Meyer-Kaiser lab

"I feel like I'm visiting family!" Beverly exclaimed as she hugged me. I returned her embrace whole-heartedly, because I felt the same.  After a second, I pulled back and met her eyes, hands still on her shoulders. "Right?!"  I had never met Beverly in person, but we felt like old, close friends. We were introduced a few years ago by a mutual collaborator, archaeologist Calvin Mires. We hit it off instantly over Zoom and developed a research proposal to submit together. Alas, the funding gods would not see us collaborate, because the proposal was declined. But we stayed in touch nonetheless.  Beverly lives in Israel. Her research uses geological methods - mostly sediment cores - to answer archaeological questions. Beverly is also obsessed with tsunamis. Any time she takes a sediment core, she can tell instantly if there was a tsunami in the study site's geological history. "Tsunami deposits," which consist of large rocks and shells, jump out of the...

Friends, time is a funny thing. Sometimes, it seems to crawl along, but other times, it flies past me with a nearly-audible whoosh. The past few weeks have been a waterfall of events - and then it was July.  Our dive site, Outer Brewster island I want to highlight two events. First, I went SCUBA diving with a friend in Boston Harbor. It was so good to get in the water again, and trust me, my trim was much better this time. Another friend had actually emailed me to ask for a few sea stars, so I spent part of my dive gathering specimens off the seafloor for her. The sea stars are safe in my freezer now, waiting for shipment to her lab. Soon, they will contribute to research! Another key part of my summer has been preparing for my scallop project . The last two years, I have gone out on scallop fishing boats to collect samples . This year, my schedule was full enough that I didn't go out to sea myself - but I still had to do all the prep work. I spent a few days gathering all the sa...

Friends, this week has been a big one for my lab. Another paper reporting the results of my research has been published, and I am overjoyed. This most recent paper has been published in the highest-ranking scientific journal in the world, Nature .  What it looked like stepping out of the helicopter on an  iceberg laden with dropstones. Photo from 2021.  The story begins in 2021 with the discovery of an iceberg in eastern Greenland carrying thousands of dark black rocks. Colleagues and I flew to the iceberg from R/V Polarstern with a helicopter to investigate. Our discovery inspired a whole series of analyses that have taken the last 5 years to complete.  Along the way, we discovered that the iceberg was not unique. In fact, we found that there was a stark 5x increase in iceberg sightings in the Fram Strait beginning in 2000. Most of those icebergs originated in northeast Greenland or northern Russia, where glaciers have lost mass and calved off increasing numbers o...

Corals living near the rudder of a WWII ship in Palau Friends, I am excited to announce the publication of a scientific paper from my lab! This paper concerns the communities of animals that live on underwater shipwrecks , airplanes , and natural coral reefs in Palau. Back in 2022 and 2023, while I was in Palau for my Porites project , I used extra days to investigate some of the WWII remnants in Palau's waters. My team produced a dataset of photos showing corals, sponges, and oysters living on each habitat. Last summer, I asked my intern, Olivia, to identify all the species in the photos. Her analysis showed clear differences between the corals living on the ships and planes compared to the naturally-occurring coral reefs that were right next to them. We thought this finding was incredibly interesting. The difference can't be driven by larval dispersal because the wrecks and reefs were only meters apart. They had to be driven by the substrates themselves - the metals that ma...

Whenever I give a public presentation about shipwrecks, I refer to our seafloor containing "layers of history." Vessels piloted by Indigenous peoples, European colonists, and Americans, as part of transportation, energy, and industrial sectors - all of these vessels rest on our seafloor, representing centuries of our shared history as a seafaring species.  On Manresa Island, the "layers of history" are literal and obvious. The 23-acre island was used as a private retreat, first by an individual and then by a Jesuit society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1950, a coal-fired power plant was built on the island, which distributed ash into the surrounding salt marsh and expanded the island's size to 125 acres. The power plant switched from coal to oil in the 1970s, then stopped producing power in 2013. Nowadays, a birch forest covers the area where coal ash filled in the salt marsh. If you take a sediment core on Manresa Island - as terrestrial researc...

"I should bring my son here," James mused. I nodded in approval - every kid loves a good aquarium. As James and I waited for our host at the entrance to the New England Aquarium in Boston, we were surrounded by children. One group of school-age kids wore matching tie-dye. A teacher's shirt declared in bold letters "Second grade is magic!" The high-pitched squeals of delighted children were the only sounds louder than the din of running water.  Age aside, I fit right in with the young students. I had purposefully selected a dress with colorful nudibranchs on it for my day at the aquarium. While James and I waited, I practically bounced with excitement for our behind-the scenes tour. Every marine biologist is just a grown-up kid in an aquarium.  Summer, James, and me in front of the live coral tank at  New England Aquarium.  Our host, Summer, arrived and shook our hands. Summer is a Senior Aquarist whose work involves exhibit development, partnership building, and...

"I'm not standing still; I am lying in wait" - "Wait for it" from the musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda Sometimes, I wonder what my dog thinks I do all day. From his perspective, I seem to be sitting still. I am constantly in this one office chair, staring at the same brightly-lit screen in front of me, often tapping on the keys. To him, this activity seems monotonous and unproductive. But I'm not just sitting still. I am lying in wait.  The SS United States was supposed to sink last November. Then it was February, then April, and now, we don't even have an estimated timeline. I thought I was going to go straight from vacation to the field last fall, but instead, I have been on standby for months.  The extra time has afforded me the chance to build my plan . Idle scientists tend to dream, and I have dreamt big. While waiting for SS United States to sink, I have connected with collaborators about a potential citizen science project, sparked an id...