Backstory

Murray Gingras and colleagues examined lagoon goo for signs of life from the comfort of a moonlit rooftop in the Caribbean.

Daniel Donato and colleagues exercised their acrobatic skills while measuring mangrove carbon stocks.

Brett Carpenter and colleagues got more than they bargained for when cleaning the mud off a metre-long piece of core from the San Andreas Fault.

Samantha Joye and her colleagues donned respirators and safety suits to survive the fumes when tracing an underwater gas plume following the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Richard Iverson and colleagues made enough of a din to scare the bears when sending large amounts of debris down a 95-m-long flume to find out what difference wet sediments make to an avalanche.

Massimo Frezzotti and colleagues saw their 17-ton vehicle drop 10 m into an ice crevasse in their quest to recover the climatic history of East Antarctica.

Pieter Vermeesch enjoyed training for a marathon in an empty two-dimensional space, with his eyes closed, in-between sampling aeolian dunes in the Namib Sand Sea.

Matthew J. Hornbach and colleagues navigated shallow debris-filled waters in an attempt to understand the factors that contributed to tsunami generation during the Haiti earthquake.

Susan E. Hough and colleagues faced logistical challenges when attempting to deploy portable seismometers in post-earthquake Port-au-Prince.

John S. Pallister and Wendy A. McCausland rushed to the aid of their Saudi Arabian colleagues to advise on an emerging earthquake emergency.

Nardy Kip, Julia F. van Winden, Huub J. M. Op den Camp and an array of colleagues braved hostile acidic peat bogs around the world in a feat of truly collaborative research.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, James Schauer, Hung Nguyen and colleagues found the Beijing Olympics to be conducive to international collaboration in science, as well as sport, as they attempted to assess the effect of emission restrictions on climate forcing.

In an attempt to assess the factors controlling the rates of glacial melt in West Antarctica, Adrian Jenkins and colleagues found themselves waiting anxiously for their submersible, Autosub3, to return from under an ice shelf.

In their pursuit of palaeoclimatic reconstruction, Andrew Cohen and colleagues experienced the 'Eureka!' highs and dangerous lows of sediment coring in Lake Tanganyika, East Africa.

Vladimir Samarkin, Michael Madigan and colleagues travelled to Don Juan Pond in Antarctica, in an attempt to understand life on Mars. Instead, they discovered an unexpected link between the geosphere and atmosphere.

After dodging icebergs and flying fish, Jeff Standish and colleagues collected a suite of basalts from the Southwest Indian Ridge, to try and determine the mechanisms of mid-ocean-ridge formation.

Fiamma Straneo and colleagues travelled to the heart of a glacial fjord in East Greenland to determine the causes of glacial retreat.