What equipments does an oceanographer use?

Question

I need the equipments an oceanographer uses. Please help me! URGENT!!

Answer 1

Collecting nets come in a wide array of sizes. The smaller ones, perhaps a meter long, may be towed briefly in near-surface waters. The largest multiple opening-closing variety consists of a great metal frame carrying as many as 20 nets and an environmental sensing array that sends information back to the ship's laboratory.

When the samples come aboard the ship, some may be examined immediately under microscopes in the ship's lab, animals may be dissected or analyzed for clues to their food sources or exposure to pollutants, and other samples may be preserved for further work in shore-based laboratories.

Water sampling devices range from a bucket dropped over the side of a ship to large water bottles sent thousands of meters toward the seafloor on a wire. Probably the most commonly used water sampler is known as a CTD/rosette: it is a framework designed to carry 12 to 36 sampling bottles (typically ranging from 1.2- to 30-liter capacity) and a conductivity/ temperature/ depth sensor that sends information to the laboratory so that the water bottles can be closed selectively as the instrument ascends.  The largest water bottles, called Gerard barrels, collect 250 liters.

Aboard the ship, a flow cytometer may be used to analyze particles in the form of single-celled organisms for optical properties indicative of their physiology and structure.

The CTD is one kind of profiler - that is, it descends through the water column making continuous measurements. Another is the expendable BathyThermograph (XBT), a temperature probe released on a weighted copper wire that unreels to record temperature and depth while the ship is underway.

Floats can be weighted to be neutrally buoyant at a particular depth, where they drift in the current while emitting periodic sounds. Such floats have been tracked for years by moored sound receivers to provide a long-term look at ocean currents.

An acoustic Doppler profiler measures currents while a ship is underway. Sound signals sent from the moving ship bounce back to receivers aboard the ship for processing to give a vertical profile of horizontal water motion relative to the ship.

Seafloor rocks can be gathered by towing a dredge consisting of a steel box and chain bag. More precise sampling may be accomplished using a submersible with robotic arms or a remotely operated vehicle equipped with television so that the area where the rock was found can be described in detail. Sediment sampling devices include a box corer that drops into the mud and brings back a block of near-surface sediment. A piston corer can return a cylinder of sediment up to 100 feet (33 meters) long that may encompass several million years of sedimentary history.

Bottom landers may be described as a way to take the laboratory to the seafloor. Miniaturization in electronics now allows scientists to put computers of increasing sophistication in pressure cases and send them down several thousand meters to control a variety of instruments.

Sorry that this is so long; however, instead of providing you with just a list, I thought you might like to have the list of devices along with the task for which they are used.