#outpace2015

I am reporting from the shores of New Caledonia. I am just about as far away from my home of New York City as one could get—literally and metaphorically: New Caledonia is an island in the southern hemisphere, in the subtropical South Pacific, east of Australia. I am in the capital city, Nouméa, where palm trees lines streets that move at a leisurely, island pace. It’s also about 80 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than New York City right now, which is perhaps the most jarring difference of all.

Few have heard of New Caledonia, a French “special collectivity.” I hadn’t either, until I had to get a plane ticket here. During World War II this island served as the South Pacific headquarters of the U.S. military. This was strategically important for the Allied forces during WWII, it had good infrastructure and developed roads. Additionally, the hospitality of the New Caledonians and the tropical amenities offered much needed respite for the soldiers. This is a snippet of what I learned at the Musée de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, just one stop on my two-day exploration of the city before embarking on 45 days of non-stop science.

As luck would have it, on my way to the museum I rode the bus one stop too far—an easy mistake to make, the street signs are miniscule and in French, also the buses blast catchy, island-y remixes of American Top 40 songs so I was reluctant to disembark. After I stepped off the bus, I got my bearings and by chance found myself face to face with the research vessel L’Atalante, my home for the next two months.

Scientists from research institutions around the world are partaking in this expedition, the broad, overarching goal of which is to study how microorganisms in the South Pacific Ocean influence the carbon cycle. My specific project focuses on one particular microorganisms, a cyanobacterium called Trichodesmium. This microbe is important in the low nutrient, oligotrophic ocean because of their ability to take in and fix carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, and because they have the relatively rare ability to transform atmospheric nitrogen into a form that is a utilizable nutrient for other organisms in the ocean. These abilities make Trichodesmium colonies oases of biological activity in a desert-like ocean. My colleague Andreas Krupke, a post-doctoral researcher in the Van Mooy Lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and I will be conducting a series of experiments on this transect from Nouméa, New Caledonia to Papeete, Tahiti to assess how other microbes and Trichodesmium interact and the resulting physiological and biogeochemical impacts these processes have.