Meyer-Kaiser lab

The scene in the House of Benthos today.  I woke up this morning to find two classmates already in the barrack 11 kitchen, except that instead of eating breakfast, they were typing on their computers. In all honestly, I joined them just as soon as I had eaten, because we have a report due tomorrow. As the morning rolled on, more and more classmates made their way into the kitchen with their computers. We filled the long wooden table with laptops, water bottles, and notebooks. At any given time, at least two conversations were going on at the table - one work-related, one not. We talked amongst ourselves to coordinate what should go into the reports, then shouted across the room to make a joke. We spent several hours like this, clicking away at our computers, trading USB sticks and clever quips across the table. Eventually, we got hungry and distracted, so somebody turned on a Queen-Pink Floyd-Nirvana shuffle mix, and someone else started cooking a late lunch. The lapto...

It's Sunday evening, and I'm in my dorm room in Nybyen. Across the hall from me, a group of classmates is reviewing for our exam tomorrow. They've got someone's computer hooked up to the TV screen, and they're flashing up pictures of animals we collected on the cruise and trying to name them. It's like a strange game show - a biological Match Game - and I can only imagine what a group of comedians would make of this scenario. They'd look at our indiscernible blobs, the strange and alien forms of our specimens, and shout out terrible-sounding words in a made-up language, because that's what we sound like to them. I can picture the SNL skit already. Hey, at least the lab has a view! Anyway, it's been a long week, and I've spent most of it in the lab. Once we got back from the cruise, we had samples to sort through, exams to study for, and reports to write. My settlement plates are all analyzed and the data stored safely on my computer, so now...

The title for this post is something my classmate, Adriana, always says when she wants to get a group's attention. She walks into a room, loudly says "People of the world," and then starts in with an important message. Others in the course have now picked up the phrase too. It's great. As I look at my classmates now, I can tell we've changed since the beginning of the course. At first, we were just a group of hodge-podge strangers trying to figure each other out. Then it became clear who was the leader, who was the introvert, who was the caregiver, who was the adventurous one. On the cruise, we were thrown into the single most intense working environment I've ever experienced, but we handled it together. Granted, the fast pace, excess of work, and lack of sufficient sleep caused some conflict, but it also forged trust. We learned to rely on each other, to keep each other going, to get past our little annoyances and work effectively as a group. We have a lo...

Friends, the opening of this post may surprise you, since I last wrote about Rijpfjorden but am now back on land. The end of the cruise was short and sweet, and I spent most of my time analyzing data in the shipboard lab. My classmates and I have now made it back to Longyearbyen, but I suppose I should fill you in. One of these things is not like the other one. First of all, my settlement plates were all recovered successfully. I had plates at 3 different dive sites and on 2 different moorings, and I got them all back. The results are very interesting, because I could see clear patterns in the data before even counting the organisms. The figure at right is a prime example: these settlement plates are from the Rijpfjorden mooring. One set was deployed at ~20 m below the surface, and the other set was deployed at the seafloor (~195 m deep). One set of plates had exactly two species on it, and the other had exactly none. Can you guess which is which? By the time I finished analy...

If you look at a map and find all the places I've named so far on the route for this cruise, you'll notice we're traveling north and east. We started in Lonyearbyen, then hit up Kongsfjorden, Magdalene- and Smeerenburgfjorden, and finally Rijpfjorden, which is our turn-around point. Rijpfjorden is the northermost and easternmost fjord in the Svalbard archipelago, on the island of Nordauslandet. It's pretty different from the rest of the Svalbard fjords because it's primarily influenced by Arctic water coming down from the central Arctic basin. Along the west coast of Svalbard, the West Spitsbergen Current flows northward and brings with it heat, nutrients, and Atlantic organisms, so western fjords are much warmer and Atlantic-influenced. Rijpfjorden, by contrast, is a true Arctic fjord. Contents of our Rijpfjorden trawl. Photo by Adrian Pop. When I did my Svalbard image analysis last year, I found that stations in Rijpfjorden had the highest diversity of a...

Like dutiful little soldiers, we filed up to the bridge. Jørgen had called a meeting, forcing us to leave our microscopes for a minute. We expected some sort of lesson or exercise, but instead we were greeted by an incredible view. We were in Magdalenefjorden, on the northwest corner of Spitsbergen.  Glacier in Smeerenburgfjorden Magdalenefjorden has actually been voted the best place on Svalbard, and I have no trouble understanding why. It’s a short fjord, and it has steep sides dotted by glaciers. The glacier at the head of the fjord had a dramatic, high wall that was bright blue and jagged. Paul, the course leader, told us that if we just watched it for a few minutes, we were bound to see a piece break off. We didn’t spend much time in Magdalenefjorden – just enough to take some sediment samples, enjoy the view, and move on. I would have happily stayed much longer, but alas, we had work to do. Our next stop was Smeerenburgfjorden, which is named after the now-de...

“It’s been a hard day’s night And I’ve been working like a dog It’s been a hard day’s night I should be sleeping like a log” - “Hard day’s night” by the Beatles This post is actually a little delayed, since as you may imagine, I didn’t take the time to write a blog post while I was in the thick of my settlement plate analysis. I was swimming in settlement plates for a few days there, but oh, was it worth it. My results for this experiment are going to rock. After my last post, settlement plates were successfully retrieved from Kvadehuken and Ny-Ålesund. In case you don’t remember, Kvadehuken was the location where no plates could be recovered last January because the dive mission was aborted . Kvadehuken is actually a pretty incredible place – it’s a cape at the mouth of Kongsfjorden, and the seafloor is exposed bedrock covered in calcareous red algae, anemones, and sea urchins. The cape has been the location for several studies on Arctic hard-bottom communities. I re...