Science can be glamourous and scary with white lab coats and sterile, chrome labs filled with test tubes and beakers. But what happens when your field of study doesn’t fit into a lab? When the core of your research is an observational look at the natural word and is as expansive as the ocean.
Let’s be honest, marine science looks glamorous; pictures of scuba divers, dolphins and scientists in board shorts walking along the beach. We get to take our lab note books and walk or swim along some of the most beautiful and diverse ecosystems on the planet but for marine scientists and oceanographers, we can’t always bring our research to the lab so we have to bring the lab to our research.
This is the birth of Airbnb science.
Giant Pelican cases get carefully stuffed with portable microscopes, lasers, water pumps, lights, beakers, preservative, pipettes and anything we can think of that might be needed to accomplish our scientific goals. Hundreds to thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment get strewn together and thrown in the back of a truck or minivan ready to travel to the nearest ocean front. With a principle investigator in the driver seat and grad students loaded in the back we set off for a whirl wind 4-day trip where sleep comes second to data collection.
Arriving at the Airbnb we scope our new lab space, not for the amenities but for counter space. We carefully decide where the best place to set up lab equipment might be and designate a charging station for everything from dive lights to video cameras. We see the pool not as a relaxation spot but as an underwater camera rig test tank. Here we can calibrate our equipment and make sure it is ready to meet the ocean.
Our dive gear is carefully assembled and packed making sure we bring along back up lights and batteries and all the animal collection bottles we can carry.
This is where the real fun begins.
Loaded on to a small dive boat the dive master helps each scientist with equipment and gear as the captain discusses sea conditions, asks what scientific operations they should prepare for and helps coordinate the best dive spot to meet mission objectives. The boat ride isn’t always easy; sea sickness can sneak up on a diver at any moment so we force our stomach into place and focus on the task at hand.
What happens next is a carefully choreographed dance. Boat engines stop, gear assembled, air on, safety checks, camera secure and sample bags clipped to our BCDs. We test and taste the air that will allow us to breathe in the underwater world, we strap on our fins and mask, give a final OK and back roll, tumbling off the boat and into the water below. Then there is stillness and silence.
Floating above 700ft of water in the open blue water of the gulf stream we get a chance to see a world few divers get to see. The task at hand and the safety of our buddy are the only things that matter now. Collect, record, and write down everything you can while there is still air in your tank. This isn’t the science but the observation. When our time is up and the boat brings us back to shore that is when the science begins.
We rush our samples back to the “lab”, throw our salty dive gear into the pool/rinse tank and set out to identify and sort the alien animals we recovered.
The dining room becomes our laser lab and the kitchen counter becomes our aquarium. The clock starts. We have only a few hours to collect as much data as we can before the next dive. It is now where our packing skills get tested and forgotten supplies now become our enemy. Getting creative with what we have and what we can find becomes the name of the game as we gently transfer animals between vessels and experiments.
Ocean life always has a surprise or two up its sleeve so we have to be flexible, ready to change our hypothesis and our understanding on what we thought we knew. We watch the weather and the seas being sure to prioritize safety but we work until the days are dark.
Dive. Rinse. Repeat. Until the trip is over and it is time to transfer data on to hard drives and repack the pelican cases. The field work is complete but our work is far from over. Headed back we now have to decide what our data means, we have to watch and re-watched our recorded observations and analyze our data for trends. It is now that we can write our story, contextualize what we have learned and cultivate new unexplored questions.
We share, explain and write about what we have discovered and what is still yet to come. In this way the science is never complete and we set to plan the next trip, ask the next question and turn the next Airbnb into our laboratory.
コメント