Well, to begin, I’m home. My expedition ended on October 12, 2015. In the final few days of the trip, I spent most of my time tearing down my scientific equipment and packing up my belongings. I flew from Dutch Harbor to Anchorage on the evening of the 12th. It was excellent to be back on land, and my first act of celebration on the night of the 11th (when we pulled into port) was to go to Safeway and get some fruit. An apple was all I needed, but boy was it nice.
I was all packed by the time we arrived in port, so on Monday morning (Oct 12.) I enjoyed a hike to the old bunkers on Dutch Harbor. The bunkers are a remnant from world war two, and while not much more than stone, they provide an eerie insight into the island’s past.
My last two weeks on the ship was chaotic. As began slope and shelf stations, our cast time and transit time was cut significantly. Very often I just finished processing my samples in time to collect another station’s worth. It was tiring, and at one point I hadn’t slept more than an hour (several naps) for about three days. That being said, it was worth it. I am now in the process of analyzing all of my data.
Since I got back on land I’ve been participating in several regional outreach opportunities, primarily to promote scientific learning through the Department of Marine Science here at USM. I’ve been developing hands on learning kits for several scientific concepts that relate to oceanography including ocean acidification and solubility. I’ve also been spending a significant amount of time organizing data and generating preliminary figures of methane distribution in the Arctic. This last week, I spent most of my time learning and helping run samples for barium. Barium is a trace element that the Shiller lab studies. It is an indicator of river inputs into the ocean. This week we used our new ICP-MS to run all of the samples from the expedition for barium. We’ll repeat the procedure, with a few modifications, for gallium and vanadium. Each of these trace elements can be indicators of various oceanic processes such as water mass mixing or shelf interaction. Water mass mixing is when waters from two different conditions begin to mix – in the Arctic water masses are commonly described as “Pacific-derived” and “Atlantic-derived.”
I’m delving deeper into my data every day, and will be presenting a poster at the 2016 Ocean Sciences Conference in New Orleans. I look forward to sharing my preliminary interpretations at a conference to gain insight from oceanographers around the globe.
