There is a new science adventure in the air. Thanks to the inspiration and opportunity provided by Quixote I will be heading to Argentina in the next week to be a solo scientist on one of their yachts. We'll be sailing around the bottom of Argentina, through some Fjords (yes, Argentina has Fjiords!) and then out to the Falkland Islands, and back. It's going to take a bit over 3 weeks. You can see the details here. The purpose of my project is to look for microplastics in the water, and potentially in some fish, but we'll see about the fish. 

So, the idea of this project is that I'm coming along as a early career scientist to do some science, in some pretty remote and otherwise inaccessible parts of the world. I've been offered a berth for the duration of the voyage, the other people on the trip are from all over the world and they're here for their holidays. 
I on the other hand will be sciencing it up! And involving the other passengers wherever possible. Which should be great fun. Everything I've done in the past has involved multimillion dollar boats and thousands of dollars worth of equipment, not to mention a strong support network of experienced scientists ready and willing to help. On this trip it's almost entirely the opposite, small ship, lone scientist and whatever equipment I can rustle up and fit into my luggage. Which has involved a lot of random inventiveness, and quite a few trips to the local hardware store, and supermarket, and fishing shop, and car repair shop, and electronics shop, and supermarket again, and hardware store again. There's some sales people out there petrified of young scientists wandering around town now. 

At the moment I have worked with some colleagues (and long suffering relatives) to develop 3 different experiments, with different likelihoods of success depending on the weather. It's a boat, so things are going to go wrong, some things won't work, some things will go missing, and just plain bad weather could render a whole lot of ideas impossible. Hence the level of redundancies, there's back up's on back ups and piles of zip-lock bags just in-case I hit a jackpot of specimens. Because when it comes to home-made science there's nothing like a zip-lock bag and a coffee filter to get things going. 
We can collect water from different depths to about 20m and filter it for microplastics, and we've got two different ways of collecting water. 
I've also now got the ability, thanks to the awesome kit below, to investigate the stomachs of any fish who may come onboard, and see if any of them have been munching on that tastiest of food, plastics. 

And then I've put together all the general kit for testing water parameters like pH, temperature, salinity etc. So fingers crossed it'll all work! A large portion of my bag is spare batteries for everything, because apparently it can be quite hard to source batteries in the south atlantic. Funny about that!

Stay tuned! Whilst I don't know what sort of internet access I'll have whilst onboard, I am hoping to collect some awesome photos, maybe the occasional video and who knows what else. 
(in the mean time I'm going to head off and try to get all of this to fit!)

So, since being trained on how to shoot things and jump into cold water without dying, very little of photogenic value has happened. 
Instead what has happened is a bunch of lectures on various topics relating to the nature of the Arctic environment, the interactions between the water column (pelagic) and the sea floor (benthic) and then some super duper in depth discussions about the critters that live in the benthos and how they work. So, whilst it has been incredibly interesting and astonishingly educational it isn't so easy to write about because a bunch of kids taking notes in lectures.. well there's nothing new to that. 
So instead I'm going to share a few of the things we learnt, and random points I thought were interesting. 

Firstly we won't be seeing sea ice whilst we are here in Svalbard because of the Arctic sea ice retreat that you might have heard about. So that's a stark sign of global change. It's somewhat hard to deny that things are changing whilst up here, it's pretty clear.

The Arctic and the Antarctic really aren't similar, aside from being cold with ice. The biology is different, the seasonality is different, the amounts and age of ice is different etc. etc. Plus the Arctic has fjords, polar bears and no penguins, though it does have this thing that looks like a penguin (but it isn't!)

The water movements within the Arctic area are hugely complex. Water is coming in from the North Atlantic Current (which is warm and salty), then the Bering Strait brings in some cold fresher water and all these currents interact and swirl around in various patterns resulting in significant ecological differences in very small areas. 

Some of the deep water in the Arctic can sit around for 300 years, whilst other shallower more fast moving water can be in and out in 10 years. I still find the idea of identifying water as "Atlantic" or "Tasman" etc. as a somewhat odd concept, surely water isn't so easily described, but apparently it can be, and it's actually a really important part of oceanography.

I thought it was quite cool that the terminal moraine from a glacier at the end of a fjord, if sufficiently shallow, can act almost as a fjord dam limiting water circulation and therefore drastically changing that fjords ecology. Moraines are awesome.

There was a lot of general discussion about the importance of studying the marine environment and particularly the benthos.. seeing as this is a benthic ecology course that isn't overly surprising. But so far, I'd have to concur. There are some really importance processes happening at the bottom of the sea, including carbon cycling (ie. all I can gather from this article is that they know it's an important factor.. but really not much more than that). Plus, there are some super duper crazy animals living down there, and if these guys can't be an inspiration for some creativve biomimicry then I don't know what can. Anyhow, point is, its probably worth looking into. 

That said, it looks like the melt water from glaciers has a huge impact on fjord ecology too, bringing fresh nutrients, sediments and fresh water. So maybe it isn't just a pretty picture. 

Then we got into a little bit of Geography, which was fun. Stuff like the intermediate disturbance hypothesis and a little bit of island bio-geography. Not feeling too far from home now! 

There was a lot of discussion about the impacts of climate change and how they are going to change the ecology, and in some cases new species are already moving back into the Arctic because the environment has changed sufficiently. Overall, people are expecting a very different Arctic. A summer without sea ice will have a huge impact on the communities dependant on sea ice, not to mention on the communities dependant on the communities dependant on sea ice. And on it goes. There will be changes to the fisheries, to everything. The Arctic is at the fore of witnessing these changes, but it will only be time until similar changes are felt globally. When we won't find the species we used to find. It can be quite distressing hearing about the impacts of climate change, particularly on the big mammals that we tend to identify quite well with. Because of the lack of sea ice there are less areas for seals and walruses to raise their pups within reasonable distances from feeding grounds. (ie. imagine if all the supermarkets and cafes within your usual driving distance were removed and suddenly you had to drive twice as far, and then imagine it got worse next year, and the year after, not so bad if you live in the city, but for anyone already living on the edge.. well there's some expletives that can fit there. N.B a walrus CANNOT create it's own veggie garden as we can). 

So far no one has mentioned the giant squid, we can but hope.

The scientific world did tend to think that the deep sea was dull, boring, the same everywhere (homogeneous), dull, boring and more dull. That was until quite recently when they discovered those black smokers mentioned earlier. Then they started doing things like watching what happens to a dead whale ("Whale Fall") on a patch of apparently empty sea floor. And what happened was kinda cool, if rather macabre, and brought a whole new understanding to what's happening at the bottom of the sea whilst we're not looking. If a whale falls in the ocean and there's no one to hear it, does it make a noise? Yep, something along the lines of "THUD - nom nom nom nom nom". So much for Zen. 

Also, walruses are left tusked. Go science!

Next up, a bit of hard core biology for the geographer and preparation for a cruise. 

After 4 schools, 7 talks, I was pretty much too tired to write. It took me a while to get back into the swing of talking in front of people. Like most people I'm fairly petrified about presenting and it takes a bit for me to warm up. But after a few talks it becomes impossible for your body to keep freaking out and I started to remember what I actually wanted to say. 
For the most part the talks went really well
the kids were good and asked questions, figured I was onto a winner when the teachers were so curious they were taking notes and interrupting. Mostly the kids asked pretty good questions, the only silly one was from a kid asking how they choose which chicken to roast... Like in supermarkets... this is not something I know, nor is it something I have any intention of finding out. But other than that the kids got pretty interested in the idea of people who live on floating houses, and if there's any doubt about the excitement of science generally showing a video of a rocket launch sets everyone straight (and gets a lovely and appreciative oooooohhh).
What else? Not much really, the tricky bit was presenting my research to a bunch of prep kids. They did pretty well I think, it was possibly the most challenging time in my short time as a science communicator and whilst I could feel grey hairs growing I also learnt a lot about watching the audience and how to compare complicated international issues with day to day things kids experience everywhere (I avoided the word geopolitical and have since deleted it from the presentation). One of the issues I find most challenging to communicate is how decisions made about water use in China have direct impacts for communities in Cambodia. Whilst the analogy of water at the top of a mountain being clean and water at the bottom of a river being less clean is an ok way to tell the story it still seems to lack something. One of the many concepts I'm working on for communication. 
Stayed at a slightly creepy b&b where they tried to feed us fruitcake. 
Being Australian scientists it is essential to appreciate the local pub, we did this with enthusiasm.