Through the Canal

We are now out in the warm and saline Caribbean Sea, and the waters are an intense blue. The waters are so blue, there is very little in them: we drop the CTD and barely get 0.25 micrograms of Chlorophyll per liter all the way to the 50 meter mark.

The clear waters of the Caribbean are very low in nutrients, and the nutrients below the thermocline are deep, well beyond the reach of photosynthetic plankton. In fact, our CTD profile looks like a series of straight lines rather than the peaks and curves seen in the Pacific. Still, we take two samples for comparison and continue on to Florida.