exoCean Laboratory

#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!

HMS Challenger

#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. 🌊

Looking at you, Titan

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.

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

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. 🧠

HMS Challenger

#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. 🌊

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.

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.

Matthieu loading in the sample information prior to launching.

(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.

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

#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!

Ship time *scheduled!

#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!

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.

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!

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 🧿...

#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):

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!

glorious peacock seducing CEREGE people

please feed me

we love peacocks so much they follow us in our offices

#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. 🦚

Read the European Marine Board report here: 📘👀
www.marineboard.eu/publications...

there is always something dissolving in our lab

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 🔬

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...

#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.

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!

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

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.

#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.

...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.

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...

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

#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.

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

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

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 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!

#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! ❄️

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).

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.

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!

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.