A week out of my biome
Mid-February I headed over 2000 km due south to attend a conference in San Diego. The view of palm trees on my cab ride to the hotel felt surreal—like I’d stepped into a different world.
Since I live on a rainy Pacific island, I thought long and hard about leaving my raincoat at home—and I did. What I overlooked was a need for sunscreen, so I promptly got a sunburn (then found a drugstore and got sunscreen). It was sunny and hot (for me) all week, I can’t imagine being in San Diego in summer.
The point of my trip was to attend an oceanography conference, so most of what I saw was the inside of a conference centre. Ironically, I went to many talks about ice and the changing Arctic. Since the conference included a seemingly endless buffet of talks, I also went to sessions on bioluminescence, big data systems and ocean fungi (which I had no idea existed until I saw the session).
I also presented my PhD work on the underwater soundscape in an Arctic bay. Turns out this bay gets used for snowmobile races, so what I found was that snowmobiles on ice make a lot of noise—and yes, I wrote a whole chapter in my dissertation on this tidbit of info. If you want to hear what snowmobiles on ice sound like, go here (there’s also some ice cracking, which is rather cool to listen to).
As a tangent, recently I’ve been fascinated by how algae can make noise (unfortunately, the conference had no talks on the topic or I would have gone). When algae photosynthesize, it produces tiny bubbles of oxygen as a by-product. As these tiny bubbles collapse, they let off a loud popping sound. I tried to include this tidbit of info in my dissertation, but it really wasn’t relevant. In the end, I wrote a short story featuring this which has been submitted to a magazine (who knows what they'll think of it).