OPEREX Cruise plan

Photo of teacher Miriam Sutton.Miriam Sutton, a North Carolina middle school teacher, participated in the C-MORE/ OPEREX research cruise as a Teacher at Sea. During the cruise, she provided communication and developed educational activities that assisted teachers and scientists in bringing the research project into the classroom. Her main objectives were to establish an online blog to communicate with teachers and students while at sea; develop simplified experiments that link the cruise activities to the classroom; interact and assist scientists with their research projects; and generate photo/video documentation of the research cruise.

Miriam maintained a Teacher-at-Sea blog about her experiences at sea, and you can still email her your questions and comments. As part of the Hanauma Bay Education Program, Miriam gave a presentation on Thursday, August 14, 2008 in the Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve theater about her experience. Download the flyer pdf or visit the lecture series page for details.

30 July to 14 August 2008

Objective: To explore the potential and limitations of perturbation experiments at sea.

Two Types of Ocean Perturbations

Natural perturbations:

We can observe and interpret natural perturbation. For that we need to detect the presence of these perturbations, to be present at their occurrence, and to apply sampling strategy appropriate for temporal/spatial scales of these perturbations.

Artificial perturbations:

We can perform, observe, and interpret artificial perturbation experiments. We have a freedom to select the site, the scale, and the observation strategy.

During OPEREX cruise we will follow some natural perturbations including blooms and eddies, and we will perform some of the artificial perturbation experiments including bench/lab scale incubations, ship deck incubations, and ship deck pH shift experiments.

Learn more about OPEREX

Learn more about the OPEREX cruise by downloading the

  1. OPEREX cruise plan (PDF)
  2. OPEREX cruise overviw (6 MB Powerpoint)
  3. OPEREX cruise schedule (Excel file)