Research Cruise

Adam Subhas is a senior chemistry major with strong interests in environmental chemistry, and more specifically, applications of environmental chemistry to climate change.  This winter break, he will be participating in a research cruise with Caltech professor Jess Adkins!

The month-long research cruise with Jess Adkins (HC ’90) starts from Hobart, Tasmania on December 16th, and the boat docks again on January 17th.  In the meantime, we will be traveling on the Southern Ocean, looking for deep sea corals and mapping the sea floor in the process, as well as collecting oceanic data such as salinity and nutrient levels.   We will be using a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) to find and retrieve the deep sea corals, as well as to map the sea floor.

The deep sea corals are used for two main projects in the Adkins lab – the first is to use the corals as a record of climatological events and ocean circulation in an attempt to reconstruct past climate change events and predict future ones.  The second is to use these specimens to investigate how the corals make their skeletons in the first place.