MOD Engineer Spotlight: Sara Goheen

What is your background and what are you working on at the moment? 
I did mechanical and ocean engineering as my major at MIT. After graduating I spent a year and a half working at a friend’s tech startup in San Francisco, but I missed the “hands on” part and actually making things, plus I missed the ocean. Thus, I decided to move to San Diego. When I got here, I religiously checked the Scripp’s job listings and eventually saw an opening in MOD. I thought it sounded phenomenal, sent in my application, and now it’s been six years. I’m currently working mostly with the epsi, our in-house microstructure instrument to measure small scale turbulence in the ocean. That was my first project when I joined MOD and since then we’ve gone through several iterations and developed the deep version that can go down to 2000m. We are currently redesigning the deep version to fall faster for a project in May where it will have to combat stronger currents to get down to the depth we are most interested in measuring. Next up I’m going to be the project lead on making the “epsi-SOLO” where we’re trying to integrate our sensors onto a SOLO float. We all do a little bit of everything as engineers, but my main focus area is the mechanical stuff.

What keeps you excited and interested in working in the field of oceanography?
Everything! I really love the fieldwork aspect of the job – it is great getting to be out there on the water and measure things instead of just making instruments and sending them off to be used by someone else. Getting to see it work and go through the whole process, testing, improving etcetera,  is really cool. Also, I honestly don’t know why we’re bothering with space, there is so much to learn about the ocean and our planet in general. It really feels like you’re at the frontier of human exploration. Even when I don’t understand all the science bits, I love the feeling of learning things and advancing our understanding of the ocean.

Last but not least I’d have to say that the people I get to work with also keep me excited about my job. I’m surrounded by amazing humans that are the perfect blend of supersmart, quirky, caring, and interesting and it really makes all the difference to have fun people around you.

When you were a kid, did you expect to be an engineer? 
No, not really, I thought I was going to do architecture. As a kid I didn’t even know that oceanography was a thing and I thought that if you’re into designing, building things, sustainability and all that, you should go into green architecture. I still think that could have been fun, but it’s a different timeline. Things take much longer in architecture. I like being able to tinker with something, make a prototype and throw it in the ocean to test it almost right away. Designing buildings involves years of planning and it might not even get built at all.

Were there any particular things from your childhood that drew you to study the ocean and make gadgets? 
I’ve always been one to tinker with things and keep my hands busy, from origami to drawing and all sorts of crafts from basket weaving to wire working. I love making things of all different mediums and combining different techniques in my projects. I also loved playing with Lego growing up, and of course my collection has grown. Hence, I’m not super surprised I now make gadgets for a living.

As for me ending up working with the ocean, that’s not entirely surprising either. I grew up near the ocean in New Jersey, we lived probably 15 minutes from the beach, and my dad was a commercial fisherman. As a kid I did a lot of surfing, snorkeling, fishing, clamming and all that. I don’t fish a whole lot anymore, but I’ve always liked being on the water and going out in our small boat (though as a kid I remember going out scalloping on a day trip with my dad and I was just puking my guts out and had a rough time).

What skills or abilities do you think are useful when thinking about getting into oceanography and becoming a member of the engineering development team? 
I think it is important to not be afraid to ask questions, to be curious about trying new things and not think that you have to perfect a design before you prototype it. When I started, I would be tweaking a design a million times before I’d cut it out, say on the router table, and then I’d instantly notice everything that was wrong with it. The more time you spend just getting the prototypes out the quicker your design progresses and before you know it, you’re already on version “n” and it’s actually working, versus spending all that time on the computer and it’s looking nice but it’s not functional.

What does a typical workday look like for you? 
There are days when you spend hours looking up different types of epoxies, reading various data sheets, looking into material properties and specifications, and then trying to combine everything in SolidWorks. Then there are days when you spend hours in the machine shop, making prototypes and you can instantly test your ideas. An ideal day is about 50% computer time and 50% making stuff. Lately my day also includes cleaning and organizing gear in the lab – we often have kits and instruments coming back from sea trips that needs to rejoin the lab space.

I love the "making stuff part best though. All our machines you have to learn a decent amount to use safely, thus anything you want to make also becomes sort of a puzzle of trying to figure out how to make it, how to secure the part in the machine, what tools to use etcetera. That always stays interesting to me. It’s also exciting when we get parts back from the campus machine shop and get to start assembling things like a big Lego set. I wish I could say I went surfing every morning too, but that doesn’t always happen. I do love lunch surf breaks though.

What drew you to Scripps? 
I grew up on the east coast so Woods Hole [Oceanographic Institution, WHOI] was always a cool thing we had over there, it would be in the paper and on the news. I did a summer internship there between my junior and senior year of college. That project was all about physical oceanography and fieldwork, and I was mindblown that one could do that as a job. Some of the people I worked with at WHOI mentioned Scripps, and I figured I was ready for some warmer weather, so I looked into jobs here.

Is there a particular scientist/person/engineer that inspires you?
Oh, that would have to be Mike, our senior engineer, any day of the week. He has a background in electrical engineering, but he can pretty much make anything and learn anything overnight by watching YouTube videos. His ability to constantly tinker and keep a problem going in his brain, even when he’s sleeping or not working, it is pretty amazing. He’s very well rounded in his engineering skillset which is something I aspire to - not to mention his witty jokes 

Do you have a fun fact that you'd like to share that not everyone knows about you? 
Everybody knows I love Lego, like a lot. I’m also a big fan of turtles, but that’s perhaps also a well-established fact. Well, not everyone knows that I was president of the Origami Society at MIT. My favorite things to make are the modular builds, for example when you make a sphere, and you first make 30 small pieces and interlock them all to form a bigger piece. I prefer that over super intricate, single-sheet-of-paper projects. I once was part of a team that made 400 pieces that were put together to a big sphere that ended up in the local museum.

Written by Kerstin Bergentz

MOD Postdoc Spotlight: Alejandra Sanchez-Rios

What is your background and what are you studying/working on now? 
I did my undergrad in oceanography at Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, in Ensenada, Mexico, which is about two hours south of San Diego. That was a five year degree and after that I worked for a year as a research assistant at CICESE (Centro de Investigacion Cientifica y de Educacion Superior de Ensenada) in the physical oceanography department which is what made me want to continue doing physical oceanography. I did my PhD at Oregon State with Kipp Sherman and then I moved to Taiwan and did almost two years on a fellowship over there, working primarily with coastal models. Now I’m in MOD and here I’m looking at temperature and salinity variability along isopycnals, how they’re changing with time and how they relate to mixing depending on what physical features are present.

What keeps you excited and interested in working in the field of oceanography?
That’s a very interesting question, I go back and forth with this a lot. When you’re doing a lot of writing this often comes up. I think there are two main things though. Curiosity is the first one, I just love figuring out how nature works. The ocean is not static, it has so many different processes going on and they all influence climate and us humans and I just love to discover all of that. The second thing is contributing to the human understanding of our planet. It can be hard sometimes when you’re working with something that is so detailed, which a lot of us in MOD do, to find the meaning and motivation for it, what’s the bigger picture? But when you reframe it in terms of contributing a piece of the puzzle of collective human knowledge of our planet, how it changes with climate and how we can mitigate that, it makes more sense. I am starting to think about the third step of this too, which would be how to use our improved understanding to help people impacted by a changing climate which is something that feels very meaningful to me and keeps me excited.

Fast CTD deployment during NORSE 2022.

When you were a kid, did you expect to be a scientist? 
When I was a kid I wanted to be a biologist. I used to go to the San Diego Zoo as a child and absolutely loved it. I saw myself as a zookeeper and I wanted to do something related to biology. That’s how I ended up in oceanography, thinking it was really marine biology (which it is not really) and here we are…

Were there any particular things from your childhood that drew you to study the ocean? 
My parents took me to the ocean a lot as a kid and I think I always felt very comfortable in and around the ocean because of that. We often went to the aquarium and the ocean have always just felt familiar and a big part of my life. Though what made me particularly interested in marine sciences was high school teacher of mine who was an oceanographer. She taught biology and geography and always included a lot of the oceans in her classes which opened my eyes to this being something you could study at university.

What skills or abilities do you think are useful when thinking about going into oceanography in graduate school or working as an oceanographer?
What comes to mind right away, which is probably reflective of where I am in my own life at the moment, is storytelling. Being able to construct a story. I think we are generally good at investigating why’s and hypotheses, but putting it in a compelling way is hard. And it may seem like “soft science”, but I truly believe that there’s an art to being able to tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, even in a scientific journal, and to be able to capture your audience and convince them of something. That is a useful skill I wish I had started working on earlier in my academic career. And then of course there are more “hard skills” like coding, you can rarely get too much of that, and good communication skills are really important too.

What does a typical work-day look like for you? 
Oh, that really depends on what kind of mood I’m in. My ideal typical day would be to wake up and have some coffee. I like to read something first thing in my day that puts me in the mood for science, something that inspires me and gets me thinking about what I’m doing. What that is depends on what project I’m working on, but I have a list of papers I’m working my way through. Then, if I’m in a writing mode, I’d like to put in at least one hour of writing in early on. Sometimes when I have some flow that means I write a whole page or two, and sometimes that means I have to fight to even get two sentences on paper, but it’s about being consistent, although I’m not always good at being consistent.

Then I try to dedicate some time to look at data. There’s a lot of organizing of data that needs to happen before you can even start making figures and think about science questions. I also spend a lot of time thinking about structuring data in general. How do we store it efficiently, where, how to make it accessible to people et cetera. Emails unfortunately take up some time each day too. Looking for opportunities after I’m done with this postdoc here at Scripps is also something I do on some days. Meetings, seminars, and socializing with colleagues is something I try to do most weeks too. It’s important to not forget about the social aspect of academic work which can sometimes be quite lonely when you’re sat there in front of your computer most of the time.

Alejandra Sanchez-Rios, Devon Northcott and Jen MacKinnon doing fieldwork in the North Atlantic.

What drew you to work at Scripps? 
Well, I knew Jen MacKinnon from past fieldwork and conferences, and I really liked the projects she was involved in but I did not see a post-doc position in the MOD lab advertised at the time. Long story short, I ended up applying for a postdoc position at SIO that was more in the realm of atmospheric sciences. Many things factored in there, including that I wanted to be close to home since my parents live in Tijuana and I had lived far away (Oregon and Taiwan) for many years. During the interview process the person I was supposed to work with said that I looked like a good match for the MOD group with my background in observations as well as models of rapid dynamical processes. I set up a meeting with Jen and we talked and I was so excited about the kind of work that happens in MOD. With the help of Jen we wrote a proposal to work together and I applied for a fellowship at UCSD. I got it and here we are.

Is there a particular scientist or person that inspires you?
That is a very good question. I think I’ve been very lucky with my advisors which have all been very inspiring people that have pushed me in a very good way to be better. They’ve all understood me and seen me in a very human way which I’ve appreciated.

Big picture inspiration though, there are some activists/writers that are doing amazing work in general. One is Loretta J. Ross. She works in reproductive rights justice, and even though she does nothing related to oceanography she started the discussion about intersectionality that made me really start to understand how different things are connected, how you can’t devaluate any part of the equation because they’re all in balance. That also helps remind me when I’m doing science that nothing is completely objective that nothing is unrelated, the human part is as important as the scientific part. That grounds me as an oceanographer, to never let go of the whole picture and stay in my bubble of “oh, the only thing that matters is geostrophy” or whatever. I highly recommend reading some of Ross’ work, she’s able to be vulnerable and share her story but still be very much in an academic setting. 

Anna Savage and Alejandra doing fieldwork aboard the R/V Armstrong 2021.

Do you have a fun fact that you'd like to share that not everyone knows about you? 
Well, a pretty fun fact is that by pure luck and coincidence I ended up, on my first oceanographic cruise ever, getting to go down in HOV Alvin [a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution submersible]. My advisor at the time had a lot of time booked in ALVIN so he managed to take all his students down and I think it was on my 22nd birthday that I got the gift of going down 300m below the surface of the ocean.

Text and photos by Kerstin Bergentz

NORSE 2022 - over and out

Hei! (Norwegian for “Hi”)

The NORSE 2022 cruise is just about done and we’re packing up our containers and are getting ready to head home.

It’s been a couple of eventful weeks in the North Atlantic.

Deployment of a Seaexplorer glider. Photo by San Nguyen.

We started off with the deployment of a few gliders. They are perhaps best described as tiny submarines carrying all sorts of instruments (temperature, salinity, turbulence and even acoustic sensors) that are piloted remotely. They can be programmed to drive in almost any pattern and surface to send their data every couple of days.

Then we moved on to the moorings. A total of 4 of them were deployed at various locations near the island of Jan Mayen, both surface and subsurface ones. One of the primary objectives of this project is to investigate acoustic phenomena so most of the moorings have either sound transmitters or receivers.

Mooring deployment. Photo by Kerstin Bergentz.

Then it was time for the various drifting assets. There were two DBASIS buoys, a collaboration between researchers at SIO and WHOI, with a profiling Wirewalker below a meteorological buoy. It’s the complete package equipped with almost anything you could think of to measure, and drouged at 100s of meters it will travel with the mean current in that part of the ocean.

Preparing the DBASIS buoy with a Wirewalker. Photo by San Nguyen

Last but not least there’s also been many surface drifters. They’re drouged at 15m and will thus flow with the surface currents. Most were the “standard” ones from the Lagrangian Drifter Lab at Scripps (www.ucsd.ldl.edu) that are not recovered but will stay our here measuring currents for many months. Some drifters were part of various R&D programs trying to design new instruments and they were recovered and brought back to land for evaluation and more tests.

Drifter deployment. Photo by San Nguyen.

T-pads ready to go in the water. Photo by San Nguyen.

At least from the perspective of the MOD group the real star of the cruise was our new instrument: the T-pads, our towed phased array. It’s a nifty piece of engineering magic: a very carefully designed series of acoustic sensors placed on a profiler that is lowered off the side of the ship on one of our winches. This instrument can be used to acoustically map flows in the ocean with unmatched temporal and spatial resolution. This was the first time the T-pads got some real action on a cruise and we’re all very excited by the results, this is not the last you’ll hear of them. 

The North Atlantic is an unforgiving place and we’ve had to deal with everything from weather to the loss of some instruments. But that’s part of the job and the only thing to do is to learn some lessons and do better next time.

For now we’re all excited to be headed back to slightly warmer temperatures in San Diego and get some good rest and family time during Thanksgiving.

Northern lights. There are worse office views to be had. Photo by San Nguyen.

The return to Tromsø. Photo by San Nguyen.

North Atlantic waves. Photo by Kerstin Bergentz.

Thank you for following along on our journey as we try to solve the vexing problems in ocean physics and biology.

Until next time!

Land never looks as gorgeous as when you return from sea. Photo by San Nguyen.

(Thought we’d sign off without a silly ocean joke? Really?
- Guess what I put in a box and threw in the ocean?
- Never mind, it’s a sea-crate… )

Written by Kerstin Bergentz

NORSE - 2022 edition

Ahoy from the far North!

Ten members of the MOD team are just wrapping up our first week aboard the Italian research vessel Alliance on the second NORSE (Northern Ocean Rapid Surface Evolution) cruise.

After isolating in Tromsø for almost two weeks we finally got to head to the dock and start setting up our gear, and we have a lot of it… Together with the other researchers onboard representing Applied Research Laboratories at University of Texas, Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Applied Physics Lab (APL) at University of Washington, Center for Marine Research and Exploration (CMRE), Italy, and the University of Bergen, Norway, we have enough oceanographic toys to sample pretty much anything one could imagine to sample in the ocean.

Though being isolation wasn’t that fun, there are definitely worse places to be stuck in than Northern Norway.

During last year’s pilot cruise (read the posts from that here) we spent a lot of time around the island of Jan Mayen. Partly because we were hiding from bad weather, but also to scout out the area, because this year we’re back with not one, not two, not three, but four(!) moorings to be deployed around here. Of particular interest is the acoustical properties of this region as an example of a place where different water masses with very different properties mix and mingle.

Just like last year we have various types of gliders with us, some that will be recovered and some that will be left out for months and piloted remotely. We also have a lot of lagrangian drifters onboard (lagrangian meaning that they flow with the water and trace out the currents plus sample wherever they go) that can sample everything from temperature, winds, and both acoustical and biological properties in the surface layer of the ocean.

MOD team working on one of our winches.

In addition to the gliders, moorings and drifters we have some MOD in-house gear staples like Wirewalker buoys and also our powerful winches with one fast-CTD profiler and one microstructure profiler. These are very cool pieces of engineering craft that allows us to drop our instruments down hundreds of meters and reel them back up again while the ship is driving. This way we can get very high resolution measurements, both in time and space, of things salt, temperature, turbulence and more. We’re also trying out a few new pieces of tech that are under development, more on that some other time.

Prepping the winch.

Our fast-CTD profiler backlit and a wonky horizon just to show you how much things are rocking over here.

The North Atlantic can be a harsh place, especially in October, and unfortunately we’ve already had some delays due to weather that made us to leave Tromsø a few days late. But we’re determined to make the most of this cruise regardless and are keeping the spirits onboard high with everything from karaoke to silly jokes (“What stops the ocean from leaking out?” - the seals).

We’re also updating our Instagram stories every now and again, come give us a follow at @mod_at_scripps.

Signing off with a pretty Jan Mayen picture.

Text and photos by Kerstin Bergentz

MOD Student Spotlight: Charlotte Bellerjeau

What is your background and what are you studying/working on now? 

I did my undergrad in Aerospace Engineering at University of Colorado Boulder. I think I got into aerospace engineering because of sailing growing up. I’ve been sailing and working on boats since I was a kid. The combo of enjoying working with my hands but also loving maths and physics got me into the fluid dynamics side of things which and pushed me into aerodynamics. My minor at CU Boulder in oceanic and atmospheric sciences got me interested in oceanography.

I graduated during the pandemic and had a summer job running a sailing camp while applying to jobs. But the more jobs I applied to the more I realized that I didn’t quite fit into the typical aerospace workforce and was being drawn more towards science. I felt a desire to do something that would be meaningful and good for the world. I applied to some engineering jobs in oceanography but then I realized that there’s more than one way of getting into that field. So I started applying to grad schools for oceanography while working as a full time research assistant at CU Boulder.

Today I’m in my second year of the Applied Ocean Sciences program at SIO working with Matthew Alford on turbulence and mixing near steep undersea topography, like canyons and seamounts. I do some instrument development too and I’m recently back from a research cruise off the coast of Ireland looking at turbulence in the bottom boundary layer.

What keeps you excited and interested in working in the field of oceanography?

I think just being in love with the natural world and wanting to spend time at sea, wanting to understand the ocean more. And then of course the importance of understanding the ocean in a changing climate. I think climate change contributes part urgency to working in this field, and part inspiration realizing we as humans are not doing a great job taking care of the planet and that scientists can be a part of changing that.

When you were a kid, did you expect to be a scientist or engineer? 

I don’t know if I expected it, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. I liked those fields in school. I think that for the longest time, right up until I started applying for grad school and getting interested in oceanography, I could have told you more things that I didn’t want to do than what I wanted to do. I think that’s often the way it goes, you rule things out before you find something you really enjoy.

Were there any particular things from your childhood that drew you to study the ocean? 

I grew up near the ocean on Long Island, so every weekend there was a different beach to explore, and I just loved the ocean from a really young age. I started sailing when I was 11 or 12 and have since then worked teaching sailing and done a bit of offshore racing. I think that was also a big part of me getting into oceanography, realizing how much I enjoy being out of sight of land. The idea of getting to be out there as a part of my career was pretty cool. I enjoyed learning how a sailboat works and how you can use the power of wind to move your boat fast, and that insight and excitement was maybe what got me interested in the forces of nature and fluid dynamics to start with.

 What skills or abilities do you think are useful when applying to graduate school in oceanography? 

Creativity, flexibility and open-mindedness. I think that especially in the field of engineering, one mistake people make is thinking that they already have the best answer figured out and not being open to listen to others and to learn. I think that in both science and engineering people work best as a team, that’s how you get the best results. Humility is important. Wanting to let other people on your team shine and honoring everyone’s unique abilities.

What does a typical work-day look like for you? 

A typical work day for me is part fiddling with code to try to process oceanographic data, and part going down to the lab to help out with some engineering project like soldering something or molding some epoxy. I do a lot of paper reading too when I’m doing background research. Right now I am reading a lot of papers just trying to figure out what’s going on in the field and how I fit into that. I really like the variety.

What drew you to study and work at Scripps? 

Honestly, Scripps wasn’t the first thing on my radar because it is about as far away from my home on the east coast as you could possibly get in the lower 48. But then I stared researching grad schools, and I was really attracted by the climate change focus and progressive profile Scripps has. Working right at the beach in the sunny California weather is nice too.

Is there a particular scientist or person that inspires you? 

I think that one person that inspired me was my mentor in undergrad. Everyone was assigned a faculty mentor for their senior project and ours was this really sweet and badass older woman everyone called Dr G. She was just such a force of nature. I’m really inspired by all the women in the science, especially the ones who have been here for a long time and who paved the way for us.

I’m also inspired by my parents. My mom just published a book she wrote about the role of slavery in America’s founding, especially in the north which is sometimes overlooked as slavery is seen as a “southern thing”. She tells the story of a woman who was enslaved in my hometown during the revolutionary war and I’m really proud of her for illuminating a founding mother of our country, especially in a time when racism is so prevalent and divisive in our country.

Do you have a fun fact that you'd like to share that not everyone knows about you? 

When I was in undergrad, I worked in a mechanical engineering lab at CU Boulder on some projects 3D printing cool materials, everything from electronics to cartilage for knee replacements and other medical applications. We also had a project printing simulated moon dirt for NASA and as a part of that we got to try flying on a reduced gravity airplane. So I guess a fun fact is that I’ve experienced what it would be like to be in outer space (it was awesome!).

Written by Kerstin Bergentz

MOD Alumnus Spotlight: Dr. Marion Alberty

Dr. Marion Alberty is currently a postdoc at Princeton University, where she researches circulation and heat transport in the western Arctic Ocean. Between 2012 and 2018, she was a student in the Physical Oceanography PhD program at Scripps and was advised by Jennifer MacKinnon and Janet Sprintall.

What has changed most about your work since you graduated from the Physical Oceanography PhD program at Scripps?

It might be easier to start with what hasn’t changed, because I’m still thinking about physical oceanography but literally everything else is different! My postdoc work uses numerical models and I infrequently work with observations, which were the focus of my graduate work. Also, I use Python to program now instead of MATLAB, which was a challenging but rewarding change. Moving to New Jersey to work at Princeton also brought about lots of changes too.

Towards the end of my PhD I started to transition towards working and thinking more independently and I've tried to keep moving in that direction. In that sense my work as a postdoc isn’t too different from my work towards the very end of the PhD program.

Could you tell us more about how you made the transition to doing independent research and coming up with your own original ideas?

Back in 2015 I joined the Arctic Mix cruise up in the Beaufort Sea, and got pretty excited about the bowchain observations we were making. When Jen (Mackinnon) saw my excitement, she encouraged me to run with it, so I had to focus and find the interesting story in the data I had. That ended up becoming the third chapter of my thesis, even though the rest of my research had focused on tropical sites, and also was my first time diving into the submesoscale rabbit hole. I think I'm still working towards being an independent researcher but I'm happy with the progress I've made.

How did you choose PhD advisors?

When I first started I knew that I was interested in turbulence and mixing, and that I wanted to do observational work. One of the great things about Scripps is that students have the freedom to explore their options during the first year, so I dedicated time to talk to Jen and Janet (Sprintall) as well as other faculty and find out who they are as people. After a while, I realized that Jen’s and Janet’s mentoring style would work well for me, that I would be well supported, and that the science problems they were working on would keep me engaged and happy in my work.

Beyond the support you got from your advisors, what were some ways in which the broader MOD group helped you be successful?

MOD was in its early stages when I was a student, so I actually remember when we first started having group meetings. Those were very useful to share my research, get feedback, and feel like I was part of a tight-knit scientific community. Everyone who attended those meetings were people who I admired and whom I felt comfortable approaching in other contexts, but having a dedicated space for group support made a huge difference. By the time the meetings formalized I was preparing to finish my projects and eventually defend; I remember wishing those group meetings could have been a part of my entire graduate experience because they were so rewarding.

Written by Noel Gutierrez Brizuela

MOD Student Spotlight: Andrew Parlier

What is your background and what are you studying / working on now? 
I’m born in San Fransisco but grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and I think I’ve always been very interested in what happens at the intersection of humans, technology and nature. I wanted to better understand how that interaction between humans and nature works and then build things for humans to do that better.

I did both my undergrad and then my masters in mechanical engineering pursuing the skills to do that at Stanford. After I finished I wanted to work with something making a positive change. Driven by my awareness of climate change and particular skillset I ended up in the energy sector and I worked in startups and tech for a while, mostly related to energy tech and clean tech.

It was fun but eventually I started to get a little burnt out and feeling like I didn’t have the impact I wanted. Thinking about the things I loved in my life and how I could have a more direct impact on climate change research I ended up deciding that oceanography was probably the best way. But I also decided that I was only going to do it if I got to work on instrumentation development. The paucity of data in oceanography is frankly embarrassing. We can do better and I want to be part of doing better.

That is the reason I came down to Scripps, specifically to work with MOD, because it’s one of the few places in the world where you really get to develop new instruments. My current work is with Professor Matthew Alford developing new microstructure sensors that can measure really small scale flows in the ocean (turbulence).

Deploying the epsifish, a turbulence instrument

Testing new sensor packages

What keeps you excited and interested in working in the field of oceanography?
The potential for new data and to measure and see new things that we haven’t before. There is so much theory and there are so many ideas of what’s happening in the ocean, but we so often have to make extrapolations or we can’t observe it well. I believe we can do better and that’s what I want to work on.

When you were a kid, did you expect to be a scientist or engineer? 
Yes, both my parents studied engineering and I was a classic engineering kid, I built a lot of Lego growing up.

Were there any particular things from your childhood that drew you to study the ocean or  make gadgets? 
Perhaps not so much in my childhood, but I did find myself during my undergrad in particular coming back to the ocean a lot, simply being fascinated with all the questions related to it. And you know, if they in Star Trek argue that space is the final frontier, for humanity the ocean is the final frontier. Though we’re working on exploring space, building telescopes and whatnot, there is still so little that we know about our own planet, and we’re also doing quite a poor job of observing it. I guess this kept coming up for me in undergrad, though I didn’t realize it until later, and now I find myself in oceanography.

What skills or abilities do you think are useful when applying to graduate school in oceanography or becoming a member of the engineering development team? 
I’d have to say experience in different things. Basically finding unique combinations of things that you can do that other people can’t. That doesn’t mean that you have to go do things you don’t like, but I believe that most people who are drawn to oceanography are not drawn to it for the exact same reasons. People come to oceanography from a lot of different angles, so lean into your angle. For me it was coming from a mechanical engineering background and having worked in tech, but still having taken the classes to be able to talk about fluids and science and stuff. That background, in combination with my experience from industry and my approach to things, I think is my angle.

Andrew presenting at the 2022 Gordon Research Conference on Ocean Mixing

What does a typical work-day look like for you? 
Great question. There is not necessarily a typical work day for me since instrumentation development require so many different things. On any given day I could be down at the machine shop actually making parts, I could be in the lab tinkering with things, I could be at my desk writing firmware for the microcontrollers that we use, or writing code for looking at our data, there are design reviews and meetings with people to discuss what we’re doing, there’s reading papers, teaching and mentoring (I mentor a few different engineering undergraduates). I also do a lot of legislative work taking meetings with people trying to have an impact.

With all that I would’t say there’s a typical day for me, and though I don’t do everything everyday I do a little bit of most of those things in a typical week. Also, I’m a graduate student, so there’s always writing involved at some point too.

What drew you to Scripps? 
Well, there was basically two places where I felt I could work on what I wanted to do, and out of those two Scripps was a better fit. Plus the weather is not too bad, and my fiancé, now my wife, was living down here at the time so it just made sense.

Is there a particular scientist, engineer or other person that inspires you?
I think I’m less inspired by a particular person and more by the natural world. Especially human interaction with it. You know, every once in a while I look at the skies and there is some set of cool clouds up there that makes you just go “wow”. I don’t need to necessarily understand every little detail of how they work, but I can still look at it and think “this is pretty great”. The awe that the natural world can inspire, that sense of knowing that we can’t understand all of it, we can’t find an answer or unified theory to explain everything, or even if we do it’ll likely be beyond our lifetimes, that’s inspiring to me.

Do you have a fun fact that you'd like to share that not everyone knows about you? 
Let me think… I do have a podcast that everybody should check out. It’s called “Prophiles” and it’s pretty great. Here’s a link.

Written by Kerstin Bergentz

BLT 2022 edition - we're off!

We’re headed to sea again!
This time with the BLT (Boundary Layer Turbulence) project.

We MOD members Matthew, Bethan, Nicole, Arnaud, Helen, Gunnar, Sara, Isabella, Charlotte and Andrea have spent the past few days getting ready to head out on the RRS Discovery. Departing Southampton our group is headed for the Rockall trough to collect data on turbulence in a submarine canyon, aiming to solve the mysteries of bottom boundary layers and mixing and how that drives the upwelling limb of the meridional overturning circulation.

The meridional overturning circulation is the name for the slow pole-pole flow of water in the global ocean. Simplified, surface waters at the north and south poles gets cooled by the chilling temperatures and becomes dense enough to sink to the bottom. It then travels towards the equator as North Atlantic Deep Water (coming from the Arctic) or Antarctic Bottom Water (coming from Antarctica). These cold dense waters must eventually be brought back up to the surface to complete what is known as the Global Overturning Circulation. While we understand the formation processes of deep water fairly well, how it rises back up is still an open question. Since this circulation of the ocean is crucial for its ability to sequester heat and carbon, a better understanding of the processes involved is important for understanding climate change.

The Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC). Figure 14.11 from Professor Lynne Talley’s book “Descriptive Physical Oceanography”.

For a long time oceanographers believed that the upwelling that closes the global overturning circulation occurred throughout the ocean interior. However, recent observations and theories suggests that upwelling is actually concentrated along sloping bottom boundaries in the ocean, such as steep continental slopes or walls of a submarine canyon, and that highly localized turbulence within thin (typically tens of metres thick) layers near the seafloor, known collectively as the bottom boundary layer, is what actually drives the upwelling of waters from the abyss.

Now that we are on the third (!) BLT expedition, we are much more experienced (though there are always new problems to run into). We have been setting up in Southampton and getting everything on the ship ready for science at sea, where we will spend several weeks profiling. Our main instruments are the epsifish - a microstructure profiler we built in house - and the fast CTD (conductivity, temperature and depth) profiler that can can be winched up and down rapidly for high resolution. 

By Monday last week everyone in our group had arrived: Matthew, Bethan, Nicole, Arnaud, Helen, Gunnar, Sara, Isabella, Charlotte, and Andrea. We are a good mix of experience levels (from student to professor) and disciplines (engineering and science). We received our cabin assignments and went for a walk around Southampton. 

Isabella and Andrea working on the winch

Sara and Charlotte tightening things up

On Tuesday we began mobilizing the equipment. We opened the containers that were shipped here from San Diego and those that were left here after the previous BLT cruise. We started setting up the lab, and the epsifish/FCTD boom was constructed.

Andrea on the winch.

Testing the epsi-fish

By the end of Wednesday the boom had cables attached to it that connected it to power and ran all the way to the lab. We had cameras and lights up too. Back on the science side, there were many debates about where and when to deploy moorings during the next couple of weeks. 

On Thursday the lab was almost finished being set up, the electronics were placed and tidying up had started. The new grad students on the cruise (Charlotte and Andrea) were frantically downloading the software they need while the ship was still on the dock. 

Look at the lab! So neat. This is he “before” picture. (There will be an “after” one too for comparison)

Sunny in Southampton, the Friday shirts were on.

Now it’s Friday and we have strapped down the lab and are ready to sail tomorrow! The lab looks professional, many Matlab scripts have been passed around, and the epsi was put into the water off the boom for the first time.

Wish us luck on the seas!

P.S You can read more on the BLT project here and one of the previous cruises here.

Written by Andrea Rodriguez-Marin Freudmann

SUNRISE 2022 - Over and out!

Greetings landlubbers,
The 2022 SUNRISE cruise is now over and we have made it back to LUMCON in Cocodrie, Louisiana. After a day’s worth of packing and cleaning we are now ready to head home with a ton of great data, cameras full of sunrise and sunset pictures, our bags full of dirty laundry and lots of good memories.

The last week of the cruise started out a bit rocky with plenty of rain and waves. We deployed two Wirewalkers and spent a few days doing transects of various shapes around them gathering a dataset with multiple spatial and temporal scales that we are all very excited about. But it’s also been hard work, between the two ships we’ve done a total of almost 24 900 VMP and CTD profiles, often profiling 24/7.

Profiling with a CTD and a VMP (to the left) from the back deck.

In addition to getting good data we’ve done many other important things such as celebrating Canada Day properly, eating lots of delicious baked goods our eminent chief scientists have made, and taking turns reading the Declaration of Independence out loud on the 4th of July.

One of the many fabulous creations our chief-scientists whipped up in the kitchen.

4th of July reading the Declaration of Independence on the back deck.

Canada day!

The last two days of sampling were dedicated to the students who got to try their hand at being chief scientists. There was a lot of planning happening over slack between the two ships, and some nervousness too. The night crew was handed the reins mid-shift and tasked with finding a good front to sample, which they did brilliantly, and when the day crew took over at 3am there was a nice and sharp front feature to map out. The agreed upon sampling plan involved getting all 4 vessels (2 big ships and 2 small boats) lined up on parallel transects which took quite a bit of coordination.

Chief scientist in training on the Pt Sur bridge.

Profiling come rain or shine.

Students doing a CTD cast aboard the Pelican.

Aboard the Pt Sur and the Pelican we were continuously sampling with our VMPs and CTD, and both the Pelican and the small boats were equipped with very high resolution thermistor chains (a bunch of temperature sensors taped or clamped onto a wire or rope as close as 30 cm apart) to be able to look at the small scale temperature variation in the upper ocean.

One of the small boats and the Pelican in the background.

We kept sampling the same 4 lines for a full inertial period (24h) and managed to capture some interesting variations and changes in both time and space between our 4 boats. In addition we did some larger scale sampling in various patterns and formations to provide more context. The students agreed that it was a great experience and we all learned a lot about everything from leadership to communication, and gained new respect for the intricate process that is collecting good data to do good science.

After the students handed back the responsibility to the actual chief scientists it was time to recover our assets (the two Wirewalkers and the two small boats) and start packing up the lab. After a dramatic last sunset and sunrise, and timing it with the tide, we slowly sailed through the Louisiana wetlands and made port back at LUMCON.

SUNRISE sunrise.

Arrived back in port.

Back at the dock, watching one last sunset, we toasted to what we all agreed was a very successful cruise.

The R/V Pt Sur and R/V Pelican science crews back at the dock after a successful 19 days at sea.

A massive thank you goes out to the phenomenal crews aboard the R/V Pelican and the R/V Pt Sur without whose help we would have had such a good time. Equally, a big thank you to everyone who’s supported the cruise from land and to LUMCON for all their great work.

Over and out from SUNRISE with one last sunrise photo.

Text and photos by Kerstin Bergentz

SUNRISE - sampling away in shifting weather

Ahoy!
The SUNRISE cruise is soon wrapping up its second week and we are keeping ourselves busy with deploying various instruments like autonomous small boats and Wirewalkers, and almost nonstop profiling with microstructure and CTD instruments.

This week in particular we’ve been using OSU’s small remotely controlled RHIBS that are equipped with a bunch of sensors that can measure currents, temperature and salinity. They have been driving around us on the Pt Sur while we’ve been making repeat transect trying to capture the time evolution of a front under the influence of varying wind and while it’s also moving inertially. We bring them back on board every two days or so to download data and refuel them.

Deploying a small boat

One of the autonomous boats at sunrise

We currently also have two Wirewalkers moored in the water and continuously profiling to try to capture any interesting watermass features that wafts by. They’re equipped with ADCPs (acoustic doppler current profilers), CTDs (conductivity or salinity, temperature and depth sensors), and sensors to measure chlorophyll, CDOM (colored dissolved organic matter), turbidity, oxygen and the microstructure using temperature. Together with the sampling we’re doing going around the Wirewalkers with the ships and the small boats, this gives us a very high resolution picture of how the ocean is moving around us.

A happy Wirewalker buoy in the Gulf of Mexico

MOD’s Devon recovering a Wirewalker. We later put this one back out again

We’re seeing a lot of cool things out here. Besides the science, like fronts and filaments and various interesting patterns in shear, chlorophyll, oxygen and dissolved organic matter, we’re often accompanied by everything from dolphins to spinner sharks to flying fish and pelicans. And sunrises and sunsets of course. In addition we’ve had the two ships, the Pelican and the Pt Sur, meet up a couple of times to transport personnel and supplies between the ships using one of the small boats.

Small boat transfer from the Pt Sur to the Pelican

A pelican at sunrise

One of the particularly striking fronts we’ve seen this week.

There’s plenty of oil rigs out here, at night they sparkle like Christmas trees

It is hard work continuously sampling but we’ve also taken the time to have some fun. There is almost always music playing on deck while profiling (best way to stay awake in the wee hours of the morning), and last weekend we celebrated Swedish Midsummer on the Pt Sur. There was a little arts and crafts session making paper flower crowns plus a MacGyvered maypole made with some old PVC pipe, spare tubing and discarded VMP profiling line. In traditional fashion we danced around the maypole singing a song about “the tiny frogs”. (A Swedish midsummer 101 can be found here). Much fun.

Swedish Midsummer celebration aboard the Pt Sur

The last few days have also offered plenty of thunderstorms and rain showers that sometimes come out of nowhere. Being soaked without warning is not always fun, but the magnificent cloud scapes definitely are.

We have about another week of sampling out here before heading back to Louisiana. On the schedule for the next few days we have everything from more transects and a day or two when the students aboard get to be chief scientists, to celebrating both Canada Day and 4th of July. Stay tuned!

Ending this transmission with a silly ocean joke of the day:

- What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches?
- A nervous wreck…

Text and photos by Kerstin Bergentz