Oh, field work. How lovely it is (no sarcasm!)! It’s a crucial component to understanding how the actual environment functions, providing relevant information about how the microbial communities function in situ under natural chemical gradients. Interested? Come sail with us!
I direct you to blogs that were maintained on separate cruises for a cursory glimpse into life and research aboard month-long expeditions:
Eastern Tropical South Pacific 2013
Eastern Tropical North Pacific 2018
Another fairly special aspect to our work relates to the experiential educational component of our research! In addition to taking scads of unsuspecting MIT undergrads to sea as part of research endeavors, we also operate a class—Field Oceanography!—that really gets everyone’s feet wet! See a summary of the first incarnation here, aboard the proverbial Black Pearl.