“This is me!” Series: The Anoxic Zones

My first years (2010 to 2012) as an Oceanography undergrad student were intense. That is the feeling it comes to me when I remember. An enormous amount of courses to accomplish and several academic organizations to be part of: junior enterprise, student representation, and organization of social events (from conferences and workshops to parties). In 2012, I used to have 12 fixed 1-hour meetings per week to cover everything. Yet, I felt that it was a time of freedom, of being bold and (almost) shameless.

During those years I was also an intern in the Biogeochemistry Lab of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). I started this internship in my first semester at University and the professor straight away gave me the responsibility to lead the Chlorophyll A analyses. For me: I was shaking and thinking “OMG, but am I capable of that?”. Months and years passed, myself and a colleague were doing all the water quality analysis and organizing our field works - in a canoe, in a boat, in a jet-ski, and in fact, even invading a farm to collect water samples from a rice pond and running from cows while bringing our samples back to the car. As I said, we were bold!

One of our joys in the field (and I should feel shame for that) was to identify anoxic zones on the bottom layer of the water column in the rivers and lagoons we were studying. That would trigger our curiosity; it meant we would have something to unravel!