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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

After a couple of months sampling with and for the others - we got to go at sea “for us” and now enjoy these little beauties in the lab 🤩

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Tom Chalk @chalkyoceans.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Great to see more work from our culturing seasons in the Arctic twin to @juliemeilland.bsky.social and my @chalkyoceans.bsky.social Mediterranean culturing space, housed in the @exoceanlab.bsky.social at @climatecerege.bsky.social.

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Tom Chalk @chalkyoceans.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Cool off from the heat dome (if affected) with a pair of lovely Arctic papers out recently in GCA from UiT (ex-)students Adele Westgård and Freya Sykes. Take your pick, N. pachyderma or G. bulloides, but they are both successfully cultured in the Tromsø polar culture facility with Mohamed Ezat.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

The organizers of the seminar series «The Life of Retaria » got their first paper out - nice read for the weekend?!

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Forams respiration work with an ExoCean member!

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Julie Meilland @juliemeilland.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

🚨PhD alert 🚨 together with @tbiard.bsky.social and myself, based mostly in Wimereux with multiple stay in the beautiful @exoceanlab.bsky.social and focused on planktonic rhizarians C export and respiration. Get in touch!

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Dr. Nina Davtian (she/her/hers) @ninadavtian.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

Do you recall when @anandpallavijha.bsky.social and @chalkyoceans.bsky.social said during ICP15 that @antacl.bsky.social would join @cerege.bsky.social @climatecerege.bsky.social? Well, they didn't lie: www.cerege.fr/en/cerege/an... bsky.app/profile/anan... #IWD #InternationalWomensDay 👩‍🔬 (1/2)

cerege.fr

Anta-Clarisse Sarr - CEREGE

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Tom Chalk @chalkyoceans.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Really proud of @jysuarezibarra.bsky.social for his upcoming #MSCA research position with us @climatecerege.bsky.social. Not only a really exciting project to help us find out more about the climate system, but also an excellent career step for a superb young researcher.

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CEREGE @cerege.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

In the latest @exoceanlab.bsky.social interview, Jaime shares how his project eCO₂-MorpH uses planktonic foraminifera to reconstruct past CO₂ and inform climate models. Full interview: exocean.academicwebsite.com/pages/4065

exocean.academicwebsite.com

exocean - News & Highlights

In the Spotlight A Lego version of Dr. Suárez-Ibarra (left) and Dr. Chalk (right) hypothetically analysing a marine sediment core. In the back (still in f...

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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

#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 · 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

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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 · 20/12/2025

And...you. 🫵🏼! If you want to come work with us then get in touch. Message us here, or head to the website in our profile details. 'Tis the season*. *Of @cnrs.fr applications, good luck to everyone who is applying!

media.tenor.com

mariah carey is wearing a santa suit and smiling .

Alt: mariah carey is wearing a santa suit and smiling. All we want for Xmas (and other denominated vacations) is you to come and do some cool science with us.

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

12 scientific papers 💻, 11 months of good weather 🌞, 10⁴ foram babies 🐚, 9 visiting scientists 👩🏼‍🔬👨🏾‍🔬, 8 successful boat missions 🛥️, 7 website visits 🙏🏼, 6 new hypotheses 💡...*5 gold rings*...4 defended masters 📜, 3 #ForCry mass spec methods 🔍, 2 #Deep-C reactors 🧿...

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exoCean Laboratory @exoceanlab.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 20: it's wishing time... Whether you believe in Santa (the French singer 🎤), FC, or as I recently heard, Professor Xmas... We can all hope for some things in the holiday season... At @exoceanlab.bsky.social we would like (in no particular order):

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Tom Chalk @chalkyoceans.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Essential reading for those interested in going carbon negative 👀. See what @sulpis.bsky.social does for a living and how it connects to @exoceanlab.bsky.social here!

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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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Tom Chalk @chalkyoceans.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Net accident you say? Ooops, this net came back looking like it had been mauled by a shark, and I think... Maybe it had. A good, but expensive(!) sample. Sorry @tdegaridel.bsky.social!

Look carefully! Fish carefully! A picture of a totally trashed plankton net and the legs of two very tired scientists.

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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

As well as being a great opportunity to network, and wow people with their work on planktic foraminifera. Evolution and its impacts on foraminifera geochemistry for Jaime, and modern problems and data gathering for planktic foraminifera for Sonia...

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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 · 13/12/2025

#exoCeanadvent Day 13: Time Machine. Travel back in time with us 6 million years. Part of the reason for our work @exoceanlab.bsky.social is to better understand the past through observing the modern, but sometimes you just need some ancient mud..@chalkyoceans.bsky.social recently went to get some!

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Dr. Nina Davtian (she/her/hers) @ninadavtian.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Are you following @exoceanlab.bsky.social? If not, then you are missing their #AdventCalendar, which describes one thing about this lab—team members, research, and equipment—everyday this month until 24th! @climatecerege.bsky.social 🧪 🌊

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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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