Let me share one of my most vivid memories with you. When I was ten years old, my dad took me to the British Museum, and waiting for the train back home at Charing Cross station we stopped in WH Smiths for something to read. Dad said I could have any magazine I liked. Of all of them, the one that inexplicably appealed to me sat on the bottom shelf, sporting two yellow fish on the front cover – Practical Fishkeeping. My dad thought it was funny but bought it for me anyway. It’s a good job he did, as reading this magazine sparked a lifelong love of all things aquatic. Since then I’ve always enjoyed building habitats for fish and other aquatic creatures in my aquariums. Eventually it wasn’t enough just to get my hands wet, so I learned to SCUBA dive as well. I’ve always wanted to combine my passion for the water with my love of chemistry, and here at NOC I get the opportunity every day!

So how did I get here? Well, I did a hodgepodge of A Levels which included art, English Literature and French as well as chemistry and physics. This actually helped me to develop quite a diverse skills set, and has come in very handy throughout my career. When it came to higher education, I decided on chemistry for three simple reasons: I enjoy it, it’s challenging and it offers a wide range of potential careers. It didn’t take me long to realise that I would much rather spend my career standing at a lab bench than sitting behind a desk! I’ve always enjoyed work which combines chemistry with other topics I find interesting, for instance my Masters project involved chemical analysis of archaeological samples. After graduating I wanted a break from academia, and continued using my chemistry in a wide range of ways at work – I’ve had jobs including pharmaceutical research technician, museum visitor assistant, school lab technician, and diamond grader. I also really enjoy volunteering when I have time. I’ve done this in a few places, but I think the most fun was being a curatorial volunteer at a local museum, where I helped restore and catalogue Victorian lantern slides. Whilst working, I also studied geology and oceanography with the Open University to better tailor my chemistry knowledge for working in the earth sciences. What particularly attracted me to do a PhD was the promise of a really good challenge, and I knew it would be a great way to develop my lab skills to the highest level. When I finish, I hope to continue applying chemistry to reveal more about ancient and natural worlds.

The post Heather Goring-Harford: How did I become involved in Ocean Sciences? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Hi MOOCer’s I’m a 2^nd year PhD student researching the controls on the Southern Ocean overturning circulation. As a kid my favourite part of the year was visiting the mountains; from our own Welsh and Scottish hills to the slightly more formidable Alps. I had no idea what I wanted to go and do after school, but I knew I didn’t want to be stuck in a lab all day so Earth Sciences which had abundant field trips to mountains seemed like a logical choice. When I was leaving school I was lucky enough to gain a place on a British Exploring Society trip to Greenland where I spent time travelling round amazing fjords (looking pretty cold!) and glaciers. Here we took some photos to compare the glacial extent from 20 years ago, it was shocking to see how much the glacier had receded in so little time!

I did a 4 year undergraduate masters degree in Earth Sciences and as promised there were lots of field trips, however the geology could not compare to what I’d seen in Greenland and I grew increasingly interested in the physics of the climate system. Learning about large scale ocean processes and their place in the climate system soon set me on the path to oceanography. Not only was it fascinating to see quite complex processes broken down into simple approximations balancing the winds and the planets rotation, but also the effects the ocean have on our climate and weather.

I hadn’t heard of oceanography before I went to university, but in my 3^rd year when we had to pick an extended essay and a lecturer suggested one on “The Role of Eddies in the Southern Ocean” which sold me of the idea of perusing ocean sciences. Oceanography also came with a field trip in my master’s year to Bermuda!

CTD rosette on the Atlantic Explorer on our way to the BATS station. (2012 trip to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences)

Apart from the trip to Bermuda I haven’t actually ended spending much time at sea. I went down the route of physical oceanography where there are two main camps: observationalists and modellers. There’s a big drive to get the two more interconnected, but you do tend to end up as one or the other! In my master’s year I got introduced to high resolution state of the art ocean models. In a nutshell you break the ocean down into 1000s of tiny boxes and get a supercomputer to solve a set of fundamental equations to capture the ocean’s behaviour. For my masters project I used MITgcm (MIT General Circulation Model) data to investigate transports of heat and salt by small scale features (less than 100km across, we actually call them mesoscale as you can actually go much smaller scale in the ocean!) called eddies (like ocean storms). Ocean eddies are quite complex features that vary significantly in time and space that can effect large scale processes; modelling them is difficult because it costs a lot to run models at a high enough resolution to capture what they’re doing!

Sea surface salinity anomaly in the North Atlantic from 1/10th degree MITgcm output. Shows large anomalies along the path of the gulf stream associated with eddies.

I loved the challenge of working with such a large dataset, there was endless possibilities of interesting features you could investigate. I really enjoyed working on eddy mechanisms and how they fit in to the larger scale processes. These small transient features can that affect the global overturning circulation, which in turn can have massive impacts on our climate system. I didn’t really want to stop, so I started looking into doing a Ph.D and found there’s a lot of interesting research going on out there! I enjoy being able to discuss ideas with people and share information and experience so coming to the National Oceanography Centre with the University of Southampton was a great opportunity I couldn’t turn down.

 I’ve now been doing my Ph.D research for a year and it’s been great! I now use the same model from my masters to set up my own experiments running on the local supercomputer here. I use a simple idealised channel model to represent the Southern Ocean. I’m trying to capture the essential physics behind what’s setting the circulation. This is important because of how interconnected the oceans are; changing the Southern Ocean circulation can have large effects on the global overturning circulation. A diagram of my model. Don’t worry too much about the physics! I’ve just set up a box and blown a wind over it to create a flow that represents the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and heated and cooled the surface in a similar way to current observational estimates to see what happens to the circulation!

The post Helen Burns: How did I become involved in Ocean Sciences? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

In this post I’ll talk a little bit about how I ended up doing a PhD at the world class National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. Let me hold my hands up and say it was never my grand design from childhood to be an oceanographer, I have very much been carried here by the current of my life.

As for most, my life direction was decided during high school, when I had to choose between Geography and History for my GSCE’s. Fortunately for me, I made the correct decision, aided by the offer of a school trip to Malham, North Yorkshire, if I took geography.

I did ok in my GCSE’s, a solid average, but geography was by far my favourite subject from school so naturally I took it again at A-level, though, mainly for the physical geography (I hated human geography!). In addition to geography, I took geology, because I had an older cousin who’d done that at university and seemed to enjoy. You’re probably realizing at this age I was yet to be captivated by natural sciences, but it was during these A levels years that I really set my heart on the natural world and it developed into what will no doubt be my life long passion. It was also during A level geology that I had my first taste of oceanography, along side plate tectonics, volcanoes and earthquakes! All very exciting!

Although I miss out on cruises, I still get to travel the world going to international conferences. I took this picture at the last conference I attended which was in Honolulu, Hawaii. At conferences, we can present posters of our research to discuss with like minded people. Here’s a small crowd around my poster, they’re clearly very impressed!

I managed to carry on this exciting earth science path by being accepted to study at the University of Leeds. I hadn’t been able to chose just one area of nature that I was interested in, so I took a course called Earth System Science, which basically meant I learned the basics of all the earth sciences (meteorology, oceanography, palaeoclimatology – the list goes on) and crucially how they interact and influence each other. It soon came to my final year and I had to do a dissertation, so daunting! None of the listed projects I could chose from interested me that much, so, and I don’t really know why, I sought out the University’s only resident oceanographer at that time. When the results were announced I found out that I’d produced a first class dissertation, the greatest achievement of my life up to that point. From then I was set on oceanography. I decided I no longer wanted to be a “jack of all trades, but master of none” – so I took my masters in Oceanography at the National Oceanography Centre and here I am, still here today doing a PhD!

Hawaii really is the place to go for a conference. Here’s a snap inside the Hawaii Convention Center, that’s a palm tree growing inside, almost as tall as the building itself! Nearly everyone was wearing holiday wear, mainly Hawaiian shirts. Some wore swim wear underneath so they could go to the beach for a snorkel with turtles after a hard days work. 

I am by no means a genius, but I found something that I was interested in enough to push myself to the limits of my abilities. I’ve been extremely lucky in having the most amazing teachers, tutors and lecturers (and now supervisors!) throughout my entire time in education. I’d like to thank them for getting me where I am today.

Josie

The post Josie Robinson: How did I become involved in Ocean Sciences? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Hi, I’m Josh and I’ll be one the facilitators here on the Exploring our Oceans MOOC.
My journey into Earth and ocean sciences began at A level Geography, where I became interested in physical geography and geology. This led me to undertake a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) degree in Earth science at University College Cork. While at UCC I studied many different disciplines of Earth science, including oceanography, geology, climatology and palaeontology. As part of the degree we got to visit loads of interesting places, and even went as far as the sunny south of Greece, where we some saw exceptional geology and some ancient Greek ruins from nearly 3000 years ago. The degree was great fun and Cork is a fantastic place to study science.

This degree led me into a Masters (M.Sc) degree at Trinity College, Dublin focussing on environmental sciences. This degree encompassed aspects of coastal and estuarine science, hydrology, environmental chemistry and environmental change. My M.Sc thesis involved the study of marine geology and geochemistry, as well as marine micropalaeontology, to better understand the dynamics of marine sedimentation from glaciated margins along the west coast of Ireland. For the the residential field trip we got to spend a week in the sun near Faro in Portugal, where we visited coastal, estuarine, and lagoon environments. We even got to tear across the lagoon in a powerboat

Following on from my masters, I gained a NERC funded Ph.D position here at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton, focussing on marine geology and submarine geohazards. My research evaluates the frequency of large submarine landslides within open slope and submarine canyon settings, and the role of climate and glacial cycles in the triggering of these landslides. My research has taken me to Norway, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, The Arctic, The Irish Sea and to the North Atlantic aboard the research vessels Celtic Explorer and Pelagia. Oceanographic research is an exciting field with many opportunities for excursions and exploration. I hope you enjoy the course as much as we do.

The post Josh Allin: How did I become involved in ocean sciences? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

It was clear medicine wasn’t something I was passionate about but I knew I didn’t want an office job and so biology seemed the obvious choice. However I’d always loved the oceans; I’d lived by the sea for most of my life and I took any chance of going to rock pools, crabbing or snorkeling. I also loved David Attenborough documentaries, my favourite being any related to the marine world. Hence I decided to study Marine Biology at Southampton. I chose Southampton due to its world-class reputation and the fantastic facilities at the National Oceanography Centre.

I then took a gap year 1) because I wanted to and 2) because I had to due to my late application to marine biology. I left England, my family and all I had known until that point in my life and went to Fiji and Australia for 7 months. In Fiji I took part in a 3-month coral reef volunteering project where we lived in traditional huts on a deserted island complete with rats and falling coconuts! It was by far the best 3 months of my life to date and I’m sure it always will be. I then went on to travel Australia for 4 months before starting my degree in September that year.

Where possible I travelled during the summer holidays of my degree. I also did 2 more conservation projects, this time both with sea turtles as they are my favourite animal and are incredibly vulnerable to human impacts. The first project was in Greece and the second in Guatemala. I could see that whilst these projects were vital, the biggest impact comes from teaching locals how and why they should look after their marine resources and then top-down, coming from policy and government. I decided to be able to have this kind of impact and to keep my brain occupied (even counting turtles and their eggs in tropical countries gets tedious!) I needed a PhD, but I had no idea what on.

I narrowed it down to what I thought were my main interests and biggest impacts on our oceans, fisheries and climate change. I decided I wanted to stay at Southampton to do my PhD, with the hope that after my PhD I would move on. My PhD links to climate change as I am studying the oceanic carbon cycle and although I am an observational scientist as opposed to a modeler or forecast, my observations are important to understand the ocean system now so we may anticipate how it may change in the future.

Although I am not entirely sure the exact area of research I will continue with after my PhD, my aim is to stay in academia and to do a Postdoctoral fellowship. My dream career would to still be researching, hopefully teaching at university level but also to work in policy too. The need for science and policy to combine is being recognized more and more. Scientists need policy makers to take their information and transform it into a policy to see change and policy makers need the scientists to carry out the research. Ideally I would like to be a middle-man in this area, where I still carry out research but also heavily involved in knowledge exchange and working with the government.

(Pictures of 1. A turtle hatchling in Guatemala feeling the ocean for the first time and 2. Myself and a king penguin on South Georgia.)

@emma_cavan

The post Emma Cavan: How did I become involved in Ocean Sciences? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

I remember thinking that Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space, had a great job, and wasn’t it awesome that something like the Mir space station existed. It is fair to say I have always loved science!

However it wasn’t until many years after my A-levels and an MSci in Physics, that I started to understand how little is known about our oceans. Qualifying as a scuba diver opened my eyes, and my reading, about the science used to describe our oceans. Suddenly, I realized that there was an arena I could genuinely contribute to if I could just find a way in.

So, after 10 years in the UK civil service, I had a “now or never” moment, and enrolled on the University of Southampton’s MSc Oceanography. It was a big step to leave a comfortable salary, interesting job and good colleagues behind, to become a student again and face a whole host of unknowns.

The MSc served as a broad introduction to all the disciplines of ocean science – biology, chemistry, physics and geology, with more specialized modules covering topics such as climate, earth observation using satellites and geophysics. I felt very privileged to be being taught by people who are at the forefront of science in their areas, and who are really passionate about their subject.

I realized that I wanted to stay working in research. To do this I knew a PhD would be useful, and luckily a PhD position was advertised in an area that had really captured my attention – palaeoclimate. This is the study of what the climate was like in the past – both the recent past (e.g. the last 500,000 years) and the even deeper past – up to millions of years. The idea is that if we can understand how our planet reacted in times past, then we stand a better chance of understanding how our planet will behave in a future, higher carbon dioxide world. Specifically the topic was on sea level over the past 500,000 years, and the PhD would blend the disciplines of geophysics with palaeoclimate – just perfect for me.

This PhD has allowed me to work with different people, to see how a research consortium works (as I am funded to be part of the iGlass consortium), to attend conferences in different countries to present my work, and to join a research cruise in the North Atlantic.

My aspirations are quite simple. I wish to successfully complete my PhD and to find a post doc that will allow me to continue working in the science I find so inspirational.

Flic

The post Flic Williams: How did I become involved in Ocean Science? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

I am Rui, from Portugal, and here I will describe you my journey to becoming a marine scientist.

Since I was a little boy, I had contact with the ocean through ​​fishing with my grandfather. Despite the fact that I always live near the coast, marine biology studies were never in my mind until I was 17: of course this was my very best option, in a country of sailors and explorers! I must confess that it wasn´t Jacques Cousteau, but BBC documentaries that awakened me to this passion!

I concluded my degree in Marine Biology and Biotechnology in 2008 in the so-called “Wave Capital” from Portugal – the small coastal village of Peniche.

Then, I moved to the Azores for an internship and there I had the opportunity to truly meet the amazing that is the ocean!

In 2009, I went back to mainland, to the Algarve where I did my MSc. in Marine Biology with a dissertation on deepwater fishes from Antarctica, under the scope of an international project in collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey (unfortunately I have never been (yet!) in the Southern Ocean…).

Since 2010, I have participated in four cruises in Central Eastern Atlantic, NE Atlantic and along the Portuguese south coast, all dedicated to deep-sea research. Lots of fun, and many new and interesting animals that I can talk about later in this blog.

I really like taxonomy and one of my best achievements so far was the discovering and identification of a rare deepwater whalefish species in the North Atlantic. It was the fifth time that this species was observed! Lucky me!

Later, I worked in the University of Aveiro where I keep working in taxonomy and deep-sea research and also there some very cool discoveries, such as the first time that the opal chimaera was observed in its natural habitat at 2000 m depth. Note that this species was described only in 2011!

Currently I am a second year PhD student and my main research interests are deep-sea ecology, biological oceanography and taxonomy.

My PhD project is entitle “Changes in deep-sea benthic communities and fisheries in the European margin: assessing environmental drivers and anthropogenic impacts” and more details you can find in another text of this blog.

I can not be completely sure what I will be doing after complete my PhD… However I know I want to continue to explore the deeper parts of the oceans!

More than ever, there is a huge need to contribute to the knowledge of our oceans. It is the only way we can truly protect this so vast habitat, from which millions people around the world directly depends, but also that it is present in the minds of millions of people through the discoveries of scientists and stories of explorers and the most adventurous sailors!

Come aboard and enjoy the Exploring our Oceans course! Find me @rui_pedro19

The post Rui Pedro Vieira: How did I become involved in Ocean Sciences? appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

Before we get started on Monday, the course team thought you might appreciate a very brief overview of what to expect from the MOOC, and the topic outlines for each week:

Week 1: A hidden landscape (starts 03 February)

• Getting started in the course
• The history of ocean exploration
• Modern mapping of the oceans

 Week 2: Mobilis in mobili (starts 10 February)

• How much water is there?
• Tides
• Our spinning planet

Week 3: A living soup (starts 17 February)

• What’s out there?
• Finding connections
• Life in the depths

 Week 4: Why is the sea salty?  (starts 24 February)

• The composition of the ocean
• The importance of trace elements in the ocean

 Week 5: How do we explore the oceans? (starts 03 March)

• The technology involved in ocean exploration
• The teams involved in ocean exploration

Week 6: The future of the oceans (starts 10 March)

• The human impact
• Ownership and responsibility
• Just the beginning

What are you looking forward to learning about the most? Let us know on Twitter #UoSFLOceans!

The post Course Overview appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

In recent years, methane hydrates deposits have attracted growing interest from both academic and industry research, due to their potential as an unconventional energy resource, role in climate change and concern as a geohazard. That is attributed to the fact the gas hydrates spread worldwide along continental margins, while their estimated amount is greater than all other hydrocarbon resources combined.

In my research I use forward and inverse models in order to delineate and quantify the amount of free gas and methane hydrates in the Nyegga CNEO3 chimney and its immediate surroundings, as well as studying the methane hydrates layers at depth over a larger regional scale.

Future work will focus on the development of a joint seismic/electromagnetic tomography to better image methane hydrate pockmarks and understand the causes for hydrate dissociation from the seabed, to the water column and eventually to the atmoshpere.

The post Welcome enthusiastic MOOCers appeared first on Exploring our Oceans .

I am going to share with you some pictures from the oceans which are representative for me. My area of expertise is the deep-sea so I am going to focus on that. Next week it will be your turn to tell us what the oceans mean to you!

Although a scientist myself, when I hear the words “deep-sea” I find it hard not to think of the angler fish. Of course, this truly vast environment has much more to display, but the angler fish is nevertheless iconic.

James Cook is a UK research ship going all over the world to study the oceans. Having been there myself as part of my PhD, I feel it is inextricably linked with oceans.

No, it is not a picture from a snowing night. This is the so called “marine snow” and represents the main food source for organisms in the deep-sea. For more info about it see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_snow.

This software-generated image shows that the seafloor is not flat. There are sea mountains, valleys, hills etc. Abyssal hills in particular, are the most common landform on earth! The view from top of one hill must be breathtaking!

One of my PhD’s main focuses is to look at Foraminifera. Xenophyophores (see picture) are associated organisms and cover much of the seafloor at great depths. Truly spectacular organisms, worth knowing.

Keep an eye on the blog over the next for more posts from the facilitators, educators of the course (#UoSFLOceans) and researchers of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

Image credits:
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/anglerfish/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_James_Cook
http://www.seos-project.eu/modules/oceancurrents/oceancurrents-c03-p04.html
http://oceansjsu.com/105d/exped_mapping/ridge.html
http://everythingisweird.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/what-is-the-mariana-trench/

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