July 28, 2010
the longest seamount chain in the North Atlantic and, though theyare no longer volcanically active, they are still a prominent feature on the Sohm Abyssal Plain extending 1,100 km from Georges Banks to Bermuda Rise.
Jeff Hood, Cape Cod born, is currently a Lead Mechanic at WHOI where he repairs and fabricates oceanographic equipment when he’s on land. At sea, Jeff is a coring technician who specializes in the amazing CDH Long Core. Jeff, following in his father’s footsteps, joined the Air Force after high school where his mechanics savvy was quickly identified and developed. He was stationed at Castle Air Force Base in California and in addition to learning mechanical skills that would lead him to his current career, he had the chance to travel extensively throughout much of the world. It was a terrific opportunity!
Jeff returned to the Cape after his time in the Air Force and while putting his mechanical skills to use began to add welding to his repertoire. After some time working at various shops on the Cape and a tour during Desert Storm, Jeff was offered a position working at WHOI. Now, happily settled on the Cape with his wife Annette and his 8-year old son George, Jeff loves his work because he gets to work on cutting edge technology with some of the best engineers in the world. When I asked him what he likes the most about being at sea I wasn’t surprised when he said that he loves the challenge of having to “make do” with what you have on the ship. “You can’t run out to the ‘parts’ store when you’re at sea.”
Isabelle Gil
French researcher Isabelle Gil started out her academic life at Pantheon Sorbonne University interested in coastal geomorphology but exposure to the world of research drove her to change direction. For Isabelle, the new path was in the growing field of paleoclimatology. Today Isabelle has a post-doc working jointly for LNEG, the Portuguese National Laboratory for Energy and Geology and WHOI where she studies diatoms present in cored marine sediments from the North Atlantic to gather data about paleoclimates.
Isabelle chose to do her research practical abroad, studying coastal geomorphology in Brazil. Once in Brazil she learned that there was no funding available to analyze beach rocks but the group at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro offered her the opportunity to learn about coring, sampling and studying diatoms from the coastal lagoon (click here for non-satellite map). At that point her education had been preparing her for a vocational degree but she was introduced to the world of academic research and she was hooked! She returned to Europe to continue working on these cores, completed her DEA at University of Bordeaux I and moved on to study and write about diatoms in ocean cores for her Ph.D at Bremen University in Germany. One of the cores she worked on for this degree was from the Laurentian Fan (sound familiar?) sent to her by our Chief Scientist, Lloyd Keigwin! Now Isabelle will return to Lisbon and start digging in to all the samples she has gathered from the Western Atlantic. This paleodata will be used in climate modeling. Her favorite part about being at sea? “It’s great to see how the work is done – it really balances the time you spend behind the microscope and writing up papers. It’s the fun part!”
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