Here's another picture quiz for you. The picture below was taken in February of 2005, just off the coast in Oahu. Can you identify the piece of equipment that the two people in the picture are using, and do you know what it's used for? The answer will be posted on Thursday.
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It looks like a Nansen Bottle, that will be used to get a sample of water from a particular depth. The line is let done, the bottle is dropped, flips over when the it reaches the right depth and opens to get the sample. It is then hauled back up.
Nansen bottles are older versions of the same technology. This is a Nisken bottle. It's made of plastic, versus the metal that a nansen bottle was constructed of, because plastic is less prone to contaminate the sample. The two endcaps are joined by a length of rubber surgical tubing, and when a weighted messenger is sent down the line, they snap back into the two ends, allowing a water sample to be trapped.
It's a Niskin bottle alright, and it looks like pretty much the smallest one they make. They work fine enough for coastal sampling. For serious oceanographic work you need a battery of 24-36 of them set in a rosette and coupled to a CTD.
I guess i'm showing my age, and that I haven't been sampling for many years.
I knew that... :(