For Graduate Student, Research Is Gas: Well, Two Gases Actually, and Both Affect Climate

Dodd, Scott, Oceanus

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When you spend 40 days on a ship in the South Atlantic, enduring equipment failures, icebergs, and the occasional surly shipmate, you should at least get to see a few penguins for your trouble.

But when Naomi Levine went to sea in the winter of 2005--her second cruise as a graduate student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MIT/WHOI) Joint Program--she missed her chance.

As researchers aboard the Ronald H. Brown collected samples early each morning in the chilly air, penguins would gather alongside the ship in the dawn rays, said Scott Doney, a WHOI marine chemist and Levine's Ph.D. co-advisor.

It would have been a thrilling sight--if Levine ever got to see it. But she had to work each morning in the computer room, only coming on deck once the penguins had scattered.

"She thought we were pulling her leg about the penguins," Doney recalled. "She never actually got to see them in the open ocean on that …

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Publication information: Article title: For Graduate Student, Research Is Gas: Well, Two Gases Actually, and Both Affect Climate. Contributors: Dodd, Scott - Author. Magazine title: Oceanus. Volume: 46. Issue: 3 Publication date: September 2008. Page number: 32+. © 1998 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale Group.

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