Jennifer Hewitt Placement – Royal Research Ship James Cook

Earlier this year, I spent five weeks at sea on board the RRS James Cook as part of an Envision funded placement. The research cruise, JC288, was organised by Durham University and funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council. The science team represented a number of UK universities (Durham, Newcastle, Loughborough, and Bangor), as well German institutions Kiel University, Universitaet Bremen, and GEOMAR. Joining such a diverse group, I was immersed in a collaborative environment spanning a wide range of expertise and career stages.

The aim of the cruise was to undertake some of the first direct monitoring of seafloor sediment flows in submarine canyons. Starting in Florida, we embarked to determine if several submarine canyons in the Gulf of Mexico and along the East Coast of the USA were active. To do this, we combined sediment coring, geophysical surveying, and the deployment of instrument moorings.

Days on board were structured around the operational demands of the cruise, meaning that no two days were quite the same. My primary role was to assist with data collection. Monitoring geophysical surveys (MBES and sub-bottom profiling) helped bridge the gap between theory from my previous studies and practice. I also quickly learned the technicalities of surveying in rough weather! My favourite role, however, was sediment coring. Although I come from a sedimentary background, I had not previously had the opportunity to core offshore, making it especially exciting to be involved throughout the process. I worked on deck retrieving cores, in the laboratory processing and subsampling them, and in the refrigerator organising and archiving them. Being involved across all stages of the workflow deepened my understanding of offshore sediment coring and gave me a much clearer sense of the amount of work behind each core that makes it back to shore!

Beyond the scientific aspects, the placement was an important personal learning experience. Although the cruise does not directly overlap with my PhD topic, I gained a wide range of transferrable skills and a broader understanding of how large-scale field campaigns are conducted in practice. Most importantly, JC288 reaffirmed my enthusiasm for field-based science and how much I value being part of data collection firsthand.