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Sampling the Sampler

Crystal Breier, Kamila Stastna, Ken Buesseler, and Sachiko Yoshida (left to right) draw water from a rosette sampler in June 2011 on board the R/V Ka’imikai-o-Kanaloa. The cruise was organized by Buesseler, a marine chemist at WHOI, to track radiation released from the nuclear power plants in Japan after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami severely damaged its cooling and emergency systems. As a graduate student, Buesseler got his start in oceanography studying the spread of radiation from the accident at Chernobyl (pdf) in the Black Sea. (Photo by Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)