SGER: New and Improved Methods for Collecting Ocean Particulates for the GEOTRACES Community

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Quantifying particle distributions is essential to understanding the chemical, biological and physical processes controlling dissolved distributions. Thus sampling of oceanic particles is an important consideration for the GEOTRACES program. A scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution would use this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to build a new, large volume pumping system capable of sampling 1000L volumes through filters at all ocean depths. The impetus for this trace metal clean pump rosette capable of deploying up to eight McLane in-situ battery powered pumps at the same depth is the acquisition of large quantities of marine particles with greater reproducibility and within a shorter time frame relative to currently available systems. With this SGER, the researcher also plans to evaluate which filters are best suited for the analysis of the largest number of trace elements and isotopes (TEIs) and assess the impact of loading/flow on particle collection. In addition, filters would be subsampled using a newly designed trace metal clean cutting template and the samples distributed to the national and international GEOTRACES community for analyses of TEIs. Lastly, several casts would be carried out with the new system to compare results obtained with this system with those collected using the MULVFS pumping system.