Go confidently

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.” – Henry David Thoreau

I think it’s about time I told you the story of how I got to Norway and explained the whole reason why I’m here. It started sometime in the fall of 2013, when the American National Science Foundation put out a call for applications for so-called GROW (Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide) travel grants. Since I happened to be eligible for the grant, my advisor suggested I give it a shot.

Plexiglass settlement plates attached to a PVC frame. I hope
to outplant about 40 of these puppies. Trust me, building them
and shipping them to Svalbard were not small feats!

Applicants had to pick from one of several partner countries and propose a research project to undertake with a collaborator in the partner country. I chose Norway because I was already in contact with a collaborator there, and I thought an experiment in Norwegian waters might compliment the work I had already begun with him.

To be perfectly honest, at the time I submitted the application, I wasn’t confident in it. I thought my project was poorly planned, and it seemed to me that I had just invented a reason to go to Norway. Now that I’m further into it, I realize my project here will perfectly complement several other studies I’m doing and may in fact become an important part of my thesis. It's amazing to me how this experience has turned out so far, considering it began with a mere "Why don't you give it a shot?" I suppose, as Thoreau advises, that I should go confidently into each new experience.

What is this project, you ask? Well, for the sake of avoiding scientific jargon, I’ll tell you that I want to figure out why things live where they do (that is the basic goal of ecology). Specifically, I want to find out why sessile (non-moving) benthic (living on the bottom) invertebrates (animals without backbones) live on the hard substrata (rocks, etc.) in fjords and what abiotic (non-living) factors might influence their distributions. Some abiotic factors include temperature, salinity of the water, the presence of glaciers, and sedimentation.

I took this photo while leaving Longyearbyen aboard a
research vessel in 2011.

To answer this scientific question, I’m outplanting pieces of plexiglass for animals to settle on, and I’m

collecting half of them after 4 months and the rest after a year. The settlement plates will be outplanted in a few different fjords and at different locations in each fjord so I can see how the communities are different within and between fjords.

The best part of the experiment (in my opinion) is that my field sites – where my settlement plates will be outplanted – are all in the Svalbard archipelago. Don’t know where Svalbard is? It’s north of continental Norway at about 78-80° N, and it’s a magical place. I passed through Longyearbyen, the main settlement, in 2011 and 2012, so I’m very excited to go back.

I’m so incredibly blessed to be living the life I always imagined.