 On the morning of October 29, 1988, the University of Hawaii's research vessel Moana Wave sets sail embarking on the very first oceanographic research expedition of the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program, often referred to by its acronym HOT. This program was developed by researchers in the newly created School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. Roger Lucas and David Carl, professors in the Department of Oceanography, spearheaded this effort and led the first expedition to Station Aloha. Located 60 nautical miles to the north of the island of Oahu, Hawaii, Station Aloha lies in the open ocean in the largest ecosystem on the planet, the North Pacific subtropical gyre. The primary objective of the HOT program was to obtain a long-term time series to provide a comprehensive description of the physical and biogeochemical parameters of the ocean at a location characteristic of the gyre. Yeah, what some people will do for a little exercise. This is research in Moana. We're talking about the Hawaiian Ocean Time Series. It's HOT, 30th anniversary today, Part 2, okay, with Dave Carl and Evangeline White. So you guys, the first thing is, you know, it dawns on me as a curious person how you pay for all this. I was disfunded because, you know, taking the ship out there, even though I suppose it's rented rather than owned because it's a Navy ship, how do you, how do you pay for all that equipment, all those scientific research experiments, what not? Well, in a nutshell, with great effort, but also with great generosity of a number of agencies, first and foremost as the taxpayers of this great country, the National Science Foundation is one of the government agencies that has been supporting our research at Station Aloha since the beginning. In addition to that, we've had private support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and most recently from the Simons Foundation with a program called SCOPE, the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology. And last but not least is the State of Hawaii, the University of Hawaii. We are a public university. I am a professor, Angelique is a professor. We get our salaries from the state and we use some of that support to conduct our basic research in the ocean. So it's this tripartite of private, public and university partnership that has supported our work for so many years and it doesn't come cheaply. The research vessel that you saw in these videos is roughly $40,000 to $45,000 a day depending on which vessel you use and that demands that we work efficiently, that we work around the clock 24-7 if we're on a longer cruise, 24-4 for our typical hot cruise which is four days long. People are working very hard and we have two shifts, typically 12-hour shifts and that's how we conduct our research at sea. Wow, that's impressive. People think, oh, it's just a lot of research and somebody comes in and pays for it, no, it's complicated. You have to get the equipment, you have to schedule everything, you have to marshal your assets and then you have to raise the money to pay for it and then you have to write it up, make sense of it and make it work for humanity. Complicated. How do you sleep at night? Well it's better not to sleep because then you're working 24 hours a day and then you get more done. But yeah, I can sleep at night knowing that there's a great team of people affiliated with the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program and also with the scope program. These are dedicated scientists, students, technicians, administrators, we have all sorts of people working on our teams and we've had some people, if you can believe this Jay, that were affiliated with Hot One in October 1988 that went out on Hot One and they're still involved in working with the program. That's amazing. We've had four of our top technical staff who have been on 200 or more hot cruises and we just recently celebrated one of our colleagues, Blake Watkins, who went on 100 consecutive hot cruises. That's 10 years without missing the beat and, you know, he missed the anniversaries and the holidays and the pet's birthdays and everything else just to go out to station aloha and get that last data point. So Angelique, let's talk about the shipboard life. Let's talk about the life of a scientist who goes out there. Four days every month, some people 100 visits and all together you've done, am I right, 307 trips out there in these 30 years. That's quite amazing. So what is it like, you know, you have a laboratory on board. There's several laboratories on board. So I think you've seen from that video that there's, like I said, there's 12-hour shifts, right? So there's not a lot of downtime and in those 12 hours that you're off, there's sleep and there's other work to be done. So in those 12-hour shifts, you've got teams that are working on various aspects of the crew's mission itself. You have people that are deploying and recovering instruments. You have people that are filtering water in the lab. You have people that are running instruments in the belly of the ship itself. You've got people that are watch leaders that are coordinating this concert of sampling that's happening over this time period. And all of this has to be done in a very safe way because as you've seen, when we can be out at sea, sometimes conditions can be rough. It can be dangerous to be standing on the edge of the ship trying to bring in a heavy instrument. So it all has to be done quite safely. Anybody get seasick? Absolutely. Certainly. People get seasick. I've been seasick many times myself. It's all right, okay. Yes, absolutely. It goes away after a day or so for most of us, but not for everybody. So yeah, you have to work through inclement weather. You have to work through any number of challenges that come with having these floating laboratories at sea. And now, it certainly wasn't always the case, but you can actually communicate with shore nowadays. Back in the day, maybe you got no email at all while you were at sea. Oh, you get email. Right. How about send videos and photographs? Depending on the ship, you can send videos and photographs, depending on the coverage at that time. But that's also important because there's a huge array of instruments that we're also watching. So you saw in that video, some of these things go overboard, and we need to know where they go. Right? So that's a part of the at sea communications. There are other instruments. There are gliders. There are a ton of some instruments. There are satellites that are passing by and a whole range of instrumentation that you need to keep track of during the cruise itself. And this is like going into space and gathering information about everything in every direction, embracing, as I said, the whole environment. So what's the payload? When you come back, is there a little disk about the size of a USB? And that's all the data you've got when you're, what do you bring back? Certainly there is data. There's an enormous amount of data, and now we can store them on smaller and smaller sticks, right? But there's also a lot of water samples. There's water samples that have been put through filters. There are samples of whole organisms that are collected in net toes, and a lot of other streams of data that in the end you have to coordinate what this means for that individual cruise. But more importantly, how that stacks up to now this 30 year, which if we're in a 150 year old field is a fifth of the time series of all of oceanography, as we've learned as a component of the Hawaiian Ocean Time Series. We're pushing the envelope every time. We're pushing the envelope absolutely, and it's incredibly important that that data, which spans core data, so the things that we collect on every single cruise, to data that is supporting research for other scientists that are participating in these cruises, the data from the autonomous instruments, that they all be very high quality and quality controlled. That's a very key important part. And then comparing the delta factor, that's as much as I know about it. So, there were 60 articles submitted to the Journal of Themnology and Oceanography this morning, your 30th anniversary submission, so to say. Pick one, tell me about one, and try to do it so that a person not skilled in this kind of microbial science would understand at least some of it. I looked through them, you know, and I'm sorry. You didn't have a favorite. I need help. You didn't have a favorite. It's hard to pick a favorite, and these are all papers that have been published over the last few decades in one particular journal, Themnology and Oceanography. There are many that Dave has already mentioned, covers the base of the food web up to higher trophic levels, but I'd say one of my favorites involves understanding the concept called ocean acidification, which arguably is fairly well known in the general public. So there's these seasonal cycles of the ocean breathing in carbon and oxygen and breathing out. Right? So carbon from the atmosphere being brought into the ocean as a function both of chemistry but predominantly biology, and layered on top of that seasonal cycle of ocean metabolism and breath, we're starting to see a build up of certain chemicals in the surface ocean that effectively are what we term ocean acidification. So we're seeing the increase in carbon and the atmosphere is now being reflected in the increase in carbon. I heard you say breathing, and what it told me was the ocean is organic, it's a person. That's alive. It gets alive, it breathes, and you can watch that. What a thrill. The Pacific Ocean, the largest ecosystem. What is your advice to eventually going forward as a principal investigator? Well the main thing is to sustain the collaboration of science as a team sport, and arguably we've got the best team, you know, better than the Boston Red Sox I would say. That is something right now. We've got the best team on the planet. And that team spirit and collaborative nature of the work we do needs to be sustained. It's not something that comes natural for scientists. Basically scientists tend to be isolationists, they're individuals, they're sometimes egotists. Major discoveries aren't really necessarily made by teams, they're made by individuals. So there's this dichotomy in science between doing your own thing and being part of a larger team where the hole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that's really what we tried to build at Station Aloha, both a NAAT program and a CMOR program, and now in the SCOPE program. It's much more fun, I think, to do work together than alone, that's my own view. And I would leave Angelique with that advice to sustain and improve the collaboration that we've built already because I think that's the future. Other people need to approve our work and sustain it through funding cycles, through proposal writing, and if people aren't supportive of the work you're doing, because it's not inclusive, then that works against you in the long run. So I think by opening the door, I mean, Aloha, this acronym we have, and we didn't mention that, but the acronym is a long-term oligotrophic habitat assessment, but it's this double entendre, the welcoming, the gathering of science at a place in the ocean that we've created, I think, is just, it's a metaphor for success. It's perfect. It's perfect. And that's that. What was the position exactly? 2245, 158 West. Okay. And it's a little tiny place about the side of the maybea. The crossroads of ocean science, and it's a benchmark for discovery. You were asking about the papers. I think one thing that's very important, if your viewers are planning to go to the, and we're going to have this on the website, the URL to get you to this virtual issue reprinted articles from Station Aloha, the one-stop shopping, if you will. It's really important to look at that list of publications, and just about everyone is multi-authored. By that, I mean it has more than one author, more than one contributor. That's what I mean by scientific collaboration. And oftentimes there'll be four or five people, and it's, these are the people that work together, bring ideas to the table, argue about the interpretations, and come up with a product that would be better than if any one individual were to publish it. And you know, the basis for that is working together at Station Aloha. What a great thing you've done, Dave. Dave is a member of the National Academy of Science, and that's very prestigious and unique around here. So it's great to have you develop this. It's great to have Seymour. It's great to have HOT. And boy, you're going to have to step in some big shoes. I know, right? They're actually small. Anyway, you guys, why don't we close with that last clip you wanted to show, Dave. It's what? A couple of minutes. Let's take a look at that last video that you wanted to show. Okay, let's take a look at the gliders because one of the things that we've been looking at for the future is autonomous sampling of the ocean. Right now, we're basically a ship-based program and we'll never replace the research vessel as our main platform for sample recovery and observations. But we've been, for the last five or six years, we've been flying these so-called autonomous underwater vehicles. These are drones, if you will, that we put into the ocean. You see this deployment on a midnight at Station Aloha. These can stay out for three months, collecting data when the ship is not out at the station. These gliders go up and down in the water column from the surface down to about six or seven hundred meters. Every time they surface, they broadcast a string of data back to our laboratories at the University of Hawaii. This shows one of them, the behavior underwater. They can stay out, as I said, for three months collecting data. We can run a whole fleet of these. We've got five or six of them now in the inventory. This is something that we hope to build additional assets in the future, including possibly an autonomous surface ship that we're now just starting some early discussions. So maybe the future Station Aloha crews will involve a group of pilots sitting at a laboratory at the University of Hawaii, driving an autonomous ship out to Station Aloha, sending a CTD down, collecting water samples, filtering, and bringing them back to the dock where the scientists can do the downstream analysis. We don't think that'll happen in any time soon, but certainly in Angelique's lifetime. She's a young early career scientist with another generation of research to go. Your 30 years starts right now, Emily. I know. My 30 years starts right now. And these autonomous instruments are absolutely a component moving forward between the gliders and drones and profiling floats and a whole range of other instrumentation. Well, there it is. It's embracing the ocean in all particulars in everything we can think of. It's using the best technology we have and that we can find as going forward, always using better instruments, better technology to measure things, and finally delivering it back for the benefit of humanity. That was a small thing. Thank you so much, Dave Carl. Great to have you here. Jay, it's great to be with Think Tech Hawaii once again. Angelique White. Great to have you here. Thank you so much. Good luck for the next 30. Appreciate it. Aloha.