The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' --Isaac Asimov
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Enrichment of microorganisms into sea ice brine

July 20th, 2009 1 Comment

As seawater freezes into sea ice, all of the dissolved constituents of the water become concentrated within the solid ice matrix that forms. Because it is more dense than seawater due to the high salt content, a lot of this ‘brine’ will drain from the ice by gravity. However, some brine remains in the ice […]

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Predicting the height of a saturated peak on an electropherogram

May 6th, 2009 No Comments

One way to assess the microbial community structure in an environment is to use a ‘fingerprinting’ technique, like T-RFLP or ARISA, to interrogate the ‘species’ living there as determined from their 16S rRNA genes or some functional gene like amoA. Here’s an example of a T-RFLP electropherogram from sea ice: You can see that most […]

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Reaching the Arctic sea ice annual minimum

September 18th, 2008 No Comments

It looks like we’ve hit bottom for the year, and it’s not exactly good news. Although we didn’t break the record set in 2007 for Lowest Minimum Arctic Sea Ice Extent In Recorded Human History, we got close. This year’s minimum, about 4.5 million square kilometers, is much nearer to last year’s low than the […]

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