Finally! Eve Arnold holds her PhD diploma while her major professor, Dean Margaret Leinen, points at the long-awaited diploma in mock shock and surprise.
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Eve M. Arnold, Assistant
Professor of Geology |
While working on my doctorate, I read an ad describing fellowships from the Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI) which provide funding for students to expand on their thesis research by studying sediments collected aboard the Ocean Drilling Program's drill ship, the JOIDES Resolution. JOI provides fellowships for one or two years including salary and tuition, in addition to financial support for analytical expenses. The ad solicited proposals for several ODP trips or "legs." One of these cruises, Leg 145, was sailing across the North Pacific Ocean, the region that I was studying for my dissertation.
Excited by the idea of sailing for two months from Yokohama, Japan, to Victoria, British Columbia, instead of spending the summer in a windowless lab analyzing sediment, I applied for the fellowship. The application process is a good education for someone planning to write grants as part of their career as a research scientist. I had to describe how my thesis research and the project I planned to do for Leg 145 would relate to the objectives of the cruise. One cruise objective was to document the paleoclimate changes recorded in the eolian sediments of the central North Pacific Ocean. Since I was developing techniques to interpret the paleoclimatic signal of sediments characteristic of the central North Pacific for my dissertation research, writing the science portion of the application was easy. (For example, during times that the Earth was drier than today, the amount of dust transported in the atmsphere and deposited in the ocean was higher. These dusty intervals are preserved in ice cores, loess, and deep sea sediment records.) I would look at how the sediment composition changed and relate those changes to shifting atmospheric circulation patterns and the aridification of the deserts of Asia through time. Filling out myriad forms for budgets was an entirely different matter, but with the help of GSO staff, I got it done. A few months later, I was pleased to learn that I had been awarded the fellowship.
When I left to meet the drill ship in Yokohama, I didn't know any of the other scientists who would be sailing on the leg. From the perspective of a scientist, one of the great things about the Ocean Drilling Program is the international membership. I would sail with scientists who are experts in the field of paleoclimatology from all over the world. This is an important opportunity for new researchers; these scientists would be my colleagues in the future and an important resource for science and career advice while at sea. Even though I started my travels alone, along the way I met other scientists at airports in Detroit and Narita. (It is easy to identify scientists in airports; they are often lugging an assortment of carry-on baggage of strange shapes and sizes. I distinguished myself by carrying a large crate of equipment for taking atmospheric samples during the cruise.)
We made our way from Narita to Yokohama by train, where we took a cab to the port and boarded the drill ship. We had assumed that finding the rig would be easy, since the drill tower stands more than 128 feet above the deck. What we hadn't counted on was the acres of cars waiting to be exported from Japan. Yokohama is one of the world's largest ports, and the drill ship was tiny compared with the many merchant vessels tied up around it. Nonetheless, after an hour of searching, we eventually found the ship, and met the group of technicians, scientists, and crew members with whom we would spend the next two months at sea.
Life on the JOIDES Resolution is a graduate student's dream: you only have to work one 12-hour watch a day, seven days a week, and if you leave your clothes outside the cabin door, they come back clean and folded in a few hours. Not only that, but there are four meals a day and cookie breaks every six hours. Someone even makes your bed and cleans the bathroom. While each of the scientists that sail have a specific project that they are going to work on after the cruise, we spend the time on board collecting and cataloging cores which are recovered from the seafloor. I sailed as a sedimentologist, meaning that I spent my shift describing (both graphically and in writing) the sediment composition and physical characteristics of the recovered material using both visual and microscopic techniques. Other scientists catalogue the magnetic, chemical, biological, and engineering characteristics of the material recovered. Together, all of the ship board scientists produce a catalogue which is used by the global scientific community as a guide to selecting samples for research in the future.
The ship board scientists also collect samples to conduct research. The scientists that sail have access to the sediment cores before they are made available to the larger scientific community. I planned on collecting samples from a pelagic clay site off the coast of Japan to conduct my research. I had an unhappy surprise (OK, I panicked.) when the material that we recovered turned out to be biogenic silicathe shells of diatoms which had accumulated over millions of years. We didn't recover an inch of pelagic clay at this site. It was a good reminder that although we think we know a lot about oceanic sediments, we don't know everything. We did not recover pelagic clay until nearly a month and four sites later in the center of the Pacific Ocean. I was greatly relieved to know that my fellowship research was still on track after all.
The next thing I learned about being a research scientist was that the people who are your colleagues are also your competition. There are restrictions on the amount of sediment you can collect for yourself while at sea; the rest is saved for future use on shore. While I collaborated with several scientists on some of the studies I planned, I also had to learn to look out for Number One, which meant that I had to dive into the snarling pack of scientists at the sampling table and ensure that I got what I needed to complete my project.
Life aboard the drill ship is not all drudgery and battling for sediment. Leg 145 took us across the international date line, which required those who had not crossed the line before to offer a gift to the Golden Dragon (a 7-foot driller dressed in an elaborate dragon costume) and his court. We created a treasure chest of gifts, made costumes, and prepared skits and songs for our passage. Fortunately, we were all found worthy, and none of us were cast into the nether regions of the North Pacific.
Armed with a large box of sediment, I departed the ship to complete the analytical phase of the fellowship. I had 18 months (which sounds like a long time but wasn't) to perform mineralogical analysis of a few hundred sediment samples; perhaps I overdid it at the sampling table, I thought to myself. I also realized that I was going to be spending a lot more time in the windowless lab in the basement at GSO than my prefellowship dissertation would have required. Happily, I got the analysis done and prepared the manuscript in time for publication in the scientific results volume for the leg. It was well worth the extra effort; I completed two manuscripts and attended two meetings to present the results of this fellowship.
My research demonstrated that the sediments in the North Pacific Ocean were very sensitive to major climatic changes on Earth. The eolian sediments in the central basin accumulated at a much higher rate with the onset of northern hemisphere glaciation. Not only did the sediments accumulate more rapidly, but the composition of the sediments changed, indicating that Asia became cooler and drier in response to the global climatic shifts driven by the formation of glaciers much farther to the north.
I completed my fellowship three years ago, and defended my dissertation more than a year ago. I still collaborate with the scientists that I met on Leg 145, and I continue to do work with ODP and JOI. The JOI Fellowship was a terrific experience, not only for the science, but to learn how scientists work in the world outside a windowless basement laboratory.
