by 
By Victoria Vilton, Yale University
June 10, 2025
I’d characterize this trip thus far as a series of crescendos. When initially confronted with the task of “blog post” I signed up for the 9th with a certain devil-may-care, it’ll never actually be the 9th sort of attitude. At the time, I could hardly believe one day on this ship would pass, let alone nine. How wrong was I.
I sit here now, writing this post, and can hardly believe just how quickly a week can go by. A week with people you’ve never met, living a life that is distinctly new and abnormal. And now I, once eagerly anticipating the end, hardly able to deal with the roiling sea sickness and the lack of land in sight, feel a tug at my heart because STEMSEAS is almost over.
We started the day as we always do, with a morning check-in in the main lab. We’ve all been working hard on our research projects and my favorite part of every day has been listening to the progress of all of my peers. My group, The Great Engines that Could, including Grace, Bishesh, and myself, are studying the fuel economy of the R/V Atlantis’ engines, as it relates to weather conditions. Through this work, we’ve been able to traipse around the vessel, interviewing various crew members and pestering mates and engineers for figures and the answers to one million questions.
In what seemed to be an almost routine fashion, someone spotted the hints of a cool animal from the bow of the ship. In this case it was two puffins and we all rushed out of the main lab (safely, no running of course) and up the three flights of stairs to see the expansive horizon surrounding us. And there they were, two black bird silhouettes, tiny but there, flapping frantically, a dark, though not unnatural, spot on the perfect blue tapestry. To me they looked nothing like puffins from as far as we were but the excitement in the air was palpable. If there was one thing I learned from this trip (and rest assured, there was not just one thing) it is that in the pursuit of science, of newness and understanding, even the shadow of something interesting is enough to prompt enthusiasm in people. It didn’t matter that you could hardly see the stout yellow beaks that make puffins so cute, or that days ago it was only the spout of the whale that triggered similar reactions. What mattered was that there was something there to see at all, even though it barely cleared your vision, was just a blip really. Science, to me, functions similarly.
We also had an awesome XBT drop where Hayley and Jen helped TR launch it into the water and the rest of us sat in the computer lab and watched the data come in in real time!
Perhaps the most marvelous part of the day was lunch where the galley cooked up chicken wings! The excitement in the air was infectious and I got a kick out of seeing the barbecue and Franks hot sauce smeared napkins, fingers and mouths.
After lunch we had our afternoon check-in and got back to work on our projects.
At 15:30 Tess presented on her research, a fascinating deep dive (pun intended) into the structure of the crust at the bottom of the ocean, and how the microbes that live there get their nutrients. To me what she is doing seems fantastical. We finally learned why Tess is “mainly microbe” (if you get it, you get it)!
After Tess’ talk, my group and I looked for more people to bother about our project, specifically, Raleigh, Ana, and Auguste. But of course they helped us with a smile and gave us some great data for our poster. We went back and got started on our presentation. Dinner was my favorite part of the day. Aside from the amazing food and the has-to-be-mentioned apple pie (!!!), I engaged in one of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had. I sat down with Josh, Kyle, and some of the Alvin crew and shared just how strange it seemed to me that for 9 days, soon to be 10, soon to be 11, I lived in such close quarters with people I’ve never known and will likely, and realistically, never see again. To me this feels as unbelievable as it feels practical. To me this excursion has been more than 9 days of science and daily cheese o’clock and wobbly showers. It has been a crash course in the connection between humans. At every dinner, there was someone to talk to. Someone leagues away from me in age, experience, geography, identity and yet there we were, somehow together on the R/V Atlantis for two weeks out of the year. Josh posited the idea of something greater that brought all of us together, that there was something in our lives,
however different, guiding us to this moment in time. Isn’t that incredible? And when it ends, just as easily as we sailed into each others lives, we will sail out, and this fragile moment in time will only exist in our memories (except maybe for Kyle, who is probably going to end this trip employed by the ship). After dinner was our evening check-in and the Great Engines that Could got started on our full-sized poster (with some Ping Pong breaks in the middle, naturally).
Grace and I lucked out and got an Alvin tour courtesy of Benen, one of the engineers and pilots. We walked around the exterior and even got to climb into the submersible (no shoes allowed).
At one point, Haley, Kaylee, and I went outside. That night the sea didn’t look real, or as Kaylee eloquently put it, didn’t look “fully rendered.” The three of us, curled up against each other and the bow of the ship, peered over the edge and watched water that moved and sparkled like mercury. We collectively felt like we had sailed to the end of the game, so to speak, where the artist had decided against detail. I suddenly felt sympathy for the first sailors, terrified to sail off the the edge of the Earth.
The day ended lazily, with the quiet hum of mutual work on our respective projects, and I
went to sleep both sad that it was my third to last night of sleep on the ship but grateful nonetheless for the passage of time that made me so comfortable and happy to be here.
