Lovén Marine Centre, Tjärnö, Sweden

We made it to Oslo with no trouble. Our flight left from Reykjavik at 8am and we were in Norway by 1300. Flying was amazing. The flight path was modified so that we went east across Iceland instead of heading southwest: this was due to the Volcanoashcloud. But it was awesome: from the right side of the plane, I could see the volcano clearly, from above the clouds that ringed the crater and blocked you from seeing the smoke plume from land. It was so impressive. The pilot described the 2 plumes that we saw: the darker one was the volcanic plume, dark from ash and smoke. The second, pure white one was the steam coming up as the hot lava melted the glacier that covered the volcano. As we passed it, the landscape gave way to more glaciers, rugged coastline and streams—I feel asleep over Iceland and woke up over the snow-covered world of northern Norway.

I was surprised to see all of the snow in Norway. Iceland after all had been surprisingly warm. But it was hard to tell that I was looking at blankets of snow and not clouds. As we traveled further southeast over Norway, more and more green turned up and soon we were over a land of fjords and waterways. It was so magical to see the trees and lakes making a patchwork across the country. Many of the lakes were still frozen, so there were patches of white mixed in with the green and blue.

We passed through Oslo on our way to Strömstad, which is halfway between Oslo and Göteburg (Gothenburg), Sweden’s second largest country. It was a neat city, and the area near the train station reminded me of London a bit. We will come back to spend a few days in Oslo before Cascade heads home and I go to see Scheherazade in Krakow. In my craziness before leaving, I hadn’t printed out our train reservations, and was confused about which bus to take. The bus driver who was driving the express, direct bus to Göteburg offered to stop in Strömstad and let us off. We took him up on this, and without ever having proved that we had bought tickets, he went out of his way and stopped by the fire station in Strömstad to let us out. We arrived 2.5 hours early than we would have due to his kindness and initiative, and I have continued to be impressed with how wonderful Swedes are since (as I knew and expected :)

Lars Gamsfeldt, a postdoc at the University of Göteburg (and organizer of the course) picked us up from the fire station and brought us to Lovén Marine Centre on the island of Tjärnö. This little archipelago is made completely of granite, with pines and trees about to bud. The islands are connected by little one-lane bridges and most of the houses are made with the typical red paint that is typical in Sweden.

We arrived at the marine station, which was an incredible institute. All red buildings along the water, I was impressed how big and equipped it was. It is set up to handle large classes (although thankfully there were only 18 students there including us: the 60 freshmen wouldn’t arrive until after we left) and visiting researchers. They have a nice research vessel with an ROV, a dive locker with 30 wetsuits, booties, etc—all of which any of us were welcome to use. We were given keys to every room at the institute, excluding the woodshop. Otherwise, we could go from our rooms to the aquarium, the kitchen, the labs...everything was set up for us to make the most of our time there. We went for a walk on the adjoining island, still before sunset (which isn’t until 20:00 or so).

The next day we started class. From Monday through Thursday we learned so much: a whole statistical modeling technique: filled with lectures of theory and accompanying hands-on labs using the computer program R. Jarrett Byrnes was a fabulous teacher, helping us to understand complex ideas and statistics and helping us apply these concepts to our own data sets. We had a great time in labs, coming back to work after dinner and usually after a nice walk or swim. On two evenings we all met over beers to discuss each of our individual projects and help each other with the theories and parameters that would go into our models. On Friday we all presented our systems and model results and got great feedback from each other. My results are really promising and I have a good direction in which to go with the project, and this will become a part of my thesis I hope. My talk was titled “Stora Bläckfiskar i Montereyviken: en oceanografisk SEM model”.

On Monday night we got suited up in the 8mm wetsuits and jumped off the dock. It is a sandy bottom habitat with a lot of fouling on the docks and hydroids in the sand, but not very species rich. It was just great to be in the water and cruising around. I didn’t realize how cold it was until I exchanged my mask for my goggles (thinking I’d take a little swim), and nearly froze my brain in the first minute. That mask really protects your forehead and especially the tender little spot between your eyes! Other nights we had nice walks and would usually end the evening with beers and ping-pong and a sauna.

Our class was great. Not only were Jarrett and Lars so great to us and organized, the class had brought together a really interesting group of positive, diverse people. There were Swedes: Mathilda (an amazing jelly biologist, one of the most positive and fun people ever), Marina, Marie and Peter. An Australian who has been living in Sweden for several years and is now getting his PhD in Denmark: Jordan. An Italian fisheries biologist doing his postdoc in Sweden: Valerio. (I had actually met him and chatted with him randomly in Portland this past February at the Ocean Sciences conference). Two Brazilians: one coming from Brazil (Ronaldo) and one who is doing his PhD in northern, northern Sweden: Andre. There were two other Americans besides Cascade, Kylla and I, both from Florida State: David and Althea.

On Wednesday afternoon before our first lab, we took 2 small boats from the station and went to explore an island, a remote one not too far, that had been Lars’ field sites when he was doing his PhD. It was really cool to explore the intertidal, which was very narrow on this granite rock. The islands that we had been on were granite with mudflats, and the slopes were such so that a small difference in water level translated into a large portion of exposed mudflat, littered with clams, oysters (invasive Japanese and native Swedish), and algae (Fucus, mostly). The craziest thing is that the tides are not moon-driven. Are they still even tides? Instead, up into the Baltic and even where we were, they are wind and pressure-driven. So as the pressure system changes, the tide goes in or out. Slowly. And it holds for quite sometime. What does this mean? It means that it was low-tide the whole time we were there. Morning, midday, night. 24-hours a day, for more than 5 days. It’s an amazing concept, something that is still so foreign to me! So most things are either limited to deeper water, or are super-well adapted to such long exposure times to air.