Adventure in the Antarctic: Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sciences Researchers Return to the Southern Ocean

By Peter Grennen

Devoted students of hard science, Professor Meng Zhou and fellow researchers from the Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sciences Department (ECOS) would never admit to being superstitious. But if you saw them the day they embarked on their most recent research cruise in early February, you might conclude they had good reason to be. Before setting sail from the Chilean city of Punta Arenas for a six-week sojourn in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica aboard the research vessel Laurence M. Gould, they each took a turn kissing a statue of the sixteenth-century explorer Ferdinand Magellan, a seafarer’s petition for safe passage and good fortune.

Zhou, research associate Yiwi Zhu, and Ph.D. student Ryan Dorland have unfinished business in this part of the world. On two previous voyages—both sponsored, like this one, by the Southern Ocean project of the U.S. Global Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics Program—they collected valuable data about krill and other sea species during the Southern Hemisphere’s fall and winter seasons, a time of year when darkness inhibits growth of phytoplankton—the tiny aquatic plants upon which these life-forms feed.

On this trip the Gould reached its destination during the height of the austral summer, when phytoplankton is plentiful—if you know where to look. Of special interest to this research enterprise, a battalion of five scientific interests dubbed Project Blue Water Zone, was a piece of the Drake Passage called the Shackleton Fracture Zone. Satellite images show that from west to east the “blue water” here steadily gives way to “green water,” indicating a considerable rise in phytoplankton levels and hence the trace elements and other nutrients that sustain it.

Zhou and his team hope to improve understanding of iron’s role in the life cycle of Southern Ocean plankton communities—“to determine how much of the observed variability in phytoplankton biomass can be attributed to iron supply,” reads a mission statement posted on the project’s website. Specifically, they aim to identify the precise origin of iron in these waters—whether coastal erosion, upwelling water, wind, or some combination thereof—and the manner in which iron is circulated.

From the outset, the ECOS scientists were under no illusions about the dimensions of their assignment and the potential for mishap. One of their more daunting challenges was working within the project’s time constraints: As the physical oceanography component of the expedition, they were responsible for making sure the Gould did not remain too long at unproductive sites. “We are under pressure to process all data at nearly real time . . . to assist the cruise planning,” Zhou reported soon after the Gould had reached the study site.

At other times nature herself seemed the biggest obstacle. Work of this kind involves measuring a host of oceanographic variables using an array of high-tech equipment that is apt to malfunction, especially under the extreme conditions encountered on the open seas. Indeed, the researchers’ daily website updates refer to numerous occasions when an equipment problem put one or more of the mission’s objectives in jeopardy.

It was enough to make even a veteran voyager to the Antarctic wax philosophic about the tools of science. “When the ocean is in front of you, you realize that your symbols and equations mean so little. While our vessel was helplessly rolling and pitching, we seemed so insignificant before nature,” Zhou noted in an early-March dispatch.

Zhou’s observations serve as a cautionary tale about the power of nature. And they may help explain why some scientists see nothing unusual in enlisting spiritual guidance before venturing from the sanctuary of their labs to confront nature on its own terms.

Image: Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sciences Department’s Professor Meng Zhou (left), Ph.D. student Ryan Dorland (front left), and research associate Yiwu Zhu (right) smile with colleague Shane Ellitop in Puntas Arenas, Chile, before departing on their six-week trip to the Southern Peninsula in Antarctica. This is the third trip for ECOS researchers.

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