample is 25 meters in regular intervals to collect samples for these experiments.

K: Where are the results of all these research things published? Can we find it in the Internet and follow it, how it developed throughout the years?

Kevin: Yes, of course. So, there are several papers that have been published from GEOMAR, but also from other institutions in scientific journals. Most of them are open access so everyone can download it from the Internet. And we also have ongoing projects right now where we try to get the public involved. So hopefully there will be things set up in the future that the data can be seen kind of immediately after they have been taken.

K: That would be very nice for the public to also join and find out what's happening in the ocean around them. Now, we have more specialized equipment here on board, and I would like to introduce you to Stefane Dittmar from GEOMAR and to Lisa Roscher from Alfred Wegener Institute, and they will both explain us now what we actually expect to do here on board today and in the next couple of days.

S: Within the project that you already mentioned, PlastTrack, we’re actually focusing on micro plastic particles and even nano plastic particles, which we want to sample and then analyze. We want to sample in the environment and analyze later on. And that's actually a very broad topic. I'm quite certain that there is some sort of public awareness of the topic that has been growing throughout the last years, the last decade, I would say.

But we always talk about those terms as given terms like microplastics and then everybody has their kind of own imagination about it. But actually, we are not talking about a single contaminant but about a broad spectrum of contaminants. So, you know, you can have different types of plastic just by production, but we also encounter all kinds of different sizes of plastics.

So, we can't say microplastics are always this size or whatever, but we encounter a broad spectrum which we then have to cover with different sampling methods, for instance. And that's always something that we must keep in mind. So, in contrast to, for instance, classical contaminants like soft chemicals, where we discuss, of course different kind of chemicals, but talking about one chemical, we always talk about the same molecule.

And with microplastics or nanoplastics, it's the opposite. So, every particle is unique. You won't encounter the identical particle for another time within the environment. And although we always use those terms, this makes it kind of difficult to really cover the range.

K: But that makes it also very difficult to categorize these particles. So. So you only have some sort of minimum and maximum range where you can categorize them, probably?

S: Basically we just start categorizing them by size. I mean that's the terms that we are using like microplastics, microplastics, nanoplastics that's all associated with different size limits even that can be kind of difficult. If you look at a fiber for instance, is it is it the length of the fiber that is the defining criterion, or is it the diameter or something like that?

So even that is not always completely clear, but but yeah, that's the first category. But we just have to look beyond that and recognize that even when talking about microplastics, the size range is still three orders of magnitude that we are actually talking about. So we can be talking about millimeter sized particles, but even some that are not visible to the bear anymore.

K: Now, I guess the question to Lisa, how do you encounter these problems? You plan to do a lot of sampling here. How do you actually do that?

L: For the sampling, we sample per size fraction, let's say. So if we think about very large plastic items, one would maybe do visual observation from from the ship. And then when we go to the smaller microplastic, it's like down to three micrometers, which is roughly a third of a millimeter. And those we can sample with maintenance and followed by a pre sorting with a stereo microscope to pick out potential microplastics, based on certain criteria.

And this is also performed here in the cruise of the Alkor, there will be that sampling and sorting by a student class which is accompanying us. And yes, then when we look even further down to the even smaller microplastics, in this case down to roughly ten micrometers, we have to approach it differently than we do pump sampling and filtration onto a stainless steel filter mesh.

But what we're actually really interested in on this cruise and what was not really done before or very rarely done, is to look even beyond like to micro submicron plastics, like beyond ten micrometers and even nanoplastics smaller than one micrometer and here we have to develop the sampling method basically from scratch, because there is no established way to do this yet.

K: Very nice. So then back to Stefan. Could you explain us how you actually want to have a look at the nanoparticles or distinguish them from the others?

S: The difficulty about it is that we still have to maintain rather large sampling volumes, but we also want to capture the really small particles. So that with decreasing size it gets more difficult. Of course I think one can imagine and we are planning to do or to use some custom build setups actually that we hope are successful.

And we basically want to decrease those large sampling, large initial sampling volumes by a membrane filtration and thus end up with a very concentrated liquid sample that we can then have a look at with the methods that are provided by our analytical partners that are still under development as well.

L: Beside the approach which Stefan just mentioned, we also want to look at the water column actually and to see how or if microplastics are transported, you know, basically downwards towards the sediment of the Baltic Sea. So that's why we have the sediment trap deployed for over six months and we will retrieve it and see basically what is the microplastic flux and is microplastic encaptured in aggregates, for example, natural matter of any kind and transported down.

S: So to finish it off in the end of this cruise, we actually will be approaching Sonderburg and we are quite happy to visit Denmark and visit our project partners there.

What we achieved during the cruise

K: Welcome to just another edition of this Special that we're doing here on board the Alkor in the coastal waters of Northern Germany and Eastern Denmark. And we welcome today the Alkor, a research vessel in Sønderborg, Denmark. 

We are very grateful, for the support of AllGoodSpeakers.com and to Interreg Deutschland-Danmark, for their support of the PlastTrack project.

After now, three days on board the research vessel, Alkor arrived in Sønderborg in Denmark. And on the way, a lot of tests were done. About 16 scientists and students are on board and dedicate their time to the sampling of seawater for plastic particles and testing of equipment. And now we are very curious to hear what happened during that period.

I give the question now to Anja first and would like to know how did the journey go so far?

A: The journey went very well, the very lucky, because we could deploy all the devices that we want to. We could recover our sediment trap. We deployed the Neuston catamaran. We sampled and pumped a lot of water. So, everything that we planned, we could achieve. Moreover, the spirit was very good. There were several participants for the first time on Board of Research Vessel, and I think they enjoyed it also very much. So, for me, as a chief scientist, this was really a success.

K: That sounds very good and but I would like to know some more details if possible and give the question to Stefan Dittmar from GEOMAR, what do you think, did you manage to identify some plastic particles in the seawater here?

S: In some cases, yes. I already mentioned that we are using different methods to sample different size fractions, and especially for the larger size fractions with the support of our Danish project partners, we were able to already identify plastic particles on board. With the smaller size fractions it's more difficult and analysis are usually carried out in labs and in special laboratories equipped for that and there we also needed to test other sampling methods to really sample those smaller particles. Maybe Lisa can tell you something about it.

L: You have a very small microplastics and even for nano plastic sampling, we tried a new sampling equipment and I would say we gained a lot of experience on this cruise, and we have much better impression of how long different handling steps take, how many people are needed for the handling steps, and I'm quite positive about the development of it.

K: That's very good. I'm glad you made such good progress. I also heard Danial, you were in charge of a Raman spectrometer that you also took here and tested. What was your experience with it?

D: Yes, this was one of the methods we use to distinguish different types of microplastics from one another. We got the sense of how it works, but it needs further optimization so that we get a more visible fingerprint of the substance that we are analyzing.

K: Now, I have another person here and they were doing actually also some tests. It's Sandra Golde, from GEOMAR and she will tell us about the sediment trap, what happened with that?

S: Yes, as Anja said, the sediment trap recover went very well and we will deploy the sediment trap in a few weeks again when we are coming back to the Alkor.

K: But this time, you had some challenges with the sediment trap?

S: Yes, it works well but at some point the electrics did not work properly. So, we have to find out what the problems were and when we find out, we will deploy it again.

K: Well, then we are almost done with our little podcast today. But I would like to know and in general now overall, how did the journey go? What did you like most or were there any problems?

A: As I said, the journey for us was quite successful because we could deploy the devices that we wanted to test. It was a test cruise for the plastic project. We now have some months to see the results of our measurements and to improve the methods if necessary. And then we are looking forward to next year when we will have another chance to go on the Alkor and have a longer cruise, to then really being able to map and determine plastic particle distribution along the coast of Schleswig-Holstein and Southern Denmark.

K: Very good. Then I have one more private question. How do you feel or what worries you most when you see plastic particles in the water?

A: Well, when we started yesterday, we already mentioned that there's a lot of mismanaged plastic waste entering the ocean. And what we see in the ocean as floating microplastic is like the tip of the iceberg. Plastic disintegrates into smaller and smaller pieces. We now want to develop methods to being able to quantify the smaller pieces, but we know that there is a lot of plastic in the ocean and not being able to quantify having this uncertainty is what we what worries me most.

K: Is there anything you would tell the people what they should be aware of when using plastics or how to prevent plastics in the seawater?

D: Do not throw plastic to the water, try to recycle.

K: Thanks to all of you. This was today's podcast. And, have a look also on YouTube, we will publish some more information on the trips and on future trips and this will be added to the podcast at the end in the text field. You will see it. Thank you.

 

 





Alkor Podcast Part 3