Deployment: KM0704

The BULA cruise, a transect from Suva, Fiji to Honolulu, Hawaii was the inagural cruise of the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE). Some of the many goals were: (1) to identify prominent trends in plankton biomass, biomass structure, and elemental stoichiometry, (2) to examine latitudinal variability in upper ocean concentrations of colored dissolved organic matter and trace metal ligands, (3) to isolate new Prochlorococcus strains, (4) to optically determine upper ocean biogeochemical variables, (5) to study the distribution, production and loss rates of dissolved hydrogen and its relationship to nitrogen fixation, (6) to study viral diversity along biogeochemical gradients, (7) to assay spatial distributions of microbial community structure based on rRNA fingerprinting and sequencing, and (8) to assess spacial variability in photophysiological responses to photoautotrophs.

Original sources available from C-MORE Web Site:

• BULA Home page: http://cmore.soest.hawaii.edu/cruises/bula/index.htm
• BULA Data: http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/cmorebula/cmorebula.html
• Cruise track: http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/cmorebula/bula1track.gif
• Cruise log: http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/cmorebula/CMOREBULA_Cruise_Log.pdf (sample log sheets)
• Cruise activities: http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/cmorebula/Cruise_activities.pdf (Cruise Report)
• Cruise summary: ftp://ftp.soest.hawaii.edu/dkarl/cmore/cruise.summaries/bula1.sum (station/cast locations)

Cruise information and original data are available from the NSF R2R data catalog.