Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences

Well hello there! You’ve stumbled across a special entry to my DPhil (PhD) diary, which is the first time I write to you from the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, a marine research station nestled in the subtropical North Atlantic, in the middle of the Sargasso Sea, on a little island called Bermuda. If you’re here deliberately, I hope this blog, and subsequent entries, is everything you dreamed of (hi mum!!). If you’re here by accident, then welcome to a glimpse inside the life of a third year PhD student living the dream of every young marine biologist and oceanographer.

Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences

Why is this the dream, you ask? Well, apart from its gorgeous climate, pink sand beaches, and sunsets and rises to boot, Bermuda and its Institute of Ocean Sciences is absolutely steeped in marine science history, and, in being here, I’m becoming a piece of that history, leaving a little bit of my scientific footprint behind.

Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) has been here since 1903, when it was founded as the Bermuda Biological Station for Research. It has its own research vessel, the R/V Atlantic Explorer (which I can literally see from my bedroom window!), and is perfectly and uniquely placed in the middle of the subtropical North Atlantic ocean. The really exciting part for me, that I’d heard of and used data from long before I set foot here, is the institute’s sustained ocean observations, Hydrostation ‘S’ and the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study, known as BATS.

Hydrostation S is the longest-running oceanographic time series in the world, and has been measuring the ocean's properties at that same spot every 2 weeks since 1954! And a little further away from Bermuda, the BATS site has been sampled every month since 1988. This kind of sustained long term ocean observation is absolutely key for our understanding of long-term trends in ocean biogeochemistry. This is more important now than ever, as we track climate change and its effects on our marine ecosystems, and the impact this will have on our planet as a whole.

So, what’s a PhD student from Oxford, UK, doing in such a place as this? Well, I’m extraordinarily fortunate to be the recipient of a UK Associates of BIOS scholarship, allowing me to spend three glorious months here, gathering data for my PhD in marine biochemistry and biological oceanography. During my time here I’m working with the Microbial Ecology Laboratory alongside an ongoing project called BIOS-SCOPE, which is a program studying the ocean’s smallest life forms, the roles they play in global cycling of elements such as carbon, and how they influence the ability of the ocean to support life on earth.

Whilst I’m here, I’ll hopefully catch what we call the ‘spring bloom’, which is pretty much what it says on the tin – the blooming of the ocean’s tiniest biological organisms, phytoplankton, as the weather begins to warm up in the spring. The spring bloom isn’t like the ‘harmful algal blooms’ you might have heard of, this is a totally natural phenomenon that happens most years as a result of increasing light, temperature and nutrients, which create an environment that’s perfect for phytoplankton to survive and thrive. I’ll be going out on the R/V Atlantic Explorer to the BATS and Hydrostation S sites regularly, so I can track exactly what’s happening within the microbial community through this bloom: who’s blooming when, what that means for nutrient (particularly carbon) cycling, and which genes and genetic pathways are involved in this happening each year.

A spring bloom in the Barents Sea (in the Arctic). Image by NASA.