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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

#exocean advent calendar day 24! Today we thought it was a good fit to show an image/talk about “conception”… One of the thing we (try to) do best at ExoCean is planktonic foraminifera reproduction. Here two immaculate mummies… 😏 We would like to wish you all a beautiful Christmas Eve!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Thanks to @erc.europa.eu #Deep-C, we’re building reactors that reproduce the ocean’s most serious pressures, the kind you really don’t want to “beta test” at sea. We’ll revisit old mysteries from HMS Challenger, & bring deep-sea microbes into the lab to see what life does when the pressure is real.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

CaCO3 takes less volume dissolved between water and salts than as a crystal. Two consequences: higher pressure favors dissolution, and carbonate dissolution from acidification (very) slightly lowers sea level. Yep! Guaranteed to spice up the family dinner conversation. 🧠

spoiler: while it’s technically true, it’s not super effective

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 23: at exoCean we also look at some old questions: in the late 1800s, during the HMS Challenger expedition, they discovered that you can have a constant rain of shells from above, and still end up with a seafloor that looks like the carbonate budget never existed. Why? Pressure. 🌊

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

We spray the samples into a bright ball of plasma, which enables them to be made into ions and sent into the mass spec. Perfect for our tiny carbonate samples home-grown in the lab.

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.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

(a nano-gramme is 10^-9 grammes, a billion times less than a gramme!). In the Mission Control room (love this feature...you can pilot the instrument and drink coffee!) we carefully input the sample information and let the automated machine do the rest.

Matthieu loading in the sample information prior to launching.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 22: Winding down for the holidays often means one thing... more mass spectrometry time is available! With our friends in @cerege.bsky.social's #ENVITOP facility, we're making use! Thanks to their equipment we're working on measuring elemental compositions down to the nano-gramme!

Postdoc Matthieu Buisson loads samples into the rack ready for elemental analysis.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

#exocean advent calendar Day 21! The strongest link between all of us is our love for the ocean. Leaving Marseille with a magnificent sunrise reminds us each time we go out how lucky we are to do what we love for a living! We already have our ship time for the first 6 months of 2026 - exciting!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 19: Friday edition: today’s post is about the peacocks at CEREGE, because it’s Friday and our brains are in weekend mode. They wander around like they own the campus, scream for no reason, and block paths with absolute confidence. Honestly, goals. 🦚

we love peacocks so much they follow us in our offices

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

At exoCean, we're ahead of the game, been dissolving carbonates for ages, for free 🧑‍🔬! We stay fundamental: carbonates, dissolution, pressure. Ocean alkalinity enhancement sits right at the overlap, so we look at what “more alkalinity” does to things like forams. Mechanisms before megatonnes 🔬

there is always something dissolving in our lab

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

In CNRS Le Journal (and to journalists brave enough to ask what alkalinity is), the message is simple: scientists don’t vote “yes/no” on mCDR, we provide the cards for society to decide, based on values, political choices, economical priorities. No MRV, no scaling. lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/rec...

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 18: looking for a good read waiting for Santa? 🌊 Try marine carbon removal: @sulpis.bsky.social co-chaired the working group behind the @emarineboard.bsky.social MRV brief, because “trust me bro” isn’t a monitoring protocol. Emissions cuts first; then *maybe* carbon removal.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Phronima are pelagic amphipods, tiny, transparent crustaceans drifting in the open ocean: pure sci-fi. Some species hollow out a gelatinous salp and turn it into a floating “barrel” shelter. Those big eyes are built for the dim mid-water world, where everything is either invisible or glowing.

Close-up of a translucent phronima amphipod in seawater (not ours)

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 17: Net accident, happy outcome. Ex-lab member Laura caught this phronima (monster in a barrel) “by mistake”, so we adopted it - alive - in a lab aquarium. One haul turned into days of behaviour notes.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

...The visit to Mainz is also a great opportunity to share samples. Thanks to everyone there for helping us out with some exciting new material. Sample sharing is great, more people should do it. More info, less waste, & more collaborations. The @exoceanlab.bsky.social is always open to sharing.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 16: We're getting closer to the holidays, but we don't stop yet. @erc.europa.eu postdoc @jysuarezibarra.bsky.social was out today presenting his work @maxplanck.de in Mainz. @soniachaabane.bsky.social is also visiting to chat with colleagues.

Jaime introduces his project and ForCry at a team seminar in Mainz. 📷 S. Chaabane

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

As part of the @erc.europa.eu project #ForCry we have been working alongside ESI to make this process a little easier with this custom device, the #Cryostage, ready to hold onto our tiny plankton samples whilst they are measured. Cool! (Yeah, no really.) ❄️ 😎

A shiny metal rack ready to transfer the cold straight into our samples... this should make loading and unloading a breeze!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

The cryostage lets us keep things in place, but without adding anything nasty (looking at you glue, resin), only water! Then we can target them with a laser to look at the chemical composition. Laser + mass spectrometer = data! ⚡

A mini sample ready to be laser ablated. You can see how cold it is from the ice crystals growing around.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 15: Some plankton are tiny [citation needed?], and for those we need ways to measure tiny (this is a theme you'll hear us talking about a lot). Sometimes just holding samples in place can be hard.... enter the #Cryostage! ❄️

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!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

We still go to sea, mud, plankton, and pressure won’t sample themselves. Our view on sobriety: fewer trips, local trips & collaborators, smaller boats, longer stays, bundled projects, shared samples. Let the data travel, not us. We've just started this journey, but we aim to do better every year.

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).

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

Our shiny titanium reactors and fancy sensors aren’t “low footprint”, true, new science requires resources. But they will let us test many scenarios in one place, & go to sea with fewer questions. If we can answer it in the lab, we save the boat fuel for the questions that really need the boat trip.

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!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 14 Footprint reduction: we do lab-based ocean science because we genuinely love it, but also because lab experiments can replace lots of field trips. More control, more insight, and in part, fewer emissions. Bonus: dissolving old sediment cores neutralizes a bit of CO2. 😇

Sometimes you can replace a boat trip with a car trip, ever wondered how much ocean you can get into a Golf?

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

Some of the species we find in this core are the very same we can here and now, so we can tell quite a lot about how they lived. We'll use these samples to understand #CO2, and climate, via their chemistry. Thanks to Bremen for having us & @erc.europa.eu ForCry for the project and funding.

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.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

With lab member Louisa and ex-lab member (🥲) Rachel, we went to @marumunibremen.bsky.social to samples #IODP @ecord.bsky.social cores. Despite being drilled ~30 years ago, the mud we were looking at was once surface creatures, in the Miocene, 6 million years ago! Thanks Rachel for coming to help!

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.

Once taken, the samples are meticulously labelled so everyone knows we've got them, and we know where they came from. This trip had us taking 800 tiny bags home with us, or 1 ~36kg suitcase. Phew!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 12: End-of-year celebration - raclette edition. On the agenda for this team meeting: cheese, cheese, cheese, goals for next year: even more cheese. We’ve officially reached our melting point. 🧀

The exoCean team and friends actively brainstorming on hot topics

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

If there is oxygen in the sediment, carbonate shells can dissolve. Animals in the seafloor can therefore speed up the dissolution of carbonates. Since this process releases alkalinity, which increases the seawater’s ability to store carbon dioxide, worms can be little climate heroes 🪱

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Mixing a harmless, fast-degrading chemical into the water helps measure how fast animals in the seafloor pump water into burrows. Coastal sediments mainly have oxygen (brown) on the surface; the rest is oxygen-free (black). Animals bring oxygen-rich water into their burrows – look at that network!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 11: Science makes you do strange things. Meet @astridhylen.bsky.social, a postdoc working with carbonate dissolution in coastal sediments. She recently found herself in the middle of a salt marsh, stirring one of the ponds with a (clean) toilet brush taped to a curtain rod.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Bonus question: How much do you think this bag shopping cost in Bermuda?

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... ;)

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Look at these guys! This is the kind of thing we were looking for and bringing back to the lab, for reference that little shrimp is about 1.5mm long. We were looking for (among plenty of other things!) important differences between the Med, and the Sargasso Sea - for example in food preferences.

A microscope image of a typical plankton sample fished by a net. In here you can see plenty of tiny crustaceans, foraminifera and pteropods!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 10: As winter creeps into Provence we remember warmer days from our fieldwork in Bermuda. We stayed with the lovely folk at @biosstation.bsky.social, like @blancobercial.bsky.social who helped us to look for different foraminifera to catch, than our usual Mediterranean stuff.

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.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

The results did not reveal significant trend among the treatments, suggesting that under the tested conditions, the addition of olivine did not appear to affect foraminifera biology. Good news! Also, if anyone needs water filtration in the field with no electricity, Maxime is your guy.

No power? No problem. Maxime will filter water using the power of his lungs.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

To better understand, we cultured G. truncatulinoides under three treatments (natural, NaOH-enriched, and olivine-enriched seawater) to assess their chemical and biological responses to olivine. Over more than a month, we monitored growth, calcification, activity, and survival.

% survival of forams by day in 3 different water treatments. All the graphs kinda look the same.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 9: Meet Maxime (again). At @exoceanlab.bsky.social and @climatecerege.bsky.social Maxime has been conducting several experiments focusing on the culture of marine organisms. One project involved culturing foraminifera in the presence of olivine (Mg,Fe)2SiO4, an igneous mineral.

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!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Once finished, these measurements will be combined with CT scans, and modelling to work out exactly what is happening in these first stages of sediment formation, or indeed alkalinity recycling in the water column. Stay tuned for results later in Katoo's project!

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!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

To quantify this initial dissolution action, Katoo is carefully placing recently deceased individuals inside tiny capillary sized tubes, and measuring pH and oxygen gradients near the carbonate shell over several days (roughly sinking time).

$Nice set up! When trying ti place a glass sensor mere micro-metres away from a fragile shell, precision is required. Here we have a microscope set-up designed just for this, the probes can be moved by fractions of a mm at a time, all whilst the foram and probe end are visible on a computer or down the scope.$

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 8: Meet Katoo Declerk's Erasmus+ work. During her internship Katoo is investigating recently dead foraminifera (handily available in our lab!) Forams typically sink to the ocean floor soon after death, but partial or total dissolution can occur before getting there.

A foram carefully lined up beneath the microscope, ready for investigation. 📷 K. Declerk

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

After the run, one can even spot the @sulpis.bsky.social « actively stretching »

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

#exocean advent calendar Day 7! We are lucky to be based in a pine forest, in Southern France, which means loads of possible walks to discuss science in a wonderful environment. We also like to run together - as we did Friday to finish the week!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Coming soon! Sneak peek 👀 meet the new titanium reactor from our engineering partner Irian Mecatronics. Titanium because saltwater is petty and 1000 bar is rough. Integrated sensors, sampling system… Compact, tidy, and ready to misbehave, in a controlled way (we hope!). 🔧🛠️⚙️

Titanium high-pressure reactor under construction
(said in the voice of Sia).

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

The reactors will sit at ridiculous pressures without blinking, let us stream fluids through like tiny intravenous lines, and give us a view through sapphire windows. Materials, energy, biotech, food… if it likes pressure, or might do something cool under pressure, it’s welcome here.

A depress(uriz)ed blobfish, credit: National Geographic
(It doesn't look like this in its natural habitat!)

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 6: To study the deepest ocean trenches, we’re building reactors that make our lab behave like the deep ocean. Funded by @erc.europa.eu #Deep-C, they will hold cold seawater at ~1000 bar (10km water) so we* watch pressure shape chemistry and biology 🔬🌊 *mostly @sulpis.bsky.social

Schematic of the Deep-C high-pressure reactor and in situ sensors.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

@erc.europa.eu #ForCry aims to take the curves like those in post two much further back in time, looking at warmer intervals to look for the tell tale signs of Earth's climate changing its vibe. Find more details below! exocean.academicwebsite.com/projects/643...

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/

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

To the lab! With @juliemeilland.bsky.social we catch living foraminifera (calcite growers) and subject them to different CO2 concentrations. We can measure their boron and use the relationship in the past! Well done if you made it this far, & understood. Get in touch if you want to know more.

Hundreds of individual plankton living in controlled CO2 conditions. From Bermuda in the summer, but we do it in France too!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

#Boron isotopes (a fancy chemical measurement from tiny shells, like these shown below) can be used to reconstruct CO2, just like the ice cores can in the past (also shown below). A little less precise, but show great potential, especially if we can work out how they work in laboratory conditions.

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.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 4: Why did we set up this lab? Part I. What is going to happen to climate as CO2 levels go up? @chalkyoceans.bsky.social and @erc.europa.eu project #ForCry look at CO2 in the past to better understand climate sensitivity. Part of this is making better past CO2 reconstructions.

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.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

And yes, you'll be added too if you come to work in our lab, @cerege.bsky.social! @soniachaabane.bsky.social, @jysuarezibarra.bsky.social, and others have their figures already. Find details about the full size versions of all these folk now (or soon) on our website. exocean.academicwebsite.com

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!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 3: An important part of creating a lab is to be able to plan things in miniature, for this we use #Lego versions of our team, they tend to be a bit cheaper for testing. You may spot some of @chalkyoceans.bsky.social's not so secret wishlist in the background (#nu-instruments).

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).

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

If you are interested to come out to sea, then let us know. Water, sediments, plankton sampling and more. Can we tempt you with dolphins, whales, flamingos, disgusting* sun fish, and leaping tuna**? Just look at those skies***! *look it up **none of which are guaranteed. ***this is more likely.

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!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Together with @juliemeilland.bsky.social, we have perfected the task of bringing plankton back to the lab alive — more on that later in the month. When it is sunny and flat, even a rare @tdegaridel.bsky.social can be spotted offshore.

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.

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