An oceanographic adventure

The ship's engine roared to life at 2:30 a.m. and jolted me out of semi-consciousness. My head throbbed - in my dreams I hadn't stopped cycling through the next day's research plan, albeit in a strange, nightmarish way. I opened the curtain of my berth and took in my surroundings: the sounds of snoring shipmates (at least someone was getting extra sleep) the sight of my field notebook perched on top of the laptop with which I had spent my weekend synchronizing instruments, and the smell of coffee, coffee, coffee. Nightmare forgotten, reality filled me with eager anticipation.

I am an aspiring coastal physical oceanographer. I am excited about waves, fieldwork, and understanding the effect of coastal physics on water quality and current patterns. This summer, I had the opportunity to act as co-chief scientist during a two-day research cruise in Puget Sound, WA, through a coastal fluid dynamics course.

Coastal physical oceanography research includes the study of fluid dynamical, meteorological, and other physical forces affecting the transport, mixing, and dispersion of mass, momentum, energy, sediments, marine organisms, and pollutants. My mission in Admiralty Inlet, the main shipping channel of Puget Sound, was to investigate how the estuary manages to remain so tenaciously stratified in layers of density, despite intense turbulent mixing due to strong tidal currents. This persistent stratification could contribute to issues in the estuary, such as oxygen depletion, called hypoxia, which can lead to a devastating decrease in biodiversity in the region through fish kills and other events.

Map of Admiralty Inlet, WA. Faint Xs mark the sites of density measurements.

Once we had studied up on Admiralty Inlet, we consulted the moon and the sun for guidance on our fieldwork plans. Either we coastal oceanography researchers are all secretly astrologers or tides affect almost everything we study - you decide. Especially strong tidal currents were expected during our two days of ship time, due to the summer solstice. I was interested in measuring vertical profiles of density along the length of the inlet channel. This meant casting a conductivity (a measure of salinity), temperature, and depth (CTD) sensor over the side of the ship on a long wire to a maximum depth of about 100 meters. In 3-meter-per-second tidal currents, having a long wire hanging over the side of a 58-foot ship is not the most stable setup. Sure, I wanted to see how the stratification changed as the salty ocean water flooded into the fresher waters of Puget Sound. However, keeping the crew safe is more important, so density profile measurements were confined to times around slack tide, when the currents were weakest.

I still marvel that no one yelled mutiny and tossed me overboard after I announced a 3:30 a.m. departure to catch the first slack tide of the day at 4:30 a.m. They were either a very gracious bunch, or just a little bit crazy about oceanographic fieldwork, too. Or perhaps we were all resigned to the job because the ship carried coffee. Lots of coffee. As I had prepared for the cruise, programing instruments, changing batteries, and deciphering the tangle of wires by the ship's head, someone had made sure the ship was supplied with plenty of coffee. Thanks, someone.

Between slack tides, we swiveled a 2-meter-long pole with a current profiler into the water and steered the ship back and forth across the inlet, measuring vertical profiles of velocity. My teammate used this information to examine energy fluxes, as Admiralty Inlet is considered an ideal site for tidal-powered renewable energy. We also practiced essential oceanographers' skills on deck, such as jumping rope on a moving platform, grilling delicious shish kebabs without burning up the ship, identifying surface expressions of cool physics on the water, solving differential equations, and spotting porpoises, seabirds and distant fireworks.

Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders once said, "We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." In the sweet moment when I touched solid earth once again after a 22-hour workday at sea, I couldn't have agreed more. During the past several months of sharing these experiences and describing the science I learned at Admiralty Inlet to friends and family, one of the most rewarding aspects of my work has been helping others discover the Earth, too.

Chapter 2: The Plot Thickens

 Donald Miller, in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, considers what it would look like if we lived our lives believing that we are the character in a grand, exciting, adventurous story.  When we frame our experiences within a greater picture, certain aspects of our lives begin to make sense and themes emerge. 

Scientific research also relies on the elements of a story.  Without an overarching story, observations remain disconnected and boring.  But, when you can take a set of observations and pull out a common theme that can explain them, then you have a story. 

When scientists talk with each other about their work, they constantly use phrases like: "you need to find a good story," "those observations make an interesting story," or "what is the story you are trying to tell?"  During the story-writing process, the researcher tries to emphasize the novelty of, the intrigue in, and the relationships between various characters.  She pieces together the clues to solve a mystery of the transiently expressed protein, or maybe she writes an eulogy for the cell death induced by a pro-apoptotic factor.  Above all, an interesting scientific story takes the reader on a harrowing ride of twists and turns in the plot.

At the root of it, however, the search for a good story is a search for meaning and purpose.  Like any story, a scientific story answers the who, what, where, when, and how, but the most important element to answer is the why.  Why does this process happen?  Why should we care about this phenomenon? Why do we need to study this?  

Interestingly, as the scientist searches for the answers to "why" it becomes clear that she is not the author of the story she tells.  She merely recounts the adventure that was written by somebody smarter and more clever than her.  She is a detective, a journalist, or a biographer.  Through her research, she delves into the annals of the creator. 

Chapter 1: The Scientific Method

In every science textbook starting in middle school and continuing through college, the first chapter is always on the scientific method.  It is a very dry topic to read about and my eyes always glazed over as I tried to make my way through the chapter.  Maybe that is why I never really liked science in middle and high school.  Science can be really exciting, but the minutiae of the scientific method--sorting out positive and negative controls, making sure your methods actually address your hypothesis, and trudging through what statistical analysis you should run--can bring all of the excitement quickly to a halt.

Fortunately, college took the science out of my textbooks, brought it to life, and changed the course of my own life.  (After my first college science course successfully put me to sleep, I decided I would major in French, but, the next semester the introductory course on neuroscience that I took just for fun enraptured me.)  In Intro to Brain and Behavior we traded our textbooks for journal articles, traveled to the border of our knowledge on the brain, looked over the edge, and constructed hypothetical bridges to link two adjacent "knowledge cliffs" in a new way.  The scientific method was still important, but instead of learning what it was, we learned how to put it into practice.

 http://rickywestwood.blogspot.com/2010/05/sketch-cliff-bridge.html

Now that I work in a Neuroscience lab at MIT, the scientific method is a part of my daily life.  It is no longer boring but essential to what I do and how successful I am at doing it.  This week I have been reminded of how important it is to go back to the basics covered in Chapter 1.  Thinking up experiments is not a difficult task; there are endless ways to manipulate all sorts of variables and even more ways to record and observe what happens.  It is easy to get caught in a data deluge and even easier to get so focused on collecting data that you forget what interested you to begin with.  

I like to be productive and I like to show something that proves my productivity.  For these reasons, I find it hard to justify spending time on the thinking, reading, and hypothesizing that is supposed to come before the experimenting.  (I also hate being wrong, which is why I am wary to make predictions.)  But if you don't formulate a specific question that you are interested in, then you will find yourself where I ended up this week: in the middle of nowhere without a map to guide myself somewhere.  

So, today I started constructing a map.  It was hard at first to figure out where to even start, but I took a step back to notice the nearby landmarks: neuronal activity, activity-regulated transcription, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, transcription factor binding sites, learning and memory.  And then I started reading, and thinking, and hypothesizing--building bridges across an entrenched landscape.