Environmental Chemical Mapping Using an Underwater Mass Spectrometer

An underwater mass spectrometer (MS) deployed on a remotely guided surface vehicle was used to monitor a suite of dissolved gases and volatile organics in saltwater and freshwater environments. Spectrometer data were acquired at a rate of 0.7–3.6 s/sample for 2–3 h. The resulting multi-analyte spectrometer data were recorded in real time with the Global Positioning System (GPS) observations of the surface vehicle and transmitted to a remote laptop computer via a wireless Ethernet link. These data were merged to create high-resolution maps of chemical distributions.