This year, researchers traveled across the country and around the world, producing work that adds to our understanding of life on Earth and informs potential solutions for improving our health and the health of our planet.
From mining tunnels under South Dakota to the peatlands of Brunei, Stanford University researchers travel to destinations near and far, high and low, wet and dry to collect samples, observe subjects and collaborate across cultures and countries. In the world beyond campus, researchers did work that could benefit our planet, health and society – such as creating maps of saltwater intrusion along the California coast, finding an innovative way to distribute health surveys to a migratory population and using satellites to better understand fire susceptibility.
This slideshow features some of the many fieldwork photos Stanford researchers and colleagues shared with us in 2019. Links to the stories behind the photos are available in each caption.
While studying fire susceptibility in Southeast Asia, graduate student Nathan Dadap took this photo of two workers installing soil moisture and water table depth sensors in burned peatland in Badas, Brunei Darussalam. Image credit: Nathan DadapThese goats were key to distributing health surveys to the nomadic Nyangatom population of Ethiopia. Stanford researchers, including medical student Hannah Wild, used satellite images of vegetation to find the migratory Nyangatom. Image credit: Hannah WildResearchers from the lab of Jeremy Goldbogen, assistant professor of biology, place a suction-cup tag on a blue whale in Monterey Bay. A tag like this led to the first-ever recording of a blue whale heartbeat. Image credit: Goldbogen Lab/Duke Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab; NMFS Permit 16111Graduate student Yuran Zhang worked on a new application of DNA sequencing at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota – once the largest and deepest gold mine in North America. The technique allowed researchers to sequence microbial communities in samples of reservoir fluids and identify where water traveled through underground networks and pathways. Image credit: Courtesy of Yuran ZhangBy analyzing samples of barite crystals, such as these, researchers, including Stanford graduate student Malcolm Hodgskiss, revealed that Earth experienced huge changes to its biosphere – the part of the planet occupied by living organisms – ending with an enormous drop in life approximately 2.05 billion years ago that may also be linked to declining oxygen levels. Image credit: Malcolm HodgskissStanford researchers used airborne and ground-based methods for measuring conductivity, along with data from wells, to map underground freshwater resources and forecast the intrusion of saltwater into aquifers beneath the California coast. This effort has been led by Rosemary Knight, professor at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences. Image credit: Ker Than
