During the month of July, Maryland Organic Geochemistry and Ecology Laboratory (MOGEL) member and Lyon student Charlie Morgan will be on an oceanographic research cruise in the Bering Sea aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Icebreaker Healy. He will be collecting krill samples in support of an NSF-sponsored project to understand the effects of climate change on Bering Sea Ecosystems.

Morgan is an undergraduate student at Lyon College, visiting MOGEL for the summer as part of the Maryland Seagrant REU program. He will be blogging about his experiences on the high seas.

"You may be wondering just how big of an undertaking a polar oceanographic cruise is?" Morgan writes on his blog. "Well, it's a very large one. We must transport all of our sampling gear and laboratory supplies to the ship while it is in homeport in Seattle, Washington. This usually takes place several months in advance, before the ship departs for the summer research season. This year, the ship left port in early March for the first round of cruises, so our gear was packed and sent by freight shipment in late February. Our laboratory alone sent over 900 lbs of equipment to the vessel, including sampling jars, microscopes, analytical instruments, cold weather gear, and chemicals!

"Our cruise participants will begin their journey early this week," he said. "The first leg of their trip is from Washington, D.C. to Anchorage, Alaska, with a layover in Minneapolis. This should take approximately 12 hours. Once in Anchorage, they must switch to a much smaller plane for the remaining 3-hour flight to Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Dutch Harbor is on the Aleutian Island of Unalaska. You may be familiar with "Dutch", as it is referred to in the polar research community, because it was popularized by the Discovery Channel's exciting documentary of the Alaskan King Crab fishery, "Deadliest Catch". Here, in Dutch Harbor, they will meet the ship, and sail north into the Bering Sea."