Arctic spark in rainy England

It seems that Plymouth has the highest density of marine biologists of any city in the world. Maybe true! It is indeed fact that the town is riddled with institutes that do marine research. We have, beside the university, for instance the Marine Biological Association (MBA), the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS), and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML). And there's lots of interaction going on. For instance, we at the wet side of university research get invited to PML talks. And today there was a talk on an Arctic project on ocean acidification. So I went!

You wouldn't go to PML for the architecture

The whole idea to bike through town to go to talks given at nearby institutes had a Tromsø feel to it. Prancing around in a research institute that is not a university has that too. And then the talk! The girl had just come back from the field trip, so she couldn't yet say much about the science, and it was mostly an Arctic scientific slideshow. Like we saw so often in Tromsø! I was a bit homesick. I'm feeling much more at home now, here in the UK, than in the beginning, but the longing is still there...

Taken from the Catlin Arctic Expedition website: http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/