‘Pass the pool noodle’: the ordinary items doing extraordinary things for science at sea
By Lucinda Duxbury, IMAS/ACEAS (University of Tasmania) and Joline Lalime, Sea2SchoolAU
‘Who’s seen the toothpicks?’
‘Pass the pool noodle.’
From what we’re saying, you wouldn’t guess we’re in a floating lab in East Antarctica. And no, the pool noodles aren’t for swimming – the last measurement we took of surface water was barely above freezing.
I grab a paint scraper and draw it slowly across the surface of the sediment core. I’m removing any possible biological contamination from our busy ship environment. With a toothpick I mark the position of a dense layer of fossil phytoplankton – we’ll want to sample this. Timmy passes me a plastic plant label. Linda picked up stacks of packs of these from a hardware store before we left. We’ve repurposed them as little tools for scooping mud into tubes. Back home in Hobart, we’ll analyse the samples for ancient DNA.
Next, we pass the core to the other side of the table where it gets carved up by all the other scientists who want a piece of the pie. This is where the pool noodle comes into its own. We cut them into all sorts of shapes to pack out the empty space – preserving the integrity of the remaining mud for perpetuity. It’s pool noodle taxidermy.
The sediments have come from three and a half kilometres directly below our ship. Over the side of CSIRO research vessel (RV) Investigator, we lowered a rope attached to a weight attached to 24 metres of PVC pipe. With the release of a trigger mechanism, the pipe punches into the soft sediments on the bottom of the seafloor. The layers have been accumulating here for thousands of years, leaving imprints of ancient climates and dynamic Antarctic ice sheet fluxes.
The pipes are, ‘pretty standard plumbing supplies,’ says Jamie, a CSIRO technician who’s in charge of operations. But his favourite ordinary item in his toolkit is the ‘bamboo strut’ they use to hold the bottom flap of the Kasten corer in place. ‘It sounds fancy, but it’s just a wooden kebab skewer you get from the supermarket,’ he laughs.
We are approaching the Cook Glacier, an area particularly vulnerable to climate change yet not well studied because it’s so hard to access. The bottom of the Cook Glacier is anchored to bedrock well below sea level, making it susceptible to bottom melting from the warm Circumpolar Deep Water that can creep up under the edge of the ice shelf itself.
The sector is set to all but disappear in the next 200 years. That’s why we’re here. We want to reconstruct its past from the archives we haul up from the deep – seeking warnings from past warm periods about the stability of the ice sheet in our near future.
When we left Tasmania, it was the start of 2026. But out here, we’re trying to get back to the early Pleistocene, a period around two million years in the past.
Over at Amy and Fiorenza’s microscope, we might just have got there. I peer down the lens and zoom into the slide. They study the fossilised remains of ancient phytoplankton. Waves of emergence and extinction of whole species are time stamps – page numbers – in their muddy history book.
I watch as Amy smears some sediment on a glass microscope slide. She mixes it with water, thinning it out. Then she leaves it to evaporate on an electric plate meant for keeping a coffee cup warm. Next, she coats it with a resin. And finally, to set it, she’ll pop it under a small UV light originally designed to harden nail polish. Fiorenza will have a present awaiting her keen eyes when she wakes up for her shift.
I look down at Rouxia leventerae; time spools and spirals around its miniscule silica remains. This species of diatom died out 121,000 years ago last Tuesday. Diatoms, or microalgae, are phytoplankton at the base of the marine food web. Through their photosynthesis, they play a huge role in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and regulating Earth’s climate. Together with other groups of phytoplankton, they supply enough oxygen to the atmosphere for every second breath you take.
Yesterday, as snowflakes were falling heavy on deck, I thought about the immense legacy these organisms leave below. Living and dying in the surface waters, their bodies will eventually sink to the seafloor, forming what Rachel Carson once described as the ‘most stupendous ‘snowfall’ the earth has ever seen’.
Outside on the deck, Amaranta is tending to live phytoplankton and microbes in seawater tanks. She’s taken samples from the sea surface – and is directly simulating the effects of marine heatwaves on their productivity and community composition. Globally, marine heatwaves have increased by 50% over the past 10 years, but we know dangerously little about how they manifest this far south. The consequences could be cascading. Presently, she’s keeping everything cool and stable with the help of frozen recycled juice bottles. But she’s about to turn up the heat. In a few hours she’ll remove the ice and, she says with a wild look in her eye, ‘start cooking some phytoplankton’.
These innovations make me chuckle at the hidden creativity, the cheekiness, of scientists. But a bit like how the cold surface hides deep warm water that licks the underbelly of the Cook Glacier, I think the prevalence of these makeshift alternatives belies a more sinister situation. Climate science is woefully underfunded. There’s no incentive for companies to design state-of-the-art scientific instruments, because no one can pay for them. So, scientists go to the ends of the Earth, contorting themselves to budgetary constraints.
Don’t get me wrong, I feel incredibly fortunate to be here, in this remote and wild place. Though sleepy eyes I watch the sun rise over sea ice – see colours cameras can’t capture. I look out the lab portholes and see icebergs – calving and crashing in real time. At lunchtime, we learn ukulele.
But we also monitor and manage the effects of freezing temperatures, fatigue and seasicknes. We have all put our lives on hold for 56 days to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week.
The melting of the Cook Glacier would raise global sea levels by three metres. Altogether, Antarctica’s ice sheets equate to about 60 metres of sea level rise. Their shrinking will drastically redraw coastal contours in centuries to come.
This is how much is at stake. The question is, how much are we prepared to pay?
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Lucinda Duxbury is an ACEAS PhD student from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) at the University of Tasmania on board CSIRO research vessel (RV) Investigator. She’s part of the science team for the Cook Ice Ecosystems and Sediments (COOKIES) voyage to Antarctic waters, led by Dr Linda Armbrecht from IMAS/ACEAS. She works closely with Ezra Timothy Nugroho, who is collecting samples for his PhD on the DNA of marine molluscs from Antarctica. Jamie Derrick is the lead field technician for our trip. He ensures our science operations are smoother than the Southern Ocean. Professor Amy Leventer and Dr Fiorenza Torricella are our resident phytoplankton identification experts. Finally, Dr Amaranta Focardi is a microbiologist interested in the massive impacts of microbial interactions.
Join us on the expedition
The IMAS-led research on the expedition will be showcased through blogs released through the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science and can be followed on social media at Sea2SchoolAu Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the CSIRO Voyage (IN2026_V01) Page
This voyage is supported by the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiatives Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (Project Number SR200100008), the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (DP250100886), the COOKIES GEOTRACES process study GIpr13, Horizon Europe European Research Council (ERC) Frontier Research Synergy Grants; the Italian National Antarctic Program (CNR:DSSTTA) and Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF) (Project Number SR200100005) and by a grant of sea time on RV Investigator from the CSIRO Marine National Facility (MNF).
Top header image: ACEAS/IMAS scientists and CSIRO staff during COOKIES voyage preparations in Hobart (Image Credit: CSIRO/Fraser Johnston)
