exoCean Laboratory

@exoceanlab.bsky.social

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Laboratory of experimental oceanography based at CEREGE 🦚, Aix-en-Provence 🇫🇷. We culture, measure, and dissolve carbonates! 📨 exocean@cerege.fr 🌡️🌊🫧🐚🪸🔬 @juliemeilland.bsky.social, @sulpis.bsky.social, @chalkyoceans.bsky.social

Looking at you, Titan
spoiler: while it’s technically true, it’s not super effective
HMS Challenger
Plasma ball shown behind protective glass, it looks green but really it's white hot - about the same temperature as the surface of the sun.
Matthieu loading in the sample information prior to launching.
Postdoc Matthieu Buisson loads samples into the rack ready for elemental analysis.
glorious peacock seducing CEREGE people
there is always something dissolving in our lab
Close-up of a translucent phronima amphipod in seawater (not ours)
the pelagic realm, being delightfully weird
Jaime introduces his project and ForCry at a team seminar in Mainz. 📷 S. Chaabane
A shiny metal rack ready to transfer the cold straight into our samples... this should make loading and unloading a breeze!
A mini sample ready to be laser ablated. You can see how cold it is from the ice crystals growing around.
A rack of tiny samples, about 0.5mm in diameter... Here we've custom made some really clean rings to hold them in place... next step, freeze!
Hinne, PhD student in the lab, sampling local, plankton from Marseille, brought back to the exoCean lab to start a new life. If we can grow forams in the lab, we don't need to go back to sea! (as much).
A high-pressure reactor, like a submarine, but in reverse, cheaper, and with a thousandth* of its environmental footprint. *not calculated, hyperbolae... but the reality is probably even better!
Sometimes you can replace a boat trip with a car trip, ever wondered how much ocean you can get into a Golf?
Bremer Dom (Bremen Cathedral) with a full moon in the background. This magnificent cathedral has been in the centre of Bremen for almost 1000 years.
The core repository at Bremen has 100s of kms of IODP material Here we sample from dozens of metres below the seafloor, to get samples that were alive millions of years ago.
The exoCean team and friends actively brainstorming on hot topics
A table with 2 beers, some oat milk, (fake) butter, porridge oats, peanut butter, one avocado, some bread and a bag of coffee on it. Aim high... ;)
A microscope image of a typical plankton sample fished by a net. In here you can see plenty of tiny crustaceans, foraminifera and pteropods!
Tom and Julie went out a few days ahead of the rest of the team to do a last minute check that all the islands and beaches and bars existed.
No power? No problem. Maxime will filter water using the power of his lungs.
% survival of forams by day in 3 different water treatments. All the graphs kinda look the same.
Don't eat that! A large foraminifera trying to eat grains of olivine. It soon realised that they weren't food, but had no problems afterwards, so... not poison!
Here's the target, a picture of a foram (about 150 micro metres across). They look like pop-corn, but some of us in the lab can tell species and individuals apart as if they were our pets!
Nice set up! When trying ti place a glass sensor mere micro-metres away from a fragile shell, precision is required. Here we have a microscope set-up designed just for this, the probes can be moved by fractions of a mm at a time, all whilst the foram and probe end are visible on a computer or down the scope.
A foram carefully lined up beneath the microscope, ready for investigation. 📷 K. Declerk
Titanium high-pressure reactor under construction (said in the voice of Sia).
A depress(uriz)ed blobfish, credit: National Geographic (It doesn't look like this in its natural habitat!)
Schematic of the Deep-C high-pressure reactor and in situ sensors.
CO2 back until the dinosaurs. The record is patchy, at best! We're working hard to fill all the gaps. Figure from Chalk and Rollion Bard in Elements Magazine 2025. https://www.elementsmagazine.org/boron-proxies-from-calcification-site-ph-to-cenozoic-pco2/
Hundreds of individual plankton living in controlled CO2 conditions. From Bermuda in the summer, but we do it in France too!
A graph showing CO2 data from the ice cores over the last 400 thousand years. Data calculated from boron isotopes is also shown, overlapping (almost) perfectly.
A schematic graph showing global temperature, plotted against CO2. We know CO2 increases temperature, but the how far and how fast are still not totally constrained. Tipping points, or sensitivity changes could impact this relationship in the future, and may have done in the past.
The people that actually do all the work in exoCean, Right to Left: Jaime, Sonia, Maxime, Matthieu and Astrid. Did you know Lego magnifying glasses actually work? No, us neither!
The three PIs of #exoCean in Lego format. Olivier the steampunk moustache man, Julie smiling with her paintbrush (for picking forams) and Tom carrying some blue chemical (probably for his hair).
A niskin rosette ready to go back in the water, with this we can collect hundreds of litres of water to bring back to the lab for chemical testing, and to grow our cultures!
The team brings a multi-net out to the sea. This device makes it possible to collect plankton from different depths in the water column as discrete samples.
A plankton net (think large wind sock) hangs from the back of a boat. We use these to conduct surveys of the ecosystem and bring back live plankton to the lab.
Maxime, laboratory champion, helping us out at sea (even though he hates it).
The new exoCean lab logo... exoCean written in dark blue, fading to deeper colour at the bottom, the C is orange (think vitamins, think vitality, think #ERC!), there are some bubbles and particles hanging around too.
Dozens of small plastic flasks, each containing an individual foram sit in a temperature controlled water bath, under lights.
About 12 juvenile pteropods as seen through a microscope.
Tom with a fresh plankton sample about to be poured into the collection bucket. It's white so they stay cool on the way back to the lab.
A plankton net coming out of the deep water off the eastern side of Bermuda.
The boat Henry Stommel getting ready for a plankton tow at the BIOS dock.
Tom is packing a large metal container ready for fieldwork in Bermuda, watch this space!