By: Meaghan Dutton
If you were to ask me what my craziest adventure of college was, never in a million years would I have guessed it involved living on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for three weeks. Dr. Flood, one of the three professors in the St. Norbert Geology department, emailed the entire program with a message offering an opportunity, strongly encouraging students to apply. There was a link at the bottom of the email to an application for a program called Joides Resolution (JR) Academy: Fire to Flood. I didn’t know what I was applying for, but I applied nonetheless.
Within a month, I was accepted into the program, and I was getting ready to set sail in April! After two Zoom calls and about a hundred texts to the JR Academy group chat, we were ready to take off. With one canceled flight and a brief reroute to Germany, I finally made it to Naples, but this is where the panic set in! I was nearly 5,000 miles away from everyone I knew, and I had agreed to sail on a boat across the ocean. I got in a taxi, went to the address I was given, and prayed really hard that this was actually happening and not just an awful dream. Once I arrived at the hotel, everything suddenly became real. The very next day, we set off on our first adventure: climbing Mt. Vesuvius and visiting the ruins of Pompeii. Standing on top of Mt. Vesuvius, looking out over the entirety of Campania, it was wonderful to feel so small in the world. There is so much out there left to be seen and discovered, and I can’t wait to be part of that.
Four days after we arrived in Italy, we set sail on the JOIDES Resolution. This boat has been all over the world, covering over 200,000 miles in the past 10 years. Every lab on board is one of a kind, designed specifically for life at sea. NASA has done research on this boat, using it to aid the Astrobiology Research Unit search for extremophiles, organisms that live in extreme environments.
On the JR we spent time in lecture and lab, running samples under a mass spectrometer, looking for microfossils under X-rays, and searching for data points that indicate a magnetic pole reversal in their paleomagnetism lab. This hands-on research is essential to undergraduate science students, and I am so grateful that I was able to have access to some of the coolest labs I’ll ever see!
While at sea, I saw dolphins, whales, a man kayaking across the Strait of Gibraltar, thousands of other boats, and the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets! Passing through the Strait of Gibraltar was an incredibly amazing experience. Standing at the bow of the ship, seeing sun come up behind us with dolphins jumping in the wake of the boat cutting through the water, with Morocco on your left and Spain on your right, how could you not be in awe of the world in that moment?
I did get incredibly sea sick once we got into the open ocean, and I was out of commission for about 3 days. This happened as we crossed the Bay of Biscay, which we fondly called the Bay of Dismay because a lot of us were sick during the passing. I slept for 17 hours one day, could barely walk up the stairs in the boat, and sickly called my roommate to beg her to make me plain toast and Cheerios for every meal. However, I recovered, and we had a disco party to celebrate once everyone recovered!
We finally made it to Amsterdam, which reminded me of the landscape back in the Midwest: lots of cows, lots of agriculture, and lots of cheese shops everywhere! During the day, we had lectures about the impacts of climate change in the LowLands region, and we explored Amsterdam at night. We toured the canals of Amsterdam, riding around for hours to look at the amazing feats of architecture around the city. We also took a tour of Zaanse Schaans, a reconstructed village from the 18th century full of windmills that ground paint and sawed boards.
The best part of this journey were the friends that I was able to make from around the world. From Australia to Washington, so much of the United States and the world was represented aboard JOIDES! While we only spent 18 days together, they are some of the coolest people I have ever met. Every person and their uniqueness created an amazing culture we were able to experience Over the 60 years the JR has sailed, JR Academy has only run three times, and I was incredibly grateful that I got to be part of this group.
This adventure was truly once in a lifetime because the JR finished her final voyage one month ago. The NSF has shut down all operations, and will be pivoting towards other drilling operations. This was highlighted in a recent article in the New York Times, “Dismantling the Ship That Drilled for the Ocean’s Deepest Secrets”, which covered much of the NSF’s decision. I am lucky to be part of the 60 year history of the JR, and I am so incredibly grateful to all my professors who helped me take part in this journey!
