In­ter­na­tional Wo­men´s Day at sea - Blo­g­post 3 from RV SONNE, March 8, 2018

by Manfred Schlösser

On Board RV SONNE, Chile
24 ° 17.097 S, 71 ° 25,44 W
Thursday, March 8, 2018

In the mean­time, we have left sampling site 1 on the bathyal plain and moved on to sampling site 6 at the Atacama trench. Every­body is in a good mood, we are on sched­ule. Thanks to the ex­per­i­enced crew of the RV Sonne we have col­lec­ted many samples and data from the deep sea­floor close to 8000 meters depth.

Today, while I am writ­ing this blo­g­post, it is In­ter­na­tional Wo­men’s Day. Tak­ing a look around, our sci­entific crew on board RV Sonne is quite in­ter­na­tional and some of our sci­ent­ists are wo­men. Tak­ing a look back into the past of mar­ine sci­ence, most of the crew on board ships had been male. Since these days have passed the gender ra­tio has changed a lot but still wo­men are un­der­rep­res­en­ted on board re­search ves­sels. The situ­ation in aca­demia seems dif­fer­ent at first glance. Look­ing at the uni­versit­ies, in bach­elor, mas­ter and PhD pro­grams more than 50% of the stu­dents in sci­ence are fe­male, but in higher sci­entific po­s­i­tions a con­sid­er­ably lower per­cent­age of wo­men are rep­res­en­ted.

On the oc­ca­sion of today´s In­ter­na­tional Wo­men’s Day, we would like to in­tro­duce our fe­male sci­entific crew. These wo­men rep­res­ent 13 out of 40 sci­ent­ists on ex­ped­i­tion SO261.

1. Anni Glud from Odense, University of Southern Denmark, is working on sensor technology and has already participated in many cruises.
2. Blandine Trouche is a PhD student from the French University in Brest. She is interested in extracellular DNA of archaeal and bacterial origin.
3. Daniela Zeppilli is a researcher from Italy. She is a specialist on deep-sea meiofauna at the IFREMER in Brest, France.
4. Heather Stewart is a marine geologist from the British Geological Survey in UK interested in geomorphology.
5. Laura Hehemann from Canada works for the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar und Meeresforschung (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany. She is creating high-resolution sonar maps of the seafloor for the scientists on board.
6. Lorena Arias from the Universidad de Concepcion in Chile is a technician working in carbon geochemistry.
7. Mackenzie Gerringer, a PostDoc from University of Washington, USA, is studying deep-sea megafauna.
8. Miriam Brandt, a PhD student from Germany works on eukaryotic DNA from deep-sea microorganisms for IFREMER, France.
9. Pei-Chuan Chuang from Taiwan, a PostDoc at MARUM – Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences of the University of Bremen, Germany, is studying the pore water profiles of sediment cores from the deep sea to mathematically model the underlying processes.
10. Sophie Arnaud Haound is a group leader at MARBEC at IFREMER in Sete, France. She is working on environmental DNA from the deep sea.
11. XinXin Li is assistant professor of the TAGOR group at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China (TAGOR= The Archaeal Geo-Omics Research). She is working in organic biogeochemistry.
12. Xin Zhao is assistant technician of XinXin Li.
13. Yanara Figueroa is scientific observer from Chile.

Warm greet­ings from the Sonne,
Manfred Schlösser

Read the corresponding press release.