The Polaris and her sister ship Octantis both have a full science team, and they gather data and perform various scientific research. Dr. Brandi and gave a presentation Thursday morning in the hour or so leading up to our arrival in Antarctica about that science.
She spoke of how growing up, she hated math and science. It was in college when she was required to take a science class that she became hooked because of her chemistry professor. As she described her professor, she was a woman so passionate of chemistry and science in that “she loved science like an orca likes baby seals”. And it was that awe that the professor instilled into Brandi, who know holds a PhD in nuclear chemistry!
She spoke of how more money is being spent, but how much that buys is going down. She spoke of the process for applying for grants. How several years ago, it was about 1 in 4 which got funded. Now its 1 in 11. Thus a lot of competition for funding. As many people in research/academia know, in addition to the time consuming process of applying for grants and the such, assuming the funding is granted, there is more time for the funds to be released, and for the experiment or data gathering to occur. To end up with essentially 1 data point. And then it will needs to be repeated, likely multiple times to determine if there is a pattern.
That is just 1 factor into why people leave academia/research. Factor in the time it takes for each step – writing the proposal, applying for the grant, assuming you get the grant, the time it takes to set things up, etc, etc. It was interesting insight into STEM research.
A huge advantage to the science that Viking does, is that they travel weekly to Antarctica during the southern hemisphere summers. Therefore, they can gather data routinely and as she pointed out, they seem to have a continuous stream of “investors” since there are seemingly endless number of people who want to come on the cruise.
They work with a number of agencies and research groups:
She spoke of the water samples they collect and send through filters to measure the amount of microplastics that are in the waters here. They use a ferrybox on board to measure refined fuels in the water column. They also go out in the zodiaks and measure things like phytoplankton, and deploy cameras for a few hours to monitor for different fish and marine life. Among one of their findings was a giant jellyfish that was previously believed to only live in the deep depths of the ocean. They will also go out with hydrophones to listen for various things. She said recently they heard what they thought were whales, but it ended up being a leopard seal instead!
The science team encourages cruise ship passengers to take part in science. They have held sessions on some of the various science crowdsourcing apps like ebird, happy whale, and GLOBE clouds. We were also offered the opportunities to sign up to help with one of the projects they will work on during the trip. We each signed up for one, and we will wait to see! Some of them would involve being out in a zodiak for a few hours. I’ll add more pictures from the talk later on – it was a great session!
And we arrived in Antarctica shortly thereafter!
