Notes from the Field

Sleeping on a ship… Sleep. We all need it. But how much do we actually need? As I’ve discovered the past couple of days, half an hour just won’t cut it! I became a grumbling, tired zombie – an absolute pleasure to be around (not…). Throw in an extra 2-hour post-second-breakfast nap, however, and I […]

Back when I was in Boy Scouts, my troop would spend the better part of a week at summer camp doing Scout things.  Tying square knots, whittling sticks, trying to swim, not showering.  Pretty typical stuff.  To spice things up a bit, my buddies and I would go down to the Trading Post in camp […]

50 Things I Worry About If we are defined as humans in part by the things we choose to worry over, let the following list be a window into the psyche of a Mate on a research vessel, and a portrait of a modern sailor in the style of Picasso. 200 pounds of the Chinese […]

At Sea This is the second of the NAAMES cruises that I have been able to sail. The first was NAAMES #1, November, 2015, and I am lucky to be on this, the last of four cruises that were scheduled for this campaign. Having bookended these cruises, I recognize a couple of changes in both […]

A New Adventure NAAMES #4 is my first long-term ocean-going research cruise. The anticipation built as I prepared to leave my husband and Paisley, my golden retriever, at home for an entire month. Did I pack everything that I need? Would the food be good? Would I enjoy the experience? Yes, yes and yes! Not […]

Science and Sunsets Day 10 and two stations into the last NAAMES campaign. It feels like we were just on the dock in Puerto Rico preparing for our 25-day adventure on the R/V Atlantis. The anticipation for NAAMES 4 was great. Many relationships were formed during NAAMES 3 and getting on the Atlantis for NAAMES […]

A day at Sea 1.14PM. The sun is high in the sky. I am enjoying its energizing warmth on the bow. Only the wind is keeping me company with its mild whistling. 1.14PM. Ten hours of work have already passed by. Fast, very fast. The alarm goes off at 2 AM. Eyes wide open. Take […]

On March 14, four members of the NASA ABoVE Dall sheep project (lead PI Laura Prugh and PhD students Chris Cosgrove, Ryan Crumley, and Molly Tedesche) headed into the Wrangell Mountains for a week-long field expedition to conduct snow surveys. These snow surveys are critical to the project’s goal of understanding how snow conditions are […]

Marker Mark and Recapture Transit was long. I used it to design a deeply elegant experiment — elegance is the true mark of a good experiment, where a complex problem is broken down into a simply testable idea or procedure — to address one of the most profound questions in science: Where do all of […]