Life at Sea with a Hardcore Geologist | Everyday Extremes | BBC Earth Science

Hi, my name is Denali. I'm a geologist. It's really inspiring to be in a field where you feel like you have a real chance of discovering something important. I am obsessed with the ocean. It's why I got into this field to begin with. Right now I am doing field work at the East Pacific Rise, which is a mid-ocean ridge. It's located right about there. Essentially everyone on the crew, all of the scientists, fly from wherever they're based out of to wherever the port location is and we meet up there. And then often a day or two later we will actually board the vessel and head out to sea. So these are the bunks. These are where we sleep and the room is where we all get ready for work in the morning or evening, depending on whether or not you're doing night ops or day ops. Sometimes I do a little bit of both and just don't sleep very much. The boat can rock quite a bit so the railing is to make sure I don't fall off while I'm sleeping. After the first few days you just kind of get used to it. I got up around nine this morning and I've been doing work since then. I do usually sleep past breakfast, especially if I was up the night before. If I can, I always try to start my day having coffee somewhere nice on deck. It's just a really good start to the day and you can often see birds flying past the boat or you can see dolphins or other animals swimming alongside the boat. A very big part of this research cruise is looking at the ocean floor, which is predominantly made up of a volcanic rock called mid-ocean ridge basalt or morb, and trying to see if there is potential for another eruption at the east Pacific rise sometime soon or if perhaps one has already happened. Day-to-day work as a PhD student varies a lot. Sometimes I'm drowning in Excel spreadsheets. Sometimes I'm cutting rocks in half or hitting rocks with a laser and other times you're in the field. I'm living on a boat or I'm living in a tent next to a volcano so there's a lot of variety and that is actually one of my favorite parts of the job. The trip to Iceland was my first relatively independent field season. Very rare at that station in your career to get actual field experience at a currently erupting volcano. I would not trade that experience for the world. Though I was already pretty certain of where I wanted to go with my career, that trip definitely solidified that I wanted to be able to come. In order to collect samples from the bottom of the ocean you can use a number of different methods. For this specific research cruise I'm on now we will be using what's called a rock core, which is essentially just a drill that takes a core of the rock from the ocean floor which we then study. While I primarily am getting samples using the rock core I am also getting samples from the Alvin. A remotely operated vehicle that goes to the bottom of the ocean and collects your samples. This sample here is one that our amazing Alvin team collected while they were doing one of their dives. This is probably one of the nicest, shiniest mid-ocean ridge basalt samples I have ever seen. It's so glassy. I think it's magical. Honestly I would go so far as to say it's romantic. To hold a rock that's from the ocean floor, the bottom of the ocean floor, that's crazy. Okay so we did just finish rock pouring. We did two rock core drops overnight. It is 4 30 in the morning. So this is what they look like when they come off the rock core. All these black bits are pieces of volcanic glass. It might not seem like very much glass but we can do the analyses we need to do with just this much from each location. Now I am going to bed. I never in a million years thought I would do this as a job. I didn't know this job even existed until suddenly it was the only job I'd actually ever wanted. I am genuinely excited to go into work every day and I never in a million years thought a future like that was possible for me. But with geology it is.