Backstory

David Rubin and Patrick Hesp spent a night in a labour camp come hotel while trying to uncover the factors that shape sand dunes in the Qaidam Basin, China.

Mike Gagan, Michael Griffiths and colleagues negotiated knee-deep mud while up to their neck in water in an Indonesian cave, all to reconstruct Australasian monsoon rainfall over the past 12,000 years.

Daniel Brothers and colleagues had a run in with some killer bees while trying to understand tectonic deformation.

Edward King and colleagues towed a radar system over Antarctic ice, and whiled away Christmas in a tent, in their quest to understand glacier sliding.

William Wilcock and a team of scientists and engineers drilled holes in the sea floor, and inadvertently provided a breeding ground for octopuses, in their attempt to understand deep-ocean hydrothermal venting.

Paolo Gabrielli and colleagues dug deeply — and extremely cautiously — into Antarctic ice, to see whether the poles acted as a sink for mercury in the geological past.

Hermann M. Fritz and colleagues travelled by cargo boat through the Ayeyarwady delta in Myanmar to document the damage after cyclone Nargis.

Kerri Pratt and colleagues stayed calm under pressure and made friends with 'Shirley' as they flew through the clouds over Wyoming.

Susannah Porter, Carol Dehler and colleagues hiked miles in burning heat and braved unforgiving river rapids to sample rocks in the Grand Canyon.

John West and colleagues struggled with widely held misconceptions and computer hackers in their attempt to explain mantle processes beneath the Great Basin in the United States.

Fabrizio Antonioli, Andrea Dutton and their colleagues prised a stalagmite out of an underwater cave to learn about sea levels during the penultimate interglacial period.

Verena Tunnicliffe, Robert W. Embley and their colleagues sank their remotely operated vehicle into a boiling pool of molten sulphur in their vigour to sample the deep ocean floor.

Daniel Cziczo and colleagues experimented with electronics at over 3,000-m altitude to reduce the uncertainty in aerosol–cloud interactions.

Susanne Straub and colleagues examined teaspoons of 42-million-year-old volcanic ash to elucidate the impact of plate tectonics on arc magmatism.

Andrew Moy and colleagues studied foraminifera in sediments, and made their own contributions to the sea, in their attempt to understand calcification in the Southern Ocean.

Emily Sekula-Wood and colleagues held their breath as they waited for results to rise up from the depths of the coastal ocean off California.

Robert Field and colleagues turned their attention to the newspapers and used the simplest of weather observations to better understand the climatological and human causes of Indonesia's fire problem.