Among the many lessons we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is the value of having a highly skilled scientific workforce that is capable of leveraging its education to serve the broader community. Throughout the pandemic BIOS continued its long-standing research programs with new procedures in place and offered a record number of summer internships to on-island students, thus ensuring our continued commitment to science and science education.

Sampling offshore Bermuda this July, the BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) program completed its first full year of study to learn how marine microbes produce, transform, and leave behind dissolved organic matter as the seasons progress, and microbial communities wax and wane.

At midnight on a warm night off Bermuda in July, research technician Joe Cope and a small team of crew members prepared to deploy a net system stretching nearly the length of a city bus from the stern of the research vessel Atlantic Explorer. Though it’s not unusual for oceanographers to work around the clock during a research cruise, the timing of this particular cast was important. Every night, under cover of darkness, the marine animals they hoped to capture—some a few inches in length, others the size of a sand grain—come to the surface to feed on phytoplankton, after spending the daylight hours far below the surface, hiding from predators.

The BIOS-operated vessel Atlantic Explorer docked at the Hamilton Princess Hotel & Beach Club on September 22 for a special evening that included ship tours, mingling on the dock with BIOS researchers, and the opportunity to view a television program that features BIOS’s internationally recognized work on climate change research.

To maintain the unparalleled 27-year record of natural ocean processes and human-induced change at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site, four BIOS research technicians work to collect monthly measurements at sea, process samples in the lab, and analyze incoming data.  Over the past year, each of them has also gone beyond their basic duties with research forays into the time-series dataset.  This month, the four traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, to present their results at the 2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting.

It is not often that a piece of scientific equipment from BIOS’s research vessel (R/V) Atlantic Explorer gets the opportunity to help the broader community in Bermuda. But that is just what happened to an ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezer as the island prepared to receive and administer the newly developed COVID-19 vaccine.

After a year of shark attacks, leaking instruments, and a hiatus resulting from the global COVID-19 pandemic, BIOS’s gliders are back to work in the waters offshore Bermuda.

Oceanographer Neal Pettigrew is still piecing together the 1,392-day trip his runaway buoy made from the Gulf of Maine, which ended with its recovery on board the BIOS-operated research vessel Atlantic Explorer just before Halloween. But this much he knows: just by drifting freely over huge distances around the Atlantic, the buoy collected a remarkable amount of information about the ocean.

In early August, BIOS welcomed two new members to its Ship Operations Department—Ella Cedarholm and Lydia Sgouros—both marine technicians aboard the Institute’s 170-foot (52 meter) research vessel (R/V) Atlantic Explorer.

Follow Doug on the 10 day cruise here.