Meyer-Kaiser lab

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...

Quest 's bow The ROV pressed forward into the darkness. Out of the dim blue haze ahead of its camera, a vertical wall emerged - Quest 's hull. The vessel rested upright on the seafloor, with its bow standing proud above the sediment.  The colors were vibrant. Orange and pink strands hung from the wooden structure like birthday streamers - probably my birthday, given the palette. I leaned forward, stepping off of my chair, to narrow the distance between my face and the screen. I could feel the ROV pilot's eyes shift in my direction as my face hovered over his shoulder. He didn't say anything, but the side-eye showed I had come close enough. Note to self: respect others' personal boundaries, even when there is cool biology in view.  I sat back in my chair and pondered what I was seeing. The streamers were puzzling. I have seen plenty of marine organisms in my day - gastropods and tunicates and priapulids, polychaetes and crinoids and chaetognaths. Monoplacophorans...

The first thing I noticed were the nets. As WHOI's Falcon ROV flew across the seafloor towards a bright sonar target, a tangled mass of fishing net appeared in our camera's view.  A fishing net on the stern of Quest "Oh, it's a net!" came the exclamation from the back of the room. We saw the nets before we even saw the wreck. They were everywhere - on the sediment, draped over the hull, coiled on the deck. Our target shipwreck, Quest , was absolutely covered in fishing nets.  My mind flashed back to 2020. That year, I was the chief scientist for a team working in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary . We extensively documented the passenger steamship Portland , which had three entangled fishing nets. In fact, my team's research showed that  two new nets had impacted the wreck between 2009 and 2019. I remember the surprise of finding those nets. I remember the concern my team felt for the ROV and the careful planning we undertook to prevent entanglement. ...

Seen near St. Anthony's, Newfoundland "I love this country so much, it's so beautiful!" Riley bounced a few times on his toes as he declared his love for Canada. I had to admit - St. Anthony's, Newfoundland, was a particularly impressive spot. From the bow of R/V Atlantis , we could see limestone cliffs rising from the sea. A lighthouse perched atop the rocks warned vessels to keep their distance. Beside the lighthouse was a small cluster of houses nestled in a valley. With the sun shining on a bright blue sea, the scene looked like a sleepy storybook fishing village. Patches of snow rested on some hillcrests, even though it was July. I imagined the residents of St. Anthony's hiking to the tops of those hills each weekend - what a privilege that must be.  Many of the participants aboard Atlantis have memories of St. Anthony's. Two years ago, when the Royal Canadian Geographic Society (RCGS) launched an expedition to find Quest with side-scan sonar , they...

We gathered in the Hydro lab. This room, located on the aft port side of R/V Atlantis , is usually home base for robotics teams. The Alvin team uses it for desk work, and during my last Atlantis cruise in 2015, the team for the Sentry autonomous vehicle set up their equipment here. On AT52, my current expedition, the Hydro lab is home base for the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) team.  We're using a small ROV - a tethered robotic vehicle - to survey our two target shipwrecks, Quest and Terra Nova . The ROV can stay on the seafloor for longer than Alvin , and the video feed can be live-streamed all over the ship for everyone to see. The two vehicles - one manned, the other unmanned - perfectly complement one another.  Dwight (chief scientist), Andy, and Sam (ROV team) during the ROV test dive As we steamed north past Nova Scotia, we paused to conduct a test dive with the ROV. The vehicle we're using has completed numerous missions as part of WHOI's Ocean Observing Initia...

I rounded the corner, and the wind hit me - literally. The force of the air pressing into my chest felt like I had walked straight into a brick wall. I stumbled backward and grabbed the railing. Any sane person would have turned back, walked back down the stairs, and retreated inside. But I am not a sane person.  I pressed forward, one steel-toed boot step at a time. On R/V Atlantis , scientists are allowed on the bow - and I was determined to take full advantage of that access. I was practicing my ritual, breaking up long periods of laptop work by stepping outside, no matter the weather. It was important to me to experience the environment and remember where I am on planet Earth. The motion of the ship intensified as I marched determinedly forward. The closer I got to my destination, the more I could feel the bow's upward swing with each wave. Then a rogue wave splashed against the side of the vessel, and I was sprayed with chilled seawater. I laughed - my old friend was saying he...

"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...

Graves Light I put together my rebreather in the den. Every piece was there, just as I had packed it after  Bonaire . I sat on the floor, pulled each part of my beloved X-CCR gingerly from its padded box, and built the unit piece by piece. I blew into the loop, and the unit held positive pressure. I sucked air out, and it held negative pressure. The seals were holding. My unit was complete. All systems go.  I turned on the dive computer that was hard-wired into my rebreather. The display lit up. In the upper right, the computer displayed my surface interval: 183 days.  Ouch.  I knew it had been several months since I was in the water, but somehow, seeing the number of days - in the hundreds - made it seem even longer. It was definitely time for me to travel beneath the waves again.  I drove to Boston in the early morning, loaded my gear on a charter boat, and headed out to Graves Light. The lighthouse, situated at the entrance to Boston Harbor, was surrounded by...

My dog, Kraken, is incredibly good at recognizing patterns . Within minutes of waking up, he knows whether it's a workday or a weekend, just based on how my husband and I behave. If it's a weekend, and I put on shoes and a jacket just after lunch, Kraken knows it's walk time. If it's a weekday, I'm out of town, and Carl puts on a dress shirt, Kraken knows he's going to spend the day with his Aunt Maria. Dress shirts are a bit of a signal for Kraken to misbehave, because he knows Carl is in a hurry and that means Kraken can incite a game of Chase. This dog excels at pattern recognition - for better or for worse.  Every once in a while, Kraken will wake up to see two restful humans - that means it's a weekend. But then sometime in mid-morning, Carl will start cooking, and Kraken's internal pattern-recognition algorithm will tell him that the day is about to get awesome. Weekend + early-start cooking add up to: it's a party day! Carl (USA), Ajito (Ethio...

Every spring, daffodils are the first flowers to bloom in Woods Hole. In fact, the emergence of their light yellow petals has become my personal signal that spring is underway. And Woods Hole is awash in daffodils this week. Meanwhile, in the lab, spring has sprung with a beautiful bloom of data. Over the winter, my technician, Sarah, spent countless hours huddled indoors, identifying corals living on shipwrecks. Her cold-weather grind of image analysis is now reaching its endpoint, and as the ground thaws outside, her painstaking annotations are emerging as fresh, green datasets.  Opening those data petals to achieve their full beauty is my job. This week, I have begun analyzing our data to find patterns, discover significant differences, and figure out how the biological community relates to the 3D structure of each shipwreck. My process involves making lots of figures , running every statistical test I can think of, then standing back  and letting the data speak to me....

I pulled off the highway and followed my phone's instructions to turn on Fourth Street. The rolling hills of Bethlehem, PA carried me into town like waves rippling onto a sandy seashore. A church steeple made of dark stone rose from the sidewalk on my left, piercing the evening sky with its spire. Low, square-ish homes lined the street on both sides, bearing architectural signatures from decades gone by. I stopped at a red light, and a man carrying a plastic shopping bag slumped across the street in front of me. As I approached downtown, the buildings became denser, the blocks shorter, all perpendicular lines that chafed against the organic arcs of the green hills surrounding. This gritty steel town in the smooth, rolling hills seemed an unlikely host for a marine biology research lab, but host it was. I had arrived at Lehigh University.  Nicole (center) with her advisory committee after her  dissertation defense. Congratulations, Dr. Pittoors! For the past several years, I ha...