Backstory in 2008

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.