Marine biology graduate Bethany in trip of a lifetime to Pacific Ocean floor
BETHANY Fleming from Trearddur Bay has recently been on the trip of a lifetime to the Pacific Ocean floor, 2,500 metres down off the coast of Mexico.
Bethany attended Holyhead High (2008-15) before going to the University of St Andrews in Scotland where she has studied for a Masters Degree in Marine Biology.
In 2018 – 19 she had a placement at the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the USA (now called Woodwell Climate Research Center), returning to the UK in the summer of 2019.
She then received an invitation to join a research voyage from the team she had worked with during her placement year.
The voyage would last about three weeks over Christmas 2019.
While on the voyage she was given the opportunity to visit the ocean floor to see first hand the ‘smokers’ and the life around them the team are studying.
Smokers, more properly called hydrothermal vents, are places on the seafloor from which water heated by the earth’s core to 350oC rises, and around which organisms live, fed by the chemicals contained in the very hot water rising from the vent.
Bethany’s interest is in the giant tube worms which can grow to almost 3 metres long that grow near the vents (see below).
The descent to the seafloor was in the submersible Alvin from the research vessel RV Atlantis owned by the US Navy but operated by Woods Hole Institute.
Alvin has a pilot and can take just two scientists at a time on any trip, which in Bethany’s case lasted eight hours, surface to seafloor and back to the surface.
Bethany has now graduated with a First Class Master’s degree, and was awarded the Society of Biology top student award, getting top grades in Biology across the university for that academic year.