Week 18 - White Island Success

The week is here for our White Island field trip that I have been beyond excited for! After the disappointment of our first attempt, it was excellent to receive the phone call that the boat was leaving early in the morning.

We took the opportunity to go over on the White Island Tours boat. They crew at White Island Tours were amazing, and I can highly recommend them. The boat over takes about an hour and half, during this time they organised to have us on the island first and to be the last group back to the boat. This gave us more time to do the sampling and mapping that we needed.

As we got closer the volcano loomed and excitement grew. We were taken over to the island on the first shuttle boat and made our way to our sampling sites. These sites were easily recognisable as they were orange. The orange colour indicates that the spring has iron in it, and our purpose on the island was to test Iron hot springs.

My task was to take the temperature and pH levels and relay them to the Masters student who was creating the maps. We had a research associate taking biological samples and a PhD student taking (very very hot) water samples. I was delighted to watch us as a team work together to achieve a shared goal. We worked so well around each other and each new the job we needed to complete. Communication was great and we moved around each other with ease whilst still being careful of the rotten ground beneath us - ending up under the surface would NOT have been fun!

I marvelled at being on White Island as a scientist. Like a little girls dream come true. We were working in an area where the main crater was in sight, a scary but exciting sight.