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Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)-sponsored oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage. He will report from aboard the B.I.O. Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

S 32° 3’ 0" E 115° 43’ 58"

Broken electronics sit on a shelf in one of the laboratories on the Hespérides, awaiting repair. Finger bones smashed by errant sampling bottles are knitting nicely, the medic says. And supplies ordered last week before we lost our main satellite connection await the ship in port. The Hespérides is now pausing in Perth, Australia. The ship stays long enough to pick up more supplies, drop off some researchers, and pick up a few more before heading off to Sydney. It’s also a chance for the sailors and scientists who continue to Sydney to recharge their mental batteries after 30 days at sea.

Renewal and restoration are built into the plan for this expedition. “The biggest difference between this and regular laboratory work is that here you have to plan all the logistics ahead of time. You can’t go out and buy something if you discover you need it,” says chief scientist Jordi Dachs, of the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA) in Barcelona. During each leg, the team must bring spare equipment and repair what they can’t replace.

The same goes for people, at least in the short term, according to Spanish Navy Captain Alberto Escribano, second-in-command of the Hespérides. One a “gray boat,” as navy sailors call their warships, sailors work in alternating 6-hours shifts. “You can only do that for about 15 days at a time. For longer-term cruises, like on the Hespérides, we do more of a normal working schedule,” says Escribano, “and we break up the routine with things like meals outside on deck or card tournaments or the Carnaval costume contest.” It’s more productive, he says, to keep staff fit than to fix staff.

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Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)-sponsored oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage. He will report from aboard the B.I.O. Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

S 30° 19’ 58" E 103° 18’ 31"

The showers overflow when the ship rolls. Lunch often resembles the previous night’s dinner, and one researcher slouched on the sofa in the scientist’s lounge grumbles, “My four-year-old and her friends party more than this.” So much for quality of life. But the location and neighbors are little-explored and could give that researcher a shot at publishing a handful of original papers. That’s enough of a draw for a couple hundred scientists and technicians to abandon their homes and families for a month or two each. All the researchers here are specialists of one stripe or another, and the Hespérides is like a small hostel, a stopover in the mobile city of science.

Berta Companys Oliva, one of the youngest scientists aboard, joined the Malaspina expedition in Cape Town, will disembark in Sydney and has no idea where she’ll work next, except that she wants to do marine sciences. Her experience is a miniature model of the growing mobility of scientists throughout Spain. They may only be bound for a Ph.D. in the United Kingdom or a postdoctoral position in the Netherlands, but in another sense they are trading away their geographic and social stability, at least for part of their lives, to become citizens of the city of science.

Companys left Catalonia for Galicia to earn her undergraduate degree – still an unusual move in a country where many people fear leaving their parents’ homes before securing a gold-plated employment contract. “They didn’t offer marine sciences in Catalonia,” she explains. Now, she’s applying for internships and jobs in her speciality but with little regard to geography. “I want to live independently and I want to do marine science,” she says. “I’d be starting from zero wherever I went, except Galicia, so I’d go anywhere.”

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Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)-sponsored oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage. He will report from aboard the B.I.O. Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

S 29° 36’ 4" E 95° 00’ 33"

One winter’s evening in Callao, in Spain’s viceroyalty of Perú, Luis Née packed his botanical equipment for a voyage. The 59-year-old botanist had arrived in Perú with the Malaspina expedition from Australia in late July 1793. The Descubierta would continue through the Strait of Magellan to Buenos Aires, on the other side of the continent. Née would walk.

Here on the Hespérides, people are starting to talk of going walkabout, too, when we reach Australia. They’ll have to walk a long way to make up for the month’s confinement and isolation. Over the weekend, we reached our most remote point: almost 1,000 nautical miles from the Île de Amsterdam, a tiny French island. Australia was straight ahead and equidistant. The ship was in the heart of an oligotrophic gyre, a part of the ocean with fewer nutrients than coastlines, coral reefs, or upwelling zones. Unlike Née, whose assignment was to plunge through a land filled with life, the modern Malaspina expedition is sifting through the loneliest of seas.

Oligotrophic zones lend themselves to relentless routine. Visit Martí Galí Tàpias in the late morning in his shared, single-porthole laboratory at the waterline and he will be fiddling with hoses and dials. Visit the biogeochemist in the late afternoon and he will be shuffling bottles from one shelf to another in his laboratory, concentrating samples in liquid nitrogen and reading a printout from his chromatographer. Visit him after the evening meeting and he will be in his laboratory, cleaning bottles and planning tomorrow’s collections and experiments. The graduate student at the CSIC’s Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM) in Barcelona is measuring dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a gas emitted by plankton which some researchers suspect of helping to seed clouds at sea.

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Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)-sponsored oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage. He will report from aboard the B.I.O. Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

S 29° 48’ 2" E 82° 42’ 50"

A dorado shimmers below the surface, flitting its radioactive blue fins and flicking its yellow tail as it circles a vertical net dangling from the Hespérides. The dorado is the largest animal we have seen since leaving the African coast. It might see our nets as competition, or as a handily packaged snack. An open ocean predator, the dorado is probably laced with polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs), one of the compounds subject to limits by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs).

Despite successful international efforts to limit the use of early pollutants such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), people continue to invent new substances which leak from everyday use into the wider environment. Some of those chemicals break down quickly under the sun’s ultraviolet rays or by mixing with water. They pose little long-term threat. Researchers refer to more durable chemicals as persistent. It’s a good word for the pollutants.

Depending on the arrangement of their molecules, persistent pollutants from pesticides to fire retardant can infiltrate the bodies of living things. When larger things eat many smaller things containing these pollutants, they accumulate high levels of the normally rare substances. In some cases, those pollutants will stay near their source, such as a factory or waste dump, and remain a local issue. But others are semi-volatile, meaning that the sun’s rays may lift them into the atmosphere and drift across borders and oceans.

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Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)-sponsored oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage. He will report from aboard the B.I.O. Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

<img src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/DSC_7798.jpg” width=“266” height=“400” align=right hspace=10 />S 29° 33 15" E 72° 26’ 25"

The sun returned to the Hespérides Saturday. Scientists sprawled on the flight deck after lunch, indulging in short siestas or playing a little foosball in the hangar. Just before 3pm, an alarm clock rang and one of the researchers sprang up to check on a filter running downstairs in the laboratory. The microbes were waiting.

Now that the seas are calmer, the researchers onboard have their hands full again with sampling and filtering and storing data. In the sunless laboratory below decks Encarna Borrull Francesch, a graduate student at the CSIC’s Institute for Marine Sciences in Barcelona, plugs in a device that looks like a cross between a solar panel and a small stool. The disk is a filter, she explains, which she can tune depending on what she wants to extract from the water. Today, it is viruses.

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Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)-sponsored oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage. He will report from aboard the B.I.O. Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

S 30° 03’ 13" E 61° 28’ 50"

On Sunday the researchers aboard the Hespérides woke to frothing waves rushing past their portholes. The ship had rocked and rolled through the night, but it had not stopped for its normal pre-dawn observations because the sea was too rough. Sunday would be the first of four days when the scientific staff took a forced partial break.

It is too risky to lower the sampling rosetta or other bottles and nets when at one moment the guardrail appears to tower over the foaming breakers below and at the next the cerulean water rushes onto the deck. A sudden pitch has been known to snap cables holding sampling instruments or to send a careless journalist sprawling on a gritty deck.

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Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)-sponsored oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage. He will report from aboard the B.I.O. Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

S 32° 27’ 41" E 50° 55’ 53"

It’s pushing midnight in the computer room and the zooplankton team, some of them awake since the 4:30am Neuston net tow, are starting to get cranky.

Federico Maldonado Uribe, a marine physiology graduate student at the University of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, curses the programmer who wrote their awkward data entry system. The sleep-deprived researchers sway from side to side as their floating laboratory bobs up and down on 3-metre waves.

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<img src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/DSC_7092.JPG” width=“266” height=“400” align=right hspace=10 />Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)-sponsored oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage. He will report from aboard the B.I.O. Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

S 34° 33’ 51" E 31° 01’ 48"

Every day around dawn the Hespérides pauses in its 5,000 nautical mile journey. It does not begin again until mid-afternoon, when its researchers have slaked their thirst for samples with a bewildering variety of bottles and nets. Yet every day scientists ask one another a mysterious question: “Can I have some of your water, please?”

A little after 8:30pm each evening in the scientists’ lounge, chief scientist Jordi Dachs discusses the next day’s schedule. There are more scientists than seats, so some lean with tired legs against the walls or bunkroom doors as the ship rolls and pitches. But almost none miss the briefing, since it is the final confirmation of when each scientist must arrive on deck to supervise their data collection or pick up their share of a water sample.

The stakes are high. If a sampling supervisor fails to arrive 15 minutes before that sample’s assigned time, Dachs warns, he may skip their sample and move on to the next. And if a scientist entitled to 450 millilitres of water from a particular depth is not on hand when the supervising scientists empty the sampling bottle, that water may end up in another scientist’s plastic jug, or just splash back on the deck and wash out overboard.

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<img alt=“DSC_6948.JPG” src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/DSC_6948.JPG” width=“400” height=“266” align=right hspace=10 />Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage (https://www.expedicionmalaspina.es). He will report from aboard the Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

S 34° 50’ 20.6" E 27° 32’ 18.8"

The first working day of this leg of the Malaspina expedition began with the splash of a Neuston net into the black water on the starboard side of the Hespérides before dawn on Sunday. The bosun, another operations officer, and a handful of technicians and scientists wearing life vests and helmets stood watch with arms folded under the warm yellow running lights of the ship. They were waiting in the rich wet air for a fine mesh net, hanging behind the two metal pontoons of the skate, to fill with creatures of the night.

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Freelance journalist Lucas Laursen is joining the Malaspina expedition, a Spanish oceanographic survey circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage (https://www.expedicionmalaspina.es). He will report from aboard the Hespérides for the month-long leg between Cape Town and Perth.

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Cape Town was filled with chattering Spanish researchers this week, on shore between legs of a circumnavigation that will take them from Cádiz to Sydney and back, by way of the Panama Canal. They chewed on biltong and rode the cable car to the top of Table Mountain. Now they are loading water sampling tubes and unpacking their laboratory equipment on the B.I.O. Hespérides, docked here in Cape Town until this afternoon, when we head for Perth.

The Hespérides, a Spanish icebreaker, is taking part in the Malaspina expedition, a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary research voyage which Spanish oceanographers hope will give them a glimpse of how the world’s oceans are changing and help them forge connections with other scientists. Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC) counts hundreds of scientists from over a dozen institutions as collaborators; about three dozen at a time will live and work onboard the Hespérides during the expedition, which launched late last year from Cádiz.

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