ABOVE: A crew sets sail to Station ALOHA off the coast of Hawaii in August.
COURTESY OF ANGELICQUE WHITE
Tears streaked the top of Angelicque White’s cheekbones and soaked her mask in the moments after she had a cotton-tipped stick inserted into her nose to test for the novel coronavirus. “When they shove that swab that far up your nostril, you immediately start crying,” she tells The Scientist. The test, along with a mandatory two-week quarantine leading up to it, was part of a strict protocol White and others followed to be allowed to once again set sail on their research ship and continue to collect data on a massive ocean current in the Pacific.
Called the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the swirl of seawater, which covers roughly 20 million square kilometers, is the largest ecosystem on Earth and the oldest ecosystem in the ocean, a prime habitat for billions of ...
