|
BATS technician Frances Howse filtering water samples
Probably 95 % of oceanographic research involves filling bottles and filtering water! At BATS, technicians filter water to catch phytoplankton and extract their photosynthetic pigments to get a measure of plant biomass in the sea. They also filter water to catch small bacteria to count them, or to measure the total amount of particulate matter in the water. Sometime water is filtered to exclude the solid particles, so that dissolved nutrients (e.g. nitrate and phosphate) can be measured |
