UC San Diego Grad Student Project Evolves Into NASA-Funded Program

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• Karissa Duran- [email protected]

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• Alumni
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This article originally appeared in the fall 2024 issue of UC San Diego Magazine as "Edge of the World."

What began as a student project in 2016 has developed into a robust, NASA-funded program that trains and engages tour vessel operators and intrepid travelers to collect scientific measurements and water samples in Antarctica.

"Last year, we partnered with 15 ships, and almost 2,000 travelers participated in collecting samples," says Allison Cusick, MAS '17, MS '20. "We also trained 81 staff members that work for 11 different operators."

Cusick, now a PhD candidate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, co-founded the current program in 2016 with her advisor, Maria Vernet, a phytoplankton ecologist. Cusick worked with Vernet to design the concept of the citizen science program and the scientific questions that could be addressed.

FjordPhyto, named for the long, narrow sea inlets where phytoplankton samples are collected, is a joint project between Scripps Oceanography and Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina. From November to March, during the five-month tourism season in Antarctica, the program's "citizen scientists" collect samples of phytoplankton - microscopic plantlike organisms that live in the ocean and make up the foundation of the marine food web - suspended in the water samples.

Data collected on these expeditions helps scientists understand how melting glaciers can alter the phytoplankton levels in Antarctica's fjords. Although tiny - microscopic, in fact - phytoplankton contribute more than 50% of Earth's oxygen and form the base of the marine food web.

Once the samples are collected, they are stored on the ship until the end of the season. "Antarctica is still pretty disconnected from the rest of the world," says Cusick. "After the samples arrive at Scripps, they are processed during the summer months."

The idea was based on a 2015 effort by Vernet and two polar guides from the Antarctic tourism industry. It started with Vernet providing the guides with a few sampling bottles to collect phytoplankton from Antarctic waters.

Hearing of this effort sparked Cusick's curiosity. When she started in the Master of Advanced Studies program in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps in 2016, she already had experience in genetics, teaching, ecotourism and Antarctic research. And when faced with developing a capstone project related to ocean and coastal changes for her degree, that experience came in handy. She worked to build out FjordPhyto for the larger benefit of polar science research.

And once the program was underway with initial funding from the National Science Foundation, the samples collected by those visiting Antarctica contributed valuable data for Cusick's research as well as for Martina Mascioni, a researcher from Universidad Nacional de La Plata who was also co-advised by Vernet while earning her PhD and analyzed the samples collected in the early years of the program.

"FjordPhyto was designed to bring polar science knowledge and opportunities to larger audiences around the world," says Cusick.

As a response to her efforts, Cusick was recognized in 2024 with the Student/Alumni Innovator of the Year award, part of the inaugural Chancellor's Innovation Awards. "I am proud and energized to see this idea become something more than I had ever thought it would become."

Read about a FjordPhyto offshoot, the Genomics at Sea Program.