Meyer-Kaiser lab

Friends, you're familiar with my love of modern art . I see art and science as orthogonal axes  on the same plane - different ways of capturing the human experience. I incorporate art   with my scientific work and learn from artists whenever I can. Well, today, I am once again drawing on modern art to describe my experience. I am working on a paper revision, and I keep thinking about Martha Graham.  Martha Graham is the mother of modern dance in the United States. She developed her own unique style and technique - even today, you can take dance classes in Graham Technique, and there is an entire professional dance company  that bears her name and uses her style. One of Graham's most famous pieces is called Lamentation . It's a solo ballet performed by a dancer inside of a piece of fabric. As the dancer moves, the fabric stretches, changing shape over and over yet still constraining the dancer's movement.  This week, I have been dancing inside fabric, friends...

On the way from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales on Route 9 , our bus had to stop for a herd of cows to cross the road! If you grew up in the 1990s like me, you certainly learned about the Ozone Hole in school. The "hole" is an area in the atmosphere, centered over Antarctica, where ozone is pretty sparse, and more UV radiation makes it through the atmosphere to the surface of Earth. We were at pretty high latitude (51 - 53 deg) in the southern hemisphere, so UV was a concern. I always made sure to cover up and use sunscreen when we were outdoors. This abandoned pier outside Puerto Natales is now a bird habitat. There are a lot of dogs on the streets in Chile, but it's unclear whether they are pets or strays. My experience in Palau taught me that in some countries, there is a large gray area between the two categories - there are pets who roam, and there are strays who have a home base. We're not sure which category this guy belonged to. He was incredibly polite, as mo...

After a few days in Puerto Natales and lots of hikes in Torres del Paine National Park, the Geodynamics class returned south to Punta Arenas. We toured the Chilean Antarctic Center so the students could have another introduction to Antarctic research. I shipped home a total of 32 samples from 11 stations including near glaciers, in glacial lakes , near icebergs, and throughout the fjord . I was feeling victorious. What could cap off a highly successful trip to Patagonia? One more hike, of course.  My colleague and co-instructor, Michelle, came with me to the Magallanes National Reserve just west of Punta Arenas. The circuit trail, Las Lengas, takes you through the Patagonian forest to a series of viewpoints overlooking the Strait of Magellan. It was a beautiful hike.  I kept seeing these small red berries everywhere, and they reminded me of cranberries. I looked it up, and they are actually related to cranberries!  A beautiful mushroom  Looking out from Mirador Zapa...

A major reason why the Geodynamics class traveled to Patagonia this year was to see glaciers! I want to highlight some of the glaciers we visited and the sights we encountered along the way.  Seen in Torres del Paine National Park. Photo by Elena Perez. Glacial lakes abound in Torres del Paine. These lakes are filled with glacial meltwater. The dark color is from sediment that was released by the melting glacier. Photo by Elena Perez. An iceberg in Lago Grey, a glacial lake fed by Grey Glacier. Photo by Elena Perez. Sunrise at the entrance to Torres del Paine National Park. Serrano Glacier, in Bernard O'Higgins National Park. Photo by Marta Faulkner. Balmaceda Glacier. Photo by Marta Faulkner. One of our open-water sampling stations in the fjord outside Puerto Natales.  Filtering eDNA from water samples in the fjord! Photo by Marta Faulkner. Another freshwater input to the fjord - a waterfall! Photo by Marta Faulkner.

Fog over the cormorants. Photo by Marta Faulkner. Fog hung over the fjord as we pulled away from the dock in the early morning. It wasn't thick or soupy like fog sometimes is. Rather, the moisture clung together in ribbons that weaved around the rocky hills. The fog had its own agenda, knew its own limits. It did not feel the need to blanket us but rather traversed its own path between the peaks. The fog let us be.  After leaving the dock, our first stop was at a cormorant colony. I felt the boat's engines shift gear and calm their mechanical whir. After years of working at sea, the drop of an engine to me means one thing and one thing only: we have arrived at a sampling station.  I didn't care about the cormorant colony. Or the seals that lounged on rocks at the next stop. Or the waterfall cascading into the sea. Each of those marvelous sights drew the 100-some passengers on our boat out of doors, cameras in hand. They slid past one another in the narrow passages and elbow...

Friends, in addition to leading the Geodynamics students around Patagonia, I have my own personal mission: I am collecting samples. (Of course I am. Are you really surprised? Have you ever known me to travel and just enjoy ? Come on.) The samples I'm collecting are part of a project on icebergs that actually served as the impetus for this year's Geodynamics class focusing on the Southern Ocean and coming to Patagonia. The icebergs project came first, and the class took shape around it.  On the dock outside Puerto Natales where I collected my  first samples - it was a successful afternoon! The icebergs project is an effort to understand how ice impacts the marine ecosystem. As many of you know, I have studied the dynamics of dropstone communities in the Arctic since my PhD . Dropstones are terrestrial stones that become entrained glaciers, are carried out to sea by icebergs that calve off of those glaciers, and then fall to the seafloor when the icebergs melt. I have studied ho...

Looking out from inside Cueva del Milod όn With all the Geodynamics students finally in Patagonia, we traveled from Punta Arenas up to Puerto Natales . If Punta Arenas is the research hub of Patagonia, Puerto Natales is the outdoor adventure hub. There are hostels on pretty much every street corner, and plenty of people around town have giant backpacks to survive multiple days in the mountains. That's because Puerto Natales serves as the gateway to Torres del Paine National Park .  Some of the more ambitious students took off on a hike in the park as soon as we arrived. Others explored a ca ve near town, and it is this latter destination that I want to highlight: la Cueva del Milodόn (Mylodon Cave).  If you haven't seen a Mylodon before, that's understandable. They're extinct. Mylodons were giant ground sloths that lived in the southern part of South America, including Patagonia, in the late Pleistocene. They were massive - 3 or 4 m long, with body masses in the tons. C...

At the halfway point in my trip, my companions completely changed. Carl and Maria , who had accompanied me on the vacation leg, headed home to resume normal life, and they were replaced by 18 PhD students and 3 of my fellow faculty in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. In between, I had just enough time to switch hotels and do a load of laundry in the bathtub. The 2025 WHOI Geodynamics Patagonia trip was on! [Well, for most of us. A group of 9 people got hung up in transit and ended up arriving a day later than planned. Anytime you try to take 22 people to a new continent, someone's flight will be delayed. It's basically a law of nature.] R/V Noosfera at the pier in Punta Arenas.  Photo by Michelle Shero. Those of us who made it to Chile on the first day had a good start to our trip - with a scientific meeting. It was important to me to connect with researchers on the ground during our visit to Patagonia. One of our motivations for flying into Punta Arenas was to experience the Sout...

By far my favorite thing that we did in Punta Arenas was visit Isla Magdalena to see the breeding colony of Magellanic penguins ( Spheniscus magellanicus ). These adorable flightless birds migrate every year to the tropics on the west and east sides of South America, then return to Patagonia to breed. The males arrive first to make burrows, and the females arrive a bit later. A clutch of exactly two eggs is laid in October, and the chicks hatch 40 days later. During our visit (in March), the juveniles had just molted and left the island. The adults were completing their own molt and getting ready to return north for the winter.  This post will contain a lot of penguin pictures. I just have to share them! This is what the landscape looks like at Isla Magdalena - a lighthouse, grass, and penguins. Hi, little guy! Some penguins headed to the beach We were told not to touch the penguins, to give them plenty of space, and to let them cross the path without interference. This little guy ...

After a few days in what seemed like the end of the world, remote Torres del Paine , we turned around and followed the Route to the End of the World back south...to the actual end of the world. Friends, I am in Punta Arenas, Chile! Punta Arenas certainly doesn't seem like the end of the world. It's a city with 145,000 people. There are restaurants and shopping malls and traffic noise. If you air-dropped me in the middle of downtown with no information and made me guess where I was, I would never guess "On an isolated peninsula at the bottom of the globe."  The first Chileans to live in Punta Arenas arrived here in 1848, after a short-lived attempt to settle further south. Fuerte Bulnes (Bulnes Fort), the site of the first Chilean settlement in the Magallanes region, is exposed and windy - I can tell you that from personal experience after visiting the historic site. Bulnes actually got such a bad reputation for living conditions that it eventually became a penal colo...

Guanacos! These funny animals ( Lama guanicoe ) are the relatives of llamas and alpacas, and they belong to the same family as camels. They are everywhere ! We saw a ton of these duck-ish birds. I tried hard to get a good picture so I could upload it to this species identification app I use. After all that trouble, the app said "it's a bird." Yeah, thanks, app. A visit to the natural history museum showed me that this darling is in fact a male Upland Goose ( Chloephaga picta ), also called Caiquén. My first thought when I saw these birds was "emu," but I knew I was on the wrong continent. Instead, these are rheas! Also called ñandus, they are the South American equivalent of emus or ostriches. The species in Patagonia is Rhea pennata . We visited a rocky intertidal site, and I was excited to see blue mussels! These are Mytilus chilensis , a close relative of the species I'm familiar with from the northern hemisphere. Just like their boreal brethren, M. chile...

  The towers with a glacial lake (Laguna Azul) Ranching is ubiquitous in Patagonia Super weird cloud formation seen in Torres del Paine My husband is a dork.