A dive into a frozen expedition

Erin Easton, assistant professor for the School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences, was a part of a research expedition in Antarctica, where she and her team, in the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too), found large, thriving communities of sediments underneath ice shelves. 

Easton said the Antarctic expedition was to explore the connections between the climate and the seafloor communities.

“We went to that area to do some studies, like integrated research, and we had an opportunity where part of an ice shelf broke off while we were in the area,” she said. “We decided to go and explore this area underneath the ice shield that had just broken free. No one had had an opportunity to observe that with any type of technology prior to this expedition.”

Easton said working off the coast of Antarctica and in the Southern Ocean has been a bucket-list item for her.

“It’s a unique area of the world’s oceans in terms of its ecology,” she said. “It’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to go and do a little bit of research.”

Easton said there was a collaboration established among oceanic researchers, where they worked in the Southern Pacific and Antarctic regions, which allowed her to expand her area of research to include Antarctica in the Southern Ocean.

“My research is benthic ecology and evolution,” Easton said. “Benthic refers to the seafloor so, basically, the ecology of the organisms that live in or in association with the seafloor.” 

Her main areas of research are working in shallow to deep sea environments from soft sediment environments to hard substrate. She has been working in the Southeast Pacific for over 10 years.

“I do a lot of integrated methods where I use traditional taxonomic or morphological methods and connect them with genetic methods,” Easton said. “We do a lot of video surveys and try to improve the information that we have in terms of biodiversity information by using the information we are gaining from lab work to improve our identifications based on the video work as well.”

The assistant professor said she did a postdoctoral study in Chile, where she was able to work on the benthic communities of the Easter Island and the oceanic islands.

“I’ve always wanted to explore the ocean in different areas from the time I was 8 or 9,” she said. “I had a fascination with the ocean and the deep sea in particular and I just didn’t realize I could do it until I was later in my undergrad career when I started realizing I could go to grad school for oceanography.”

Easton said the Antarctic expedition’s findings were “fascinating.”

“Part of it was not surprising because we know that there’s connectivity between the waters that are not covered in ice and the water’s covered ice,” she said. “To see communities that were decades and possibly even centuries old to see those communities was fascinating.

“For me, it was actually surprising that it was so covered with sediment, which shows that there’s been rain of material for quite some time there, and that the connection has been ongoing for quite some time.”

After having discovered the high rates of sedimentation, collaborators are now looking into its history to have a better idea of how long it has been occurring. 

“I still want to keep doing more exploration in the Southeast Pacific because it’s still a relatively underexplored area,” Easton said. “The gulf just off our coast here, this area of South Texas, is relatively understudied compared to other regions in the gulf. Beyond that, I [am] establishing some collaborations to start working, maybe some [expeditions] in the Atlantic Ocean, which I haven’t worked in yet.”