A voyage of discovery

College of Charleston students combine class work, real
science and a taste of life at sea

By Bo Petersen

The Post and Courier

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Doc just got a longer profile.

The beams of more than 200 individual sonars fired by College of
Charleston students swept north from Doc's Rocks, an undersea outcropping
named for their teacher, Leslie Sautter, and found that the terraced ledge
just doesn't quit. It keeps running at least 11 miles from the six-mile
stretch where it was first mapped in 2006, and splits out from the
Continental Shelf as a narrow ridge of a shoal.

Melissa Haneline
The Post and
Courier

College of Charleston Senior Stephen Long makes his way
to the top deck of the NOAA ship Nancy Foster. The College of Charleston
marine geology class went on a four-day cruise to map a portion of the
bottom of the ocean.

What does that mean?

Fish.

"These things are great fish habitat," Sautter said.

The run of exposed rock at the drop-off of the sand bottom suggests
there are other still unknown habitats like the rich Charleston Bump
offshore. That would mean the Southeast coast has more breeding grounds
than realized for game and commercial spe-cies. The college crew's mapping
efforts come at a time when federal regulators are tightening the screws
on where, when and how much can be caught of diminishing species, such as
grouper, rules fishermen say are too restrictive.

But the more that can be learned about the habitats and populations
offshore, the fairer the rules can be made.

Not bad work for a ship's lab full of undergraduates. Not a bad payoff
for a few rough days in pitching seas, clutching at the computer table
while coffee cups spilled and chairs rolled back to the tightest stretch
of their bungee cords.

"It was way more feeling the waves than I thought it would be," said
sophomore Caroline Broderick about her first deep-sea expedition.

Thirteen students from the college's marine geology sea mapping program
returned Tuesday from a cruise that is part lab work for the class and
part of an ongoing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration project
to map a coastal floor that has been only slightly mapped so far.

Previous story

Students
become scientists on cruise; 14 from C of C to explore the unknown in real
time, published 10/23/08

It is, in other words, real science, hand in hand with working survey
technicians. The classwork is so valuable that students field career job
offers as they complete it.

"NOAA is always looking for survey technicians," said Melissa Partyka,
one of the technicians with whom students worked aboard the research ship
Nancy Foster. The more bodies, the faster the work gets done, Partyka
said.

But the students bring more. Something about stepping on deck in the
early morning to cast off the equipment cage and watching them compete to
help her.

"I'm out here doing this all the time. It can get like going to the
office. They make me realize how exciting, how far from the ordinary my
job is," she said.

It's pretty far from ordinary, all right, even for college students,
getting tossed out of the bunk in the night with the roll of a big wave.
Whatever happened when junior Kristen Hughes tried to run on deck she
laughs about but won't discuss. But her first time offshore "was awesome,"
she said. "Being able to wake up in the morning and see the sunrise at
sea."

The students also found evidence of a landslide or erosion along the
rock ridge, one more hint of how the ledge, 50 miles out to sea, might
have formed in the last Ice Age as shoreline with the Gulf Stream rubbing
against it.

Reach Bo Petersen at 745-5852 or
[email-masked].

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