TOADTalk: Lessons From Life as an Oceanographer
Math and science teacher Owen Coyle described his time as an oceanographer to illustrate where curiosity and an adventurous spirit can take you.
Once a week, the All-School Assembly launches with the Teacher On Active Duty (TOAD) sharing something of interest—a reflection, a story or song, a demonstration of some sort, or a simple poem. In this way, the community gets to know one of our own a little better. Owen Coyle, whose TOADTalk is featured below, joined the Thacher faculty this year. He is a member of the Lower School dorm staff, coaches JV cross country, and teaches computer programming, AP computer science, and math.
Because I'm new to Thacher, I thought I would share a piece of my former life with you. As some of you may or may not know, my former job title was oceanographer, which is why I'm dressed up like Steve Zissou today. Now, for those of you who are thinking that means I was a marine biologist, you are wrong; they're the sexy ones who get to study whale calls and turtle migrations. No, I was an oceanographer, and I studied the tiniest organisms in the ocean: the plankton. I promise it's way cooler than dolphins, once you get into it.
This talk is not really about oceanography, though, but more generally about where curiosity and an adventurous spirit can take you (two values that I know will resonate with Thacher students). So, without further ado, here are Some Adventures and Things I Learned from Life as an Oceanographer.
Oceanography is a journey, and it involves a lot of journeying on ships. Any ship voyage begins with loading all of the supplies and everything you'll need for 30 to 40 days on board. Before they even finish loading, people begin tying everything down—and I mean everything. We tied our laptops down to the desk!
The reason everything gets tied down becomes obvious when you set sail and begin the journey to your station (the place where you'll be doing scientific research). Time is money, so it's pretty much full throttle in a straight line all the way there. This means that the ship is not necessarily taking the waves head on, so things start moving a lot! Now is the time when you find out whether or not you get seasick (luckily for me, I do not). This time is also when you learn how difficult walking on a moving platform can be. From a physics perspective, your leg is like a pendulum, and as the ship moves up and down, the apparent gravity you feel changes, with the result being that your walking tempo gets faster and slower with the roll.
The journey to the station (which can take a few days depending on how far you go) is also a great time to get to know the other people with whom you'll be working closely over the coming weeks. Here are some of the characters I met over the years: 1) a Canadian ROV (remotely operated vehicle) team with two guys, both named Keith, who both liked heavy metal music; 2) a sailor who had been sailing all her life, and who told a story about how she was once moving a yacht during late autumn and got caught in a terrible storm which she thought would kill her; and 3) my favorite, a video expert named Ed, who had to work long hours and yet couldn't stomach coffee or tea and so, drank an ungodly amount of Diet Mountain Dew. (I watched them load it onto the ship with a crane.)
Most of the time you get to know people over meals, and in many ways meal time is what structures your day, since the lights are always on, and people work around the clock. Meals start when they start, and end when they end (no late night snack bar or Avery's Fruit Stand), so you either get there or wait until the next one. This can be inconvenient if, say, you happen to be the most junior person on board and draw the 4 a.m. to noon watch. Not only do you have to get up early, but dinnertime falls right in the middle of your "night time," so you either adopt a split sleep schedule or you skip dinner.
Simply falling asleep on a moving ship can be challenging. First, there's the noise: engines, bow thrusters, and waves slapping the metal sides. (The first time I heard it, I thought we'd run into something.) Then, there's the motion. Best-case scenario—imagine trying to fall asleep as your head moves in a circular motion, moving above, then below, then above your feet. If things get rougher, you can find yourself being physically rocked side to side. Rougher still, and you can wind up having to wedge yourself between the mattress and the bedframe to keep yourself from being thrown out onto the floor.
If this all sounds arduous, it is—but like all things in life, you get used to it, and eventually you get your sea legs and start feeling more comfortable in your new environment.
The science that we did on these voyages is also important, of course. I had three favorite projects that I got to be involved in: 1) sampling bacteria from parts of the ocean with no oxygen and figuring out how they "breathe;" 2) filtering literally thousands of gallons of seawater to be able to look at the RNA being expressed by the bacteria and plankton on an hour-by-hour basis; and 3) using an underwater robot to place instruments around an underwater volcano, so we could watch the eruption when it happened. None of these projects were "mine." But, because there are several projects all going on at once, you are expected to help out, and you learn so much by talking to and working with these other amazing people.
Then, there were the "wow" moments—the times when you just have to stop and take it in. One of my favorites was a moment when, after a few days of heavy seas, the weather suddenly broke, and within a few hours, the water was completely still and as smooth as glass for as far as the eye could see. Another time, I was out on deck trying to get some fresh air to help me wake up at the start of my 4 a.m. watch, when I heard someone else breathing: a deep exhaling breath right over the side. I walked over and saw, right next to the ship, a large gray whale, breathing and checking out the ship. It stayed with us for about five minutes before diving back beneath the waves.
My favorite wow moment, though, had to be the time we disturbed a deep sea octopus with the ROV. If you've seen footage of deep sea fish, you might know that they tend to move slowly, and that's because there's not a lot of food down there, so their metabolisms are much slower than ours, and they move more slowly. What this meant is that we got to watch, in slow-motion, the horror of this octopus encountering a robot, turning around slowly, and then running away as quickly as it could (but still seemingly in slow motion).
At the point you might be thinking to yourself, "Wow, Mr. Coyle, oceanography sounds great—why did you leave?" The way you describe it:
- Curiosity and adventurousness took you places you'd never imagine,
- In the beginning, things were disorienting, even a little uncomfortable,
- You found yourself working harder than you ever had before, sleeping strange hours, and measuring your days by meal times,
- You met amazing people, and did amazing things together,
- You sometimes just had to stop and take in your surroundings, and appreciate the occasional wildlife encounter.
Well, you could say the same things about Thacher, and I am so excited to be on this journey with all of you, my new shipmates.
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