Marine Biomass Filtration with a Rocker Watervac 100-MS
It’s a 20 minute drive south from UC San Diego, through San Diego proper, to the salt pools at the South Bay Salt Works.
The Salt Works comprises 28 ponds of various sizes and salinities, making it an ideal laboratory for the study of biomass distribution across multiple environments. The ponds range from the salinity of the ocean to the point where certain salts reach saturation and start to precipitate out of the brine.
Some ponds have high levels of sodium chloride which, when precipitated out, leave salts like magnesium chloride behind. Magnesium chloride interacts with life and the surrounding ecosystem differently than the sodium chloride in Earth’s oceans.
The sodium chloride ponds teem with life, while the magnesium chloride ponds teem with highly toxic minerals. Showing the presence or absence of life in these ponds is very similar to the challenge of life detection on other planets.
“These environments are good analogues for past environments on Mars or contemporary environments on Europa,” says Jeff Bowman, an Assistant Professor in the Integrative Oceanography Division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego), and member of the Oceans Across Space and Time (OAST) research alliance funded by NASA. “This allows us to test new modes of life detection and new instrumentation that might be useful for either habitat characterization or life detection.”
A big part of this type of work is getting biomass out of the water, looking for single celled life like:
- Bacteria
- Archaea
- Single celled eukaryotes
“Working in these types of environments is quite challenging, particularly in the terms of collecting the biomass,” Jeff says. “First off, you’re not near your normal laboratory, you have to get everything out there in the field, self-powered or not powered at all. And the other thing is that the brines are difficult to work with. They don`t work well with standard filtration methods because they are highly viscous. We`re working all the way up to the saturation point so we`ve got really, really salty brines that are extremely difficult to filter. In many cases, the particle loads are very high too.”
When Jeff came to us looking for a solution that could improve his field lab, our sales team and applications engineers identified the Rocker Watervac 100-MS.
This solution became the preferred solution for the OAST team, and will eventually be deployed across multiple research sites.
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