Elle Hawthorne ’29 spent a month this summer on a dream cruise to Hawai’i, watching manta rays and flying fish, and seeing white-tipped sharks hunt mahi mahi. But there were no buffets and lounge chairs on the RV Kilo Moana as it powered its way from San Diego to the Aloha State.
Instead, there was the energizing company of 17 ocean scientists and the satisfaction of collecting data as part of a major research project, even though Hawthorne had only just finished her first year at Pomona College.
“It still feels surreal,” she says. After one year of college, “being able to get real firsthand research experience, being able to go to sea—that’s just the coolest thing ever.”
Hawthorne’s work as a research assistant with Maria Prokopenko, visiting assistant professor of geology, received support from Pomona’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), which provides a generous stipend for up to 10 weeks working with a professor or on an independent research project.
One of the advantages of being part of a major scientific investigation, Hawthorne discovered, is learning from research scientists from several institutions.
At first she felt intimidated to be surrounded by such knowledgeable experts. “But everyone was so nice and so eager to help and explain things,” she found. “I learned just as much in casual conversation as I did actively working in the lab.”
Investigating ocean “deserts”
Prokopenko is co-principal investigator on a project funded by the National Science Foundation Chemical Oceanography Program, with colleagues from the University of New Hampshire, Texas A&M and the University of Minnesota. One of the team’s main goals is to unpack how nitrogen required for photosynthesis—in a microscopic form of algae known as phytoplankton—travels great distances from nutrient-rich waters to support life in vast, remote ocean “deserts” such as the North Pacific Gyre, the target of the research team’s study.
Phytoplankton is a vital part of the oceanic ecosystem, Prokopenko explains with a farm analogy: “Phytoplankton are the plants, and then there are zooplankton that are like little cows of the sea eating the plants.” Larger animals then eat the zooplankton, and the cycle continues up the marine animal food chain.
Not only does phytoplankton serve as the foundational food source in the ocean, its photosynthesis is believed to generate half or more of Earth’s oxygen.
