Scientists prepare expeditions in remote environments
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In 2020, Julia Schmale was stranded in the icy Arctic for four months © 2020 EPFL/Julia Schmale
Scientific expeditions require months of planning before scientists can acquire the first data.
A bark cuts through the Arctic silence, waking Anna up. She slept only three hours after collecting the last sample. Anna reaches for her rifle, exits the tent, and steps onto the midnight ice. She pets the guard dog she rented a few days earlier. It might be a false alarm, but she scans the darkness for polar bears, hoping her training pays off. She cannot afford to lose the samples. Nor her life.
This situation was no accident. It was the culmination of months of planning Anna Carratala Ripolles, a scientist at the EPFL Laboratory for Environmental Biology, underwent for an expedition to collect bacteria from Greenland’s pristine lakes. Fieldwork offers scientists first-hand information about how the elements under study behave in a real environment, which is much more complex than the lab. “Lab work can give you the answer to very precise questions under specific conditions. Fieldwork is what provides meaningful answers in complex natural environments,” explains Carratala.