Meyer-Kaiser lab

Early morning low tide at the jetty Sometimes on this blog, I use the titles of my posts as a motif: a series of posts with similar titles will tell a cohesive story or use a unifying metaphor. My last post was "Waking up," and this installment is "Early morning." The two posts must be related, right? Nope, I've just been getting up at the crack of dawn. No metaphor needed - this time, the title is literal.  August is anemone spawning season. My early-morning routine started last Friday, when I went to the Cape Cod Jetty in Sandwich, MA for the 6:30 am low tide. Metridium senile lives in the protected spaces between rocks in the low intertidal, so I got up close and personal with the jetty. I crouched with my feet in the water, my knees in algae, and my hand tucked under a boulder as I scraped slimy creatures off the stone with my finger nails. More than once, I could feel a fisherman's eyes on me in a mix of confusion and judgment. After only half an hour,...

The end of every research cruise is disorienting . For weeks, I have seen the same finite group of people ,  and we spontaneously formed a miniature society. Then all of a sudden, I am back where I started - in this case, home in Woods Hole - and surrounded by an entirely different group of people. It feels almost like waking up from a really good dream.  I took some time off after the Heroic Age cruise . In fact, the day after I stepped off the ship, my husband and I flew to the Midwest for a long weekend with my family. My experience at sea slipped entirely out of my mind as I played in a water park with my 6-year-old nephew. The Labrador Sea was nowhere in my thoughts as I cheered with my sister-in-law at a kitschy dinner theater. If the expedition was a dream, that long weekend was the delightful delirium that comes in the early light of dawn.  So here I am friends, back at home. By day, I write my dreams on paper , asking the funding powers-that-be to grant me more ...

R/V Atlantis in Woods Hole, just prior to departure Yours truly briefing the science party on the biological goals for our expedition. Photo by Ken Kostel. This sign used to say "scientific laboratory." The room became the home base for CBC News on board, so they amended the door sign appropriately.  Rocky cliffs of Newfoundland We could see Greenland in the distance from the Terra Nova site. Sunset on an iceberg, seen at the Terra Nova site. The ROV team hosted a ping pong tournament on the transit home.  Every game had three players: two humans and the motion of the ship.

One of the marine technicians aboard Atlantis has a sticker on her water bottle that grabbed my attention. It features a smiling cartoon frog with the caption, "The horrors persist, but so do I." What a fitting sentiment for our last few days at sea.  After leaving Terra Nova , we steamed due south into the North Atlantic. A shorter route would have been to steam southwest, along the Canadian coast, but a large storm covered most of the Labrador Sea. We skirted around it, far enough from the epicenter to be safe but not so far as to excessively extend our travel time. As Atlantis pitched and rolled in confused 8-ft seas, I retreated to my bunk. As this point in my life , with the depth of sea-going experience that I have, I knew it was pointless to fight . So I took my anti-nausea medication and hunkered into bed, only venturing upstairs to eat carbohydrates every few hours.  Thankfully, my body acclimates quickly . After a few days of my eat-sleep-medicine cycle, I emerge...

VSLAM in action on Terra Nova. Left panel shows the  ROV video; right panel shows the poitn cloud.  Another day, another night, another night shift. I settled into my designated place, right behind the ROV team, where I could see the screens and take notes without interfering with the pilot. The ROV descended to the seafloor and approached Terra Nova . When the pilot felt comfortable, he called to a colleague at the back of the room: "Slam it!" No, that was not a command to smash equipment. We've been using a software called VSLAM to make 3D models of our target shipwrecks, Quest and Terra Nova , in real time. As the ROV's camera records photo after photo, the images are fed into VSLAM, and a point cloud showing the structure of the wreck materializes on the screen. VSLAM is an incredibly useful tool - because the point cloud is made in real time, it's easy to identify gaps in the model and back-track to cover them. As the model slowly comes together, we can get...

An iceberg seen near R/V Atlantis . Photo by Sam Dahlgren, with the camera pointing through a pair of binoculars My phone buzzed under my pillow, rousing me from a shallow sleep. I opened my eyes and checked my watch. It was a few minutes before 1 pm. With ROV dives taking place at night, I've been on a nocturnal schedule. My phone buzzed again, and I swiped on the screen to open it. There were two new messages on the expedition text thread. The first said simply "Land ho!" The second was a photo of an iceberg.  I knew that Terra Nova sank close to Greenland. I had been told we would see the rocky, ice-laden island. But once we arrived, the land and the ice felt surprising all the same. Physically being in a place is so different from reading about it or watching it on video.  The ROV team deployed our little robotic vehicle into the cold, clear sea. After a short descent, the vehicle arrived on the seafloor. It looked muddy, just like most of the ocean bottom. The ROV...

"Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture...they're the same picture."  - The Office , and countless memes since 11 years in between. Same exuberant Kirstin.  In 2015, I had a life-changing experience: I dove in  Alvin . Being underwater and personally visiting the deep ocean was the most profound thing I had ever experienced. I vowed to do everything in my power to get back into the sub, and to get others the chance to dive.  It took me 11 years.  Yesterday, I was offered the opportunity to dive in Alvin to visit the Quest shipwreck in the Labrador Sea. I was immensely grateful to once again enter the deep sea. Friends, I have the coolest job on this ocean planet.  We descended at a site some 200 m away from the wreck itself. The archaeologists on board have been calling the site "the plunge pit," because they suspect it contains debris that fell off of Quest when she sank. There were some bright spots at the si...