Backstory

Having managed to get themselves and all their instruments on board a ship not too far away from an imminent war zone, Jenny Collier and colleagues enjoyed the serenity of life at sea as they investigated the rifted continental margin of India.

Rhiannon Mather, Sarah Reynolds and colleagues criss-crossed the Atlantic Ocean armed with pumps and plastic bottles in search of the nutrients that feed open-ocean productivity.

Hitomi Nakamura, sometimes on her own, braved remote ravines and thick jungles in order to sample volcanic rocks that help reveal the complex geometry of two overlapping plates subducting into the mantle beneath central Japan.

Martin Kennedy and colleagues searched the Australian outback for clues to the transition out of Snowball Earth. The answer, as it turns out, was much closer to home.

Willard Moore and his colleagues collected 200-litre samples of sea water from depths of up to 1,000 metres and stirred up the odd octopus in order to determine the input of submarine groundwater discharge into the Atlantic Ocean.

Jim Roberts and colleagues inhaled petrochemical fumes and navigated between ships and oil platforms in order to understand halogen chemistry in the Houston area and along the Texas coast.

A group of botanists, geographers and physicists foraged through gravel pits, tunnel plots and lignite mines for very rare logs from the Late Glacial.

After a magnitude 8.1 earthquake caused a deadly tsunami in the Solomon Islands, Fred Taylor and colleagues rushed to the epicentral area to learn about rupture across a subducting triple junction.

Beth Shaw and colleagues found the corals they were sampling being used as wall decorations, and braved nudist beaches in full field gear to understand the AD 365 earthquake.

Jason Neff and his team searched the depths of frigid alpine lakes for clues on dustiness in the western United States.

Torbjörn Törnqvist and several teams of students ventured into the wilds of the Louisiana coast to investigate Mississippi Delta sediments, armed with only a hand-corer and a fifteen-year-old station wagon.

Patrick Lajeunesse and colleagues enjoyed the picturesque environment of Hudson Bay while mapping its floor in order to understand the nature of the catastrophic outburst flood of Lake Agassiz-Ojibway.

Sean Gulick and colleagues circumnavigated a flotilla of floating skin divers' platforms to obtain seismic profiles of an impact crater.

Beneath the dust and hummock grass of the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia, Pascal Philippot and Martin Van Kranendonk searched for signs of ancient life in some of the oldest rocks recovered on Earth.

Kate Moran and Jan Backman took an ice-hardened drillship, two icebreakers and two helicopters to the high Arctic to recover many million-year-old sediments from the Lomonosov Ridge.

Tim Bartholomaus and Suzanne and Bob Anderson hauled 25 kilograms of equipment over 25 kilometres in 25 hours to get a handle on glacier flow — without breaking the bank.

Using sophisticated multibeam imaging equipment aboard a French Navy vessel, Marc Fournier and colleagues mapped the structure of the enigmatic Owen fracture zone underneath the Arabian Sea.