Materials and methods

We collected water samples from Shannon Point Beach and SPMC sea tables on January 30, February 1, 7, 10, and 14 in 2012. Samples were collected from the shore of the beach and from a hose in the seatable room. Three 125 ml replicates were collected from each site (20 ml for pH and 105 ml for alkalinity measurements). We compared pCO2 of Shannon Point Beach and the sea tables on two time scales: weekly and daily.

Dickson Certified Reference Materials were analyzed with both pH and alkanity to verify instrument calibration. We collected samples at 8:00 am, 12:00 and 3:00 pm to observe the diurnal variation of pCO2 at the beach. An Hydrolab DataSonde 5 was deployed at the sea tables for 10 days and then moved to the intake to measure in situ pH on the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) scale. The intake is where the seawater for the sea tables comes from and we wanted to know if the pH at the sea tables was similar to the intake. We used a T-test to compare seatable and in situ pH measurements taken with the DataSonde.

Page Updated 06.12.2012