Image

Looking it over

MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Stephanie Owens isn’t on a jungle gym—she’s checking specialized pumps used to filter water collected at various depths in the ocean and extract trace amounts of iron from the samples. Owens and WHOI scientist Pheobe Lam used the pumps, made by McLane Labs, on a research cruise near Africa in September 2008. They wanted to test the hypothesis that northeast Africa provides significant amounts of iron, a nutrient necessary for the ocean’s food web, to the eastern tropical Atlantic.

(Photo by Alexander Dorsk, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)