Beneath the surface: what’s happening at SAMS
Emotional goodbyes
Two members of staff, who between them have clocked up 25 years at SAMS, have taken early retirement from our finance team.
Lorna Watt and Liz Campbell, who hail from Dunbeg and Oban respectively, have helped a countless number of staff through the intricacies of finance forms over the years – one of the many reasons they will be missed.
While Lorna is still considering her next challenge, Liz is packing her bags ahead of some world travel in the new year.
Birthday party
She has been monitoring the North East Atlantic for moe than a decade and now Talisker, the oldest robotic Seaglider in UK marine science, has received some well-deserved recognition with a 10th birthday party.
Gliders are deployed at sea for months at a time to take measurements such as oxygen, salinity and temperature in the deep ocean and have been gathering crucial data for oceanographers.
Having already travelled 11,500 kilometres, spent 622 days at sea and recorded 6,484 oceanographic profiles, Talisker has been as far as Iceland on her missions, often braving force 10 storms and high seas.
As one of the first Seagliders in the country, Talisker represented a step change in how oceanographic data is collected.
To mark the 10-year milestone, SAMS scientists made a birthday cake and invited SAMS colleagues to come and learn more about the work of gliders and other autonomous vehicles.
Seagliders collect data down to 1,000m as they slowly submerge towards the seabed and then rise to the surface, using fixed wings and a hydrodynamic shape to create a forward movement. To submerge, a battery-powered pump moves oil into a pressurised container, increasing the density of the glider in the water and causing it to sink. To bring the glider to the surface, oil is pumped back into a bladder to increase buoyancy.
Live data is sent by the gliders via satellite to the pilots at SAMS, who can control and redirect them remotely in near real-time.
More PhD students
There are now 40 PhD marine science students at SAMS, with the possibility of more coming in the 2019/20 academic year.
Seven new students arrived this month to begin researching a variety of topics, including the Arctic, marine ecology, microplastics, social science, zooplankton and underwater acoustics.
Next year SAMS will increase the current record number of PhD students at the Dunstaffnage institute following the announcement of two successful doctoral training partnership (DTP) applications to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).