Icy Corvallis winter makes the tales of summer field season that much sweeter. Follow four graduate students during their summer field experiences across the globe, from Yaquina Bay to the Arctic Circle.
BAFFIN BAY || JONAS DONNENFIELD || PhD Student in MG&G
The first ice sighting had the night-shift scientists shouting and scrambling to the ship railings. The small, white form glided towards us on the glassy-smooth surface of the water. Incredulous exclamations sputtered from our lips, intermixed with moments of silence that left the air thrumming with palpable excitement and awe. Sailing north along the west coast of Greenland in Baffin Bay, this first glimpse of sea ice and still ocean was a precursor to the breathtaking environment that awaited us on the rest of our 33-day voyage.
Our mission: unravel the history of the substance we were so captivated by, ice, over 20,000 years ago during the last greatest extent of Earth’s ice sheets. Our question: what atmospheric or oceanographic mechanism led to the retreat of the Greenland Ice Sheet? Our method: marine sediment cores, lovingly called mud, which we miraculously retrieve from the sea floor using pipes and wires, ingenuity and improvisation, and a whole lot of teamwork. When we finally docked in Nuuk, Greenland, we had almost 50 gravity or piston sediment cores aboard from across Greenland’s western continental slope. They now reside in the Oregon State University Marine Geology Repository, waiting patiently to reveal secrets of ice long melted.
YAQUINA BAY || MARLENA PENN || Master’s Student in MRM
Last summer I spent one day a week visiting study sites in Yaquina Bay, Oregon. I have been monitoring the growth of native Olympia oysters at five locations since July 2022. In May, we decided to increase our sampling frequency from monthly to bi-weekly and add a second cohort of Olympia oysters. Every visit to Yaquina includes extensive cleaning of aquaculture cages and instruments, weighing every individual oyster (>750 oysters!), taking pictures of every oyster to later analyze for shell dimensions, and water samples from every site. This is a very meticulous process, and it would not have been feasible without the support from several dedicated undergraduate students (Alaina Houser, Drew Moreland and Tyler Wildman).
One of my favorite parts of field days is seeing the ebb and flow of the estuary. If you were to visit some of these sites at low tide and return at high tide, they would be unrecognizable due to the change in water level. Being able to watch these cycles is such a great reminder of how nature continues on, regardless of our own busy lives.
BAFFIN BAY || KATIE STELLING || PhD Student in MG&G
This past summer I spent 5 weeks at sea aboard the R/V Neil Armstrong as part of the Baffin Bay Deglacial Experiment (BADEX). Our primary objectives were to create maps and retrieve sediment cores from multiple trough mouth fan systems along the continental slope of the west Greenland Margin, with the larger goal of understanding the oceanographic conditions surrounding the retreat of the Greenland Ice Sheet following the Last Glacial Maximum. Some of my favorite memories are of our Blue Nose ceremony after crossing the Arctic Circle (pictured), the surreal feeling of sailing into a pack of sea ice for the first time, and gathering on the bridge with nearly everyone on the ship to see a sleeping polar bear.
THE ARCTIC||HALEY CARLTON||PhD Student in OEB
I spent a month in the Arctic last summer with a large, interdisciplinary team studying glacial-fjord ecosystem dynamics! We sailed on the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources’ (GINR) new ship, the R/V Tarajoq, from Iceland to Sermilik fjord in southeast Greenland. We spent two weeks at sea deploying bongo nets and trawls in search of larval fish and zooplankton, cast CTDs to collect water samples and define water masses, and deploy and recover several moorings throughout the fjord. We even spent a few days with a local schoolteacher who came aboard to learn about the science we were doing in their community and visited his village Tiilerilaaq. After two weeks at sea, we returned to Iceland for a few days before I flew to Nuuk to sort and identify some of the zooplankton we collected with collaborators at GINR.
