Backstory in 2008

Jessica Conroy and colleagues braved mud and rain and got nipped by sea lions in an attempt to unravel the record of tropical Pacific climate change.

Yoshihiro Furukawa and colleagues stuck to their guns in an attempt to recreate life on the early Earth.

Deep-sea drilling was the order of the day for Peter Clift and colleagues on their expedition to the South China Sea.

Stephen Rintoul and an international team of oceanographers headed south on the Australian icebreaker, Aurora Australis, to discover how Southern Ocean currents influence climate and biodiversity.

Nathalie Goodkin and colleagues dug deep into coral geochemistry and wrestled with waves for a 200-year record of the North Atlantic Oscillation.

Aaron Berger and colleagues leapt out of helicopters in the snow and fog in their quest to understand the effects of glacial erosion on mountain formation.

William Bowman and colleagues braved beverages of pig fat and vodka in their attempt to understand the impact of long-term nitrogen deposition on Slovakian soils.

Catherine McCammon and colleagues surmounted experimental obstacles at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France to unlock the secrets of iron in the Earth's lower mantle.

Nicole Posth and colleagues spent a month touring South African rock formations in their quest to understand the origin of ancient iron and silicate layers.

Corey Archer and colleagues sailed into the wilds of Sweden and the Amazon to collect river water and the trace metal isotopes it carried.

Research opportunities can present themselves at the most unexpected times. When Ingrid Ukstins Peate and Scott Bryan went on a conference field trip in China, they didn't expect to steer previous geological interpretations in a new direction.

Chien-Lu Ping and his colleagues got their plane stuck in a runway of melting seasonal frost during their survey of North American soil organic carbon pools.

A trip to the British Antarctic Survey herbarium in Cambridge marked the beginning of a journey into the Earth's ultraviolet-B history for Barry Lomax and colleagues.

Balancing their instruments on precarious cliff faces and braving intense media and public attention, Thierry Oppikofer and colleagues monitored the evolution of a rockslide along the eastern flank of the Eiger peak in the Swiss Alps.

Lenny Winkel and colleagues found that strong arm muscles can be required to test South Sumatran groundwater samples for arsenic content.

Dan Santamaria Tovar, along with advisor Jamie Shulmeister and colleagues, hiked, kayaked and mountain-biked their way through dense New Zealand rainforest in search of the origins of the Waiho Loop moraine.

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.