RamaCam - In situ holographic imaging and chemical spectroscopy for long term scalable analysis of marine particles in deep-sea environments

虽然现代海洋传感器能够测量溶解在海水中的化学物质的浓度，灵敏度如此之高，以至于我们几乎不需要对它们进行采样，但许多化学物质在海水中形成微小的颗粒，直径通常小于人类头发的宽度，而这些是当今大多数传感器的盲点。详细研究这些粒子的唯一方法是回收样本并在实验室进行分析。海洋颗粒包括浮游生物、鲸鱼和鱼类的死皮、粪便颗粒、微塑料和其他类型的人类垃圾。如果你从海洋表面取一瓶海水，并将其与深海的海水进行比较，那么在表层水中大颗粒的数量会高得多，因为来自太阳的光提供了浮游生物可以利用的能量，浮游生物在阳光可以到达海洋表面200米范围内的颗粒中占很大比例。与此同时，我们也知道大多数颗粒会下沉，所以对我们来说，理解为什么深海中的颗粒如此之少，有多少物质下沉到海底，它们是由什么组成的，下沉的速度有多快，以及有多大比例的物质会回到海面或被冲上岸，这一点很重要。这一点很重要，因为沉到海底的颗粒被认为在从大气中去除碳方面起着重要作用。与此同时，科学家们担心垃圾和塑料可能会积聚在海底，破坏海洋表面以下平均深度超过3800米的脆弱海底生态系统。这个项目的目的是展示新的方法来提高我们研究深海中不同类型颗粒分布的能力。即将开发的传感器将分析大容量的海水，每秒几乎可以分析三分之二的饮料，以便在深海中收集相对数量较少的颗粒数据。传感器将计算通过它的颗粒数量，研究它们的外观，并进行基于激光的化学分析，以确定这些颗粒的成分。这项工作的一个重要方面是以紧凑、低功耗的方式实现这一目标。最后一点很重要，那就是允许大量的这种新型传感器被用于研究海洋的广大地区，一次可以持续数年。这项创新工作将由英国和日本的研究人员进行，这两个岛屿国家都有悠久的海洋研究历史，他们将结合他们的专业知识来克服实现我们目标所涉及的困难挑战。通过帮助研究人员在未来更好地了解海洋中粒子的行为，这反过来可以帮助我们的政府决定需要采取什么样的政策来保护我们的海洋和大气。

While modern day ocean sensors are capable of measuring the concentration of chemicals dissolved in seawater to such high sensitivities that we rarely need to sample them, many chemicals form tiny particles in seawater, often with diameters smaller than the width of a human hair, and these act as a blind spot for most of today's sensors. The only way to study these particles in detail, is to recover samples and analyse them in a laboratory. Marine particles include plankton, dead skin shed from whales and fish, faecal pellets as well as micro-plastics and other types of human litter. If you took a bottle of seawater from the surface of the ocean and compared it to seawater from the deep-sea, the number of large particles would be much higher in the surface water, because light from the sun provides energy that can be used by plankton, which form a large proportion of the particles where sunlight can reach within 200 m of the ocean surface. At the same time, we also know that most particles sink, and so it is important for us to understand why there are so few particles in the deep-sea, how much material is sinking to the seafloor, what it is made out of, how fast it sinks, and what proportion of it makes it back up to the sea surface or gets washed on-shore. The reason this is important, is that particles that sink to the seafloor are thought to play an important role in removing carbon from our atmosphere. At the same time, scientists are worried that litter and plastics may accumulate on the seafloor and damage the fragile seafloor ecosystems that exist at an average depth of more than 3800 m below the ocean's surface.The aim of this project, is to demonstrate new ways in which we can improve our ability to study the distribution of different types of particles in the deep-sea. The sensor that will be developed will analyse large volumes of seawater, almost 2/3 of a drinks can a second, in order to gather data in the deep-sea where the relative number of particles is small. The sensor will count the number of particles that pass through it, study their appearance and also perform laser based chemical analysis to identify what these particles are made out of. An important aspect of this work is to achieve this in a compact, low power way. The last point is important to allow large numbers of this new type of sensor to be used to study vast regions of the ocean for several years at a time. This innovative work will be carried out by researchers based in the UK and in Japan, both island nations with a long history of marine research, who will combine their expertise to overcome the difficult challenges that are involved in achieving our goal. By helping researchers in the future achieve a better understanding how particles in the ocean behave, and this can in turn help our governments decide what kinds of policies need to be put in place to preserve our ocean and our atmosphere.