Our Mission
So how, as one friend of mine put it, did I manage to get this amazing gig? I’m always tempted to answer blind luck. Because it often feels that way — as if I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. When I can think about it calmly (not very often), I realize there was probably a little more to it than that, but not much. In point of fact, I still don’t know exactly how it happened, though I expect I will know soon. I can only make conjectures based on what information I have.
In November of 2005, I got a phone call from my husband’s brother, Steve Etchemendy. Steve is Director of Marine Operations at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in going to Antarctica with a group of marine biologists for a month and writing a K-12 book about it. At that point, all I knew about the trip was what Steve had just told me — almost nothing. But I felt as if I had won the lottery. I didn’t even stop to think about it. My response, irony unintended, was, “In a hot second!”
The phone call was followed by a formal invitation from Dr. Stephen M. Rock. Dr. Rock, a professor of Aero/Astro at Stanford University, could be broadly characterized as a robotics expert. One of his specialties is control of underwater vehicles from a distance, so it’s no surprise that he is also an adjunct research engineer at MBARI, where they rely heavily on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for their research.
The project Dr. Rock described sounded fascinating and timely. A group of scientists would take an AUV to the Weddell Sea, where global climate change is causing Antarctic ice shelves to shrink and split apart, creating thousands of huge, free-drifting icebergs. These floating islands of ice — often many kilometers across — hold tons of nutrient-filled soil (and who knows what else) picked up on their long slide across the Antarctic continent. As the ice melts, this natural fertilizer dissolves in the water, creating a rich “halo” of life forms that surrounds and travels with each large berg.
We already know that an iceberg’s halo swells out from it several kilometers in all directions. What we don’t know is exactly what life forms these haloes contain. With the help of the AUV, said Dr. Rock, the team hoped to view every part of the halo, even that which lies beneath the iceberg.
Some believe we may discover as yet uncataloged life forms, or find evidence that these new floating ecosystems are removing large amounts of carbon dioxide and particulate carbon from the air and sinking it deep in the ocean, which might be very good news indeed for our sweating planet.
In the course of two voyages — the first to work out the technology and the second to do the actual science — we shall see. As for yours truly, I suppose my name came up because I was the only person the team knew who could write children’s books and was crazy enough to say yes. All I really know is that it’s my job to infect you with the tingle that runs down the back of my neck whenever I imagine what we might see in that first view from the robot’s cameras, deep beneath the dark and icy seas, in the land that H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones called home.
Though that’s not how Dr. Rock put it.
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