October 30, 2000

Highlights

• The 12-minute video "Ocean Science in the COOLroom: A Vision of the Future" was officially released on October 25 at the dedication of the Jacques Cousteau Coastal Education Center. The video documents research activities during the July 2000 summer field season at Tuckerton. It is narrated by Oscar Schofield and Scott Glenn, and features interviews with Fred Grassle, Mike Crowley, and IMCS graduate students Trisha Bergmann and Josh Kohut. Preview screenings in Washington, DC at NSF, ONR, NOPP, and Congressman Jim Saxton's office were well received.
• Peter Rona was an invited guest at Liberty Science Center's Annual Corporate Members Recognition Event held at the center on October 25th. A preview of the IMAX film, "Volcanoes of the Abyss" (in preparation) was shown at that event.
• Max Gorbunov left from Cape Town, SA for a 10 week cruise with the Europeans on 25 October on the Polarstern. This cruise will be experimenting with iron additions to the Southern Ocean. Max will return to IMCS on or about 12 December. Max wrote from sea: The track and current position of the boat can be seen on www.awi-bremerhaven.de. Now we are going south and crossing a region of declining spring bloom (as I would conclude from our FRR data). Tomorrow evening we will start a 2-3 day transect towards the South Pole with the aim to choose a region to dump iron in. Hope it will be closer to Cape Town than to the Pole. This is it for now. The boat is very good, beer is also German. Will have to go to the swimming pool sometimes (have not been there yet).

Meetings Attended

• Peter Rona participated as a member at an October 19th meeting of the School of Engineering Committee for Implementation of the Rutgers Strategic Plan, and reported on the Ocean Systems Engineering Center (OSEC) and its educational component, the Graduate Certificate in Engineering Geophysics. Both were initiated with SROA (Strategic Resources and Opportunity Analysis) funding.
• Mike Crowley attended the 10th Annual International SeaSpace Satellite users conference in San Diego, where he spoke on incorporating the new international constellation of optics satellites into LEO-15 research.
• Peter Rona participated in the NSF RIDGE Program "In-situ Sensors" Workshop held 22-24 October at the MBARI and Moss Landing labs. He reported on, "Acoustic imaging of hydrothermal flow regimes: RIDGE Program Observatory, Main Endeavour Field, Juan de Fuca Ridge".

Let's Welcome

• We welcome Michal Koblizek from Czech Republic and Yi Sun from People's Republic of China as new postdocs in IMCS. Michal is working with Zbigniew Kolber and Paul Falkowski on biophysical characterization of aerobic photosynthetic bacteria (Nature, Sept. 25th issue). Yi is working on characterizing green fluorescent proteins from corals.