Meet the scientists

There are seventeen student-scientists aboard the ship. Here is a little bit about us.

Lauren B - I'm studying ocean acidification, and helping out with this blog!
Sidney B - My research is on how little copepods eat plastic bits instead of real food. So far my experiments have been a success, but it is sad to know that these tiny creatures are injesting things that seem like food but have no nutritional value.
Denise D - I'm measuring toxic pollutants in copepod fecal pellets - just call me the chief poop collector. I'm getting good samples, but I won't know my results until we get back to the lab.

Jonah D - I'm looking at the isotopic composition of CO₂in the ocean in an effort to determine how much of it comes from fossil fuel burning. I'll have a lot of work to do once we are back in Seattle.
Dylan H - I'm extracting toxic chemicals from the water in an attempt to see how far out the dissolved pollutant load goes. Will we discover pollutants thousands of miles from shore? Stay tuned.
Max K - For my project I am focus on determining what effect the cooling anomaly currently present in the North Pacific subtropical gyre has on the distribution of nutrients in the upper portion of the water column. Its very cool ;-)
Alex L - I'm going to use multibeam data we collected north of Hawaii to calculate a roughness (the variability of seafloor height/depth) metric of the seafloor within the Hawaiian North Arch Volcanic Field. Roughness is a high-frequency metric that can be used to interpret the morphology of the seafloor.
Alison M - I'm evaluating the presence of non-steroidal anti-inflammitory chemicals (NSAIDS) in the great garbage patch and their propensity to sorb onto plastic pollutants.
Ben M - I'm seeking enlightenment about the nitrogen cycle by evaluating N-Star, a measure of how much excess nitrogen is either in the ocean or missing from the ocean. I'll use this data to evaluate whether our cruise track passed through any regions of the North Pacific that are different from usual.
Alli M - I'm interested in how bacteria colonize different plastics in the garbage patch because I want to learn about how the plastic integrates itself into the ecology of the patch.
Reese M - I will be resolving the thickness of the submarine lava flows in the North Arch Volcanic Field using magnetometry. Stay tuned for a blog post soon!
Zack N - I'm aboard the ship as a helper - my actual project is about the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, where I am using float and glider data to evaluate climate change.

Helena P - I'm using high resolution multibeam bathymetry and sub-bottom profiling to look at lava flows in the North Arch Volcanic Field.
Bryan T - I'm studying whether plastics stimulate the growth of bacteria and act as a beneficiary addition to the ecosystem.
Dylan V - I'm taking bacterial abundance measurements across the gyre from Honolulu to San Diego
Jordan W - The SeaFlow flow cytometer will measure small phytoplankton, including Prochlorococcus, Synechococcus, and picoeukaryotes. Phytoplankton abundance, diameter, and biomass will be calculated to determine how phytoplankton communities change across the gyre, through the front(s), and into the coastal ocean.
Naomi W - My focus is primarily on the lengthy flow at the southeastern region of the volcanic field. Through past GLORIA images of the field, physical and chemical characteristics of this specific lava flow have been discovered, but little has been concluded of the possible source fissure that could have been the source of eruption. This fissure, although estimated to be near 75 km in length, lacks high resolution mapping due to limited resources and is identified only by slight downhill lava flows and bathymetric gradients in the region. I believe this fissure exists and the objective of my research is to prove its placement through mapping the bathymetry of its possible region with a high resolution multibeam sonar to identify a lengthy bathymetry gradient that would agree with my hypothesis.