“There are parts of Antarctica where the ice is nearly three miles thick, and we’re looking at these glacial fronts spilling off into the sea, making icebergs. They are hundreds of feet tall. The ice dwarfs the ship. The ship looks like a rowboat, right? And there are 600 souls on board.
It’s incredible to just take a moment and reflect on the scale in terms of size, but also the scale in terms of time: There’s tens of millions of years right before your eyes. The scale of brightness: We have nearly 24 hours of daylight. And the scale in terms of quietness: It’s quieter than you’ve ever heard in your life. It’s a humbling sense of scale, a sense of awe.”
Brandi Revels, ’13 master’s, chief scientist aboard the Viking Polaris
It’s not hard to understand why Brandi Revels loves her job as a researcher aboard the expedition ship Viking Polaris. The sense of awe — for our world, for our planet — drew her to science. Her love of adventure took her from West Columbia, South Carolina, to the far ends of the Earth. Revels, who earned her master’s in marine chemistry from the University of South Carolina in 2013, now lives in Zurich, Switzerland — when she’s not spending months at sea as the chief scientist aboard the Viking Polaris.
Along with joining cruise guests for shore excursions and delivering lectures, she oversees field research and leads experiments in some of the planet’s most remote places.
Her path may have been difficult to predict when she was a teenager at White Knoll High School or even when she was at the College of Charleston, which she attended on a cheerleading scholarship. Revels admits she wasn’t initially a standout student.
But the lightbulb went on in a required chemistry course when a professor opened her eyes to the wonders of science. Revels switched majors from English to psychology and minored in chemistry and Japanese. She ended up graduating magna cum laude from Charleston’s Honors College.
After undergrad, she dipped a toe into medical school at USC but didn’t have the heart for it. She was working as a professional scuba diver in Trinidad and Tobago when she realized her chemistry degree might translate into environmental science work. She reached out to universities around the country but found the perfect fit at USC, where geochemist Seth John was setting up a new lab.
“The environment at USC was so nurturing that I went from someone who had no experience in this field to being quite successful,” Revels says. “The program in Columbia really set me up for success.”
“The environment at USC was so nurturing that I went from someone who had no experience in this field to being quite successful.”
Next, she earned a doctorate in isotope geo-chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), the world’s most prestigious university for earth and marine science. Now she is a visiting researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — that is, when she’s not on board the Viking expedition ship.
She is at sea for 8 to 10 weeks at a time, then spends the next two months on shore reading, writing and analyzing data. Collecting data at regular intervals provides an incredible opportunity for monitoring environmental systems. For example, one of her projects includes sampling for microplastics, which can be harmful to the ocean and its inhabitants. Repeat visits to remote areas allow scientists the opportunity to monitor the same location week after week, month after month and year after year. “If you want to have a sense of how the environment is changing over time, that’s really what you have to do,” she says. But those studies are extremely costly, and funding is hard to come by.
Enter Viking, which provides bucket-list trips for hundreds of passengers who participate in research and learn from scientists like Revels. “It’s very much a scientific vessel which is being funded by the five-star hotel that we put in the front of the ship,” she says. “And we’re using that to fund the research in the back.”
Revels’ job is to ensure that these ships are best utilized for scientific research. As chief scientist, she oversees staff scientists as well as visiting researchers.
On a typical day, researchers might collect samples of microorganisms in the morning and then use underwater microphones, or hydrophones, to study the sounds of whales and seals in the afternoon. In the evening, they might launch a weather balloon.
“You really have a full scale of environments in these pristine locations — from the microscopic in the water to the macroscopic in the air, and in high resolution and long term,” she says. “My job is to make sure that all that happens.”
And the work happens, thanks to a full team of staff scientists who work alongside visiting researchers and postdocs from other universities. There are also the guests.
“Sometimes it’s not possible to get the guests super involved because it’s delicate work, but they are always excited to be involved in any way they can,” she says. “So maybe they come with us out on the boats, and they help us take notes or observations, or we may be relying on them to help pull in lines or deploy sensitive equipment.”
Back on board, guests enjoy enrichment programs including lectures on scientific topics — anything from the microscopic plants that make up the base of Antarctica’s food chain to the biology of fish. Sometimes they even dissect a fish to show how scientists analyze the fish’s ear bone to determine the fish’s age.
“It made me realize that through research and science and the joy of learning, we are making an impact, a very real impact, on people’s lives.”
Many of the people who cruise to Antarctica have a background in science, and Revels says many are women who wish they could have pursued a similar career.
“They’ll remark, often with tears in their eyes, that they wanted to be a scientist, but when they were coming up, you were a nurse or a teacher, and those were the options,” she says, adding that she is thankful for the pioneering work these women did to allow her to do her job today.
But it’s not all fun and games — even for the guests: “I tell them, ‘This is real science, and it’s real work. You’ve paid all this money to come work. It doesn’t matter if you’re seasick. It doesn’t matter if you’re cold or if you’re hungry. If you have to pee, you have to hold it because we’re relying on you to help us get these samples, which are priceless.’”
For many guests, so is the experience. Revels remembers one guest who had polio as a child and struggled with mobility issues. It was the woman’s dream to set foot on Antarctica.
“She said, ‘Since I was a little girl, I’ve been putting pennies away. But I thought this disease was going to take me before I had the opportunity to have this dream come true,’” Revels explains. “So, all of us in the team, we all worked together. We helped her into the Zodiac. We drove her to the continent, we helped her up out of the boat, and we put her on her feet with her walker. She stood on the continent of Antarctica. She fell to her knees. She was crying. And she said, ‘I never in a million years thought that I would have the chance to do this.’”
For Revels, the moment validated all the years in school and affirmed the value of her career beyond the lab. “It made me realize,” she says, “that through research and science and the joy of learning, we are making an impact, a very real impact, on people’s lives.”
