So You Want to Be a Field Scientist
I often tell people that if you want to be a field scientist, you have enjoy being miserable.
That’s not to say that field scientists don’t love what they do. On the contrary, they love it so much that they will put up with all manner of discomfort to work on their science and they will relish any opportunity to do so. They may complain, they may gripe, they may curse at the weather, the blisters on their feet, the “field toilet” that’s actually just a glorified hole in the ground, or the lack of reliable internet; but, they will get up the next day and do it all over again, proclaim it to be the best experience of their lives, and then brag about how miserable it was to their friends and colleagues when they get home. It’s a badge of honor. “You got poison ivy in the forest trying to collect soil samples? That’s nothing! I froze my ass to a rock trying to crap on a glacier, had to get rescued by my P.I., and couldn’t sit comfortably for a week! It was awesome!”
Field scientists enjoy being miserable in much the same way that alpinists enjoy being miserable; and if removed from the field for too long, they will begin to crave the misery. It should come as no surprise then that many field scientists also do miserable and painful things like alpine mountaineering and rock climbing in their free time. I chose rock climbing as my form of extracurricular masochism. We really just can’t get enough of the misery.
There are many areas of research in the Earth Sciences that conduct field studies. I am an atmospheric chemist, so my field studies focus on measuring various chemicals and trace gases (or pollutants) in the air. In my years as a field scientist, I have experienced both ground-based field studies (those in which we establish a temporary sampling site on the ground at a location of interest somewhere) and aircraft field studies (those in which we install instruments on airplanes and collect air measurements while flying). There are also field studies on ocean-going ships and icebreakers, but I have not yet had the privilege to work aboard a research vessel. I can guarantee you, though, that a ship-based scientist would love to regale you with their own stories of discomfort.
From my experiences, I can tell you that these different types of field study have their own unique miseries. Allow me to elaborate on just a few of them.
Ground Studies
1. Remote locations
Often, our ground sites are located in remote locations far removed from civilization and the comforts thereof. Usually this is because we are trying to study some aspect of the natural world that is unperturbed by humans. My particular experience has been in working in the Arctic where I was studying chemical interactions between the air and snow surface during the winter/spring months. Sometimes there are small villages/towns nearby (e.g., Barrow, Alaska), sometimes there are not (e.g., Summit, Greenland). Either way, the misery of working in a remote location starts well before the field study itself. It starts with trying to figure out how to actually get your equipment to that location in the first place, and sometimes, how to even get any electrical power to turn it on. For some projects a generator may do the trick, but if your goal is measure the natural atmosphere and study air chemistry, creating a cloud of your own generator exhaust is counterproductive.
Transporting equipment (and people) to remote locations usually requires some form of cargo aircraft or helicopter, neither of which come at a cheap price. When I worked in Barrow, there was at least a functional runway and airport, so we could fly our equipment on commercial cargo aircraft from Anchorage. To get to Anchorage in the first place required a freight truck to Seattle and then a cargo ship from Seattle to Anchorage. This entire journey takes about a month. For the remote field site of Summit, perched atop the Greenland ice cap, periodic C-130 Hercules flights operated by the New York National Guard will transport your equipment, weather permitting. These aircraft are equipped with landing skis and rocket-assisted takeoff (just in case). In extreme weather/temperature/runway condition circumstances, or if heavy equipment for off-loading cargo is unavailable, combat off-load is not out of the realm of possibility, and it is rather common in Antarctica (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzQ8IxOGpQ4). Imagining your sensitive scientific equipment being booted out of the back of a moving C-130 is the stuff of nightmares.
2. Austere lodging
With remote locations comes a variety of different “lodging” conditions, none of which involve luxurious hotel sheets and room service. Some of the options you may encounter are: 1) dormitory-style “man camps” with bunk beds and a shared toilet/shower, 2) Cold War era quonset huts, 3) makeshift shacks with a platform for lining up multiple people in sleeping bags, 4) standard issue tent with or without army cot, 5) “Arctic oven” style insulated tent (for camping in polar locations). I have also had the pleasure/misfortune of camping in a small RV with 3–4 men, with no access to showers and only one porta-potty on site, during the winter in an oil and gas field in Utah. I don’t recommend this for your next vacation.
In Barrow (now Utqiagvik), Alaska, we stayed in groups of 4–8 in 2–4 bedroom quonset huts, which were relics leftover from the old Naval Arctic Research Laboratory that opened there in the 1940’s. My hut was even complete with thick tobacco smoke stains on the walls that were probably also deposited there in the 1940’s. As far as Arctic lodging goes, these huts are relatively plush, but are not without their difficulties. The huts are not attached to the town water/septic system (the above ground “Utilidor”). Instead, they have a large water tank inside that stores a couple of days worth of water for showers and toilet flushing (depending on the number of occupants) and a large septic tank for storing of sewage (that also is large enough for a couple of days). Both of these must be serviced by a water truck and a sewage truck from town. When a winter storm blows in, the road from town becomes impassable for multiple days, and we have run out of water and toilet flushing abilities. Normally I’m not shy about using the restroom outdoors, but this is an entirely different situation during an Arctic storm in a tree-less landscape.
Along with these various sleeping situations come various toilet situations that range in their primitiveness. I’m sure you can imagine the possibilities. Some of these possibilities are even more difficult for women (I don’t think I have to explain why). If you can get over a lack of proper toilet, a lack of running water, and even sometimes a lack of privacy (think dual seat outhouses), then you have what it takes to work in the field. There is, however, one very important positive side to field toilets: the views. I may have had to put up with a severely cold bum using a pile of rocks as a toilet while camped on the Juneau Icefield, but the view out over the massive glacial expanse was breathtaking.
3. Limited resources
When you’re working at a remote field site and you need some piece of hardware to rig up a sampling system, you can’t just hop skip over to the Home Depot. Like proper Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, you must prepare for every eventuality and pack all those things. Did you forget a piece of speciality Swagelok that you need for your instrument? Then I hope you have a way to contact a colleague back home to send it to you, but it probably won’t get to you for a while! One becomes a very creative problem-solver in the field.
When you’re in the remote field, it’s also advisable to not get injured or sick. Just don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. Perhaps there is a small village clinic that can do simple first aid, but if you sustain a bad injury you will have to get a Med-Evac flight to civilization. I had a colleague that cut off the top of her finger in an exhaust fan while at Summit, Greenland. The Med-Evac flight cost about $75,000, and that was almost 20 years ago.
Limited resources also usually means limited food options. Yes, there are research stations with a decent cafeteria, but most of the time you will have to suck it up and eat whatever is available. Be prepared to leave your particular diet du jour at home. The Arctic is not a great place for vegetarians or vegans. On the Juneau Icefield, we only had non-perishable canned or boxed food. It took me a solid two weeks to recover from the amount of canned SPAM I ate on that trip.
Oh yeah, did I mention no internet access?
4. Manual labor
Field work is not for the faint of heart, and it’s not for people who don’t want to get dirty or sweaty. We don’t have the luxury of bringing a “work crew” with us, so we are the work crew. It doesn’t matter if you are a new student or a world-famous scientist, if the entrance to your sampling site gets covered by a 20 ft snow drift in a blizzard, everybody grabs a shovel. Dig baby, dig.
5. Inclement weather
I’ll let you in on a little secret: Mother Nature doesn’t care about your research. When you are camped in the field, you are at the mercy of the elements. Depending on where you are, you may experience: extreme temperatures (hot or cold), blizzards/white-outs, hurricane-force winds, torrential rains/flooding, dust storms, or insect swarms (!). All of these are miserable in their own way and require different coping strategies.
Working in the Arctic, our primary issues were extreme cold and white-out conditions. Working outside to set up a sampling system is 100 times more difficult and time-consuming when it’s -40° outside. You have no fine motor skills or ability to work with small hardware when you’re wearing Arctic weight mittens (think astronaut space suit gloves), so you have to remove your heavy gloves. This means you can screw in perhaps 1–2 screws before you have to run inside to warm up your hands and suffer through what I term “extreme thawing”. Those who have experienced this know how painful it is.
Batteries die instantly in the cold, sampling lines ice over, trucks and snowmobiles won’t start, and duct tape does not work at all. Zip ties will become your new best friend. One of my friends has used a propane torch to heat up the valve on a propane tank that had been frozen shut (luckily he did not become the recipient of a Darwin Award). Eyelashes, nose hairs, and mustaches grow icicles. You can’t leave a building for any period of time without donning many layers of clothing and covering every piece of exposed skin. And this is just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended).
6. Rogue wildlife
Encounters with wildlife can be dangerous or even life-threatening. In the Arctic, researchers are accompanied by armed “bear guards” from the local villages. Rabies is a serious problem in the Arctic fox population near Barrow, Alaska. A rabid fox can be identified by its lack of fear of humans and it baring it’s teeth. Sadly, they have to be killed when encountered. A bear guard with whom I worked in Barrow would often provide me with a shotgun and tell me to “watch for the smiling foxes.” The Iñupiat have a fun way with English sometimes.
Aircraft Studies
1. Looooong flights to nowhere
Let’s play a little game: Imagine your last 8-10 hour (or longer) transoceanic flight to some far away destination. For some reason, your airline also made you board the flight 3 hours early to prepare for the flight. The trip was a long one, but at least when you got off the plane, you were in some new, exotic place with new things to see and do on your much-deserved vacation. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Now imagine you step off the plane and, instead of your long dreamt of vacation spot, you are right back in the same place you started. Now imagine you have to do that again the very next day. Over and over again, you keep just ending up in the same place... Congratulations! Now you know what it’s like to be an aircraft scientist!
2. Jet lag
Most aircraft campaigns are based at one airport and all of the flights begin and end at the same place. Sometimes though, the flights actually do go somewhere. I am part of a NASA mission currently, called Atmospheric Tomography, that uses the DC-8 aircraft to collect global-scale atmospheric measurements. Our 12 flights take us down the Pacific Ocean, across the Southern Ocean, up the Atlantic Ocean, and back across the Arctic Ocean. Our flights occur every 2–3 days and cross numerous time zones, and the date line twice. The aircraft usually opens at 5 am for a 3-hr preflight to warm up and calibrate instruments before an 8 am take off. I don’t even know if “jet lag” is a strong enough word to describe the permanent state of exhaustion and sleep-deprivation. Somewhere around Chile your body loses any concept of what time or day it is.
3. Air sickness
Time for a brief science lesson. The very lowest portion of the atmosphere that is in direct contact with the ground and is impacted by terrain features is termed the “boundary layer”. Wind hitting these terrain features (trees, buildings, hills, etc.) causes “eddies”, which is swirling air containing upward and downward motion. Heating of the ground surface by the sun also causes vertical air movement through “convection” (hot air rises). All of this is why it can sometimes be quite bumpy when you take off in an airplane until you break out of the boundary layer and hit the smooth air above.
In our aircraft studies, we are often trying to probe the boundary layer to study surface emissions sources and the near-surface air chemistry that impacts air quality and human health. This means that we fly in that bumpy, turbulent, surface layer for hours on end. We are free to move about the aircraft to work on our projects, but the strong turbulence makes simple things like walking, or drinking, or trying to use the lavatory, especially difficult. I’ve even been thrown out of my seat altogether.
It’s probably no surprise then that we have people on every flight who lose their lunch. Many people take dramamine or scopolamine. I’m one of the lucky ones who does not get air sick, but I’m also one of the ones who cannot tolerate hearing or smelling vomit.
So, a few words to the wise from things that I have observed:
- If you know you get air sick (or sea sick, or turbulence makes you nervous, or you just can’t handle that upside-down stomach feeling on rollercoasters), do yourself, and everyone else around you, a favor and don’t fly.
- Don’t eat excessively spicy food before or during a flight. (On a related note: things made with tuna fish are not acceptable flight lunches)
- If you are feeling a little disoriented, often times going to the cockpit and getting a view of the horizon can make you feel better; but please don’t throw up on the pilots or the instrumentation. They really don’t like that.
- Knit beanie hats do not make good barf bags. All they do is strain your barf like a colander and really upset the person sitting next to you.
- Don’t throw your barf bag into the community trash can by the coffee maker. It will smell up the entire cabin. Get yourself some Ziploc bags and seal it up.
I didn’t set out to end this article with vomit, but really it only seems fitting. If you’ve made it this far and you still want to be a field scientist, or if you’re one of the super twisted types who are now more stoked than ever, then join us. We need you. I promise it will be the best time of your life.
