A YEAR OF IMMERSION IN OCEAN SCIENCE

Between November 2023 and October 2024, I spent a month at sea on three separate voyages.

My entry point into midlife oceanography was a STEMSEAS transit from Seattle to Honolulu. STEMSEAS (STEM student experiences aboard ships) is an NSF-funded program that takes advantage of otherwise-unutilized space and time on vessels in the United States research fleet. In this case, STEMSEAS wanted to boost the number of community college applicants to the program, and ran one cruise for two-year-college faculty as a way of spreading the word. I was lucky enough to be one of 19 faculty aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson on an eight-day transit across the north Pacific. This was a profound experience which included the realization that I had "sea legs," and that my planet's oceans were incredibly voluminous.

Now I could hear the call of the sea. I followed that my STEMSEAS cruise with participation in a workshop by the Ocean Observatories Initiative in May 2024 in Wilmington, North Carolina, utilizing real-world data to build undergraduate laboratory activities.

I returned to STEMSEAS in July 2024 as co-leader of a six-day student cruise aboard the R/V Sikuliaq from Seward, Alaska, to Nome, Alaska. I pushed the group toward geologic awareness, facilitating a pre-cruise series of field trips looking at rocks, glaciers, and landscapes. I also arranged for a special jaunt via water taxi to examine coastal outcrops of the Resurrection Ophiolite. My co-leader organized several CTD casts and plankton tows.

Finally, for two weeks in September 2024, I joined JTRACK, the final IODP drilling expedition, serving as outreach officer on an attempt to drill through the plate boundary at the Japan Trench. Here, I learned about the tricky business of sampling the sub-seafloor, saw the impact of the 2011 tsunami, and created learning activities to highlight the science being done aboard the D/V Chikyu.

As someone who has spent most of his career thinking about continental processes and tectonics, these voyages greatly expanded my perspective and understanding. The culmination of these varied experiences is a learning module about the origin and destruction of oceanic lithosphere I call “The Fate of the Plate.”

This poster highlights each of these experiences with guidance on how to get involved as well as links to the resulting learning objects.