Tjärnö tales edition 2017

EMBC+ Spring School 2017 is over and was again an unforgettable experience. During the 10 days 47 students worked on 7 challenging research projects guided by an international team of 10 teachers. The facilities of the Sven Lovén Centre for Marine Sciences in Tjärnö proved again to be an excellent location for this school. Watch the documentary movies made by each team of students at the EMBC+ video channel! Enjoy! https://vimeo.com/album/4535971

And here we are again! Our third and final blog… It’s been a hard couple of days since we last wrote to you. A lot happened…. And...between you and me, it wasn’t always pretty. In some moments we felt like social science students rather than marine biologist - studying, and fully experiencing, the weird behaviour of people working under loooads of pressure. As you guys probably know by now… we aren’t here just to have fun. We have to write a report on the research we have been doing on hydrodynamics. And due to us having spent a lot of time on data gathering and building our floaters, we did not have a lot of time left. Conclusion: we need to rush! More than planned… And not only Michiel was very sad about sleeping a bit less than planned. This of course means lots of pressure, working late and even skipping breakfast and lunch to get 2 more hours to write the report. Even after all of that, we were just in time (it practically came down to the second) for our 17:00 deadline. And...

Here we are again! It has been some hard days of twelve hours working - sometimes even with literally no time for breakfast - in whatever weather conditions, like good sailors. We are writing this after jumping out of the water with our hands colder than ice, while singing: “I can't feel my hands when I'm on seaaa, but I love it”. But happiness is our way of life, so we keep smiling :) We finally managed to get a boat taxi to put everybody in their sampling places, always with the company of one of the professors and our most kick-ass, 11 years-old-captain Niels. Elena and Salva got a ride to the other side of the bay three times per day to drop the GPS-equipped floaters to measure the currents through two pipes located there. Meanwhile, Maria and Cynthia took care of the wind station, the depth and the floaters at different points of the bay. Our buoy guy Michiel is in charge of the expensive deep currents profiler and the measurement of salinity and temperature. Fin...

Hej hej… Sweden, here is a brand new EMBC cohort for you! The quite remote and lovely Lovén Center welcomed us on a very sunny 4th of April 2017. This fascinating little bay arose interest in an international team of 6 students ready to hit the ground (should we say the water?). Time for presentations? Here we are, the six-headed Hydra: three time-efficient Germans, Maria, Chris and Elena. Cynthia, from the beautiful Mediterranean coast of France, the fries-loving Belgian, Michiel. Last but not least, our favorite dinner-should-be-at-10-o’clock Spanish guy, Salva. As our project, we want to study the currents in the bay of Tjärnö, basically where the water flows and why? For this, we first jumped into the waste before we became engineers (meaning: we fix everything with duct tape). We built a small float with sails out of plastic within 4 hours - our first prototype. Of course, it ended up being a fail, so we quickly improved our engineering skills and created a more simpli...