Anneka Williams

I stepped off the plane in San Francisco at 9pm local time on Sunday December 8th but it felt like midnight to my east coast-programmed body. I was tired. It was the end of my semester at Bowdoin College, we were coming up on exams, east coast winter with its early darkness and biting cold had set in, and I was ready for a break. But there I was in San Francisco missing my last week of classes for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Conference where I would be presenting summer research from the Polaris Project expedition to Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (YKD).

I had polished up some figures and data analysis from the summer during my fall semester and had shared my research with professors and friends, but my summer work in the YKD felt distant. Seeing friends from the summer and joining the literally thousands of scientists flocking to the convention center early Monday morning clutching poster rolls brought it all back and reminded me of why the work we do is important. 

AGU was energizing. My Polaris peers and I walked around the giant poster hall and trickled in and out of oral sessions in awe of the sheer magnitude of science research going. And we also had the opportunity to talk about our own posters. For me, presenting my poster was a neat mix of expertise, learning, and question-development. I researched how wildfires in the YKD are impacting plant-mediated methane flux in Arctic wetlands.

When presenting my poster, I talked to people who knew nothing about methane, people who only studied methane flux, and everyone in between. I shared my knowledge, I learned, and I worked with some of the people who engaged with my poster to develop questions for future research. Afterward, my Polaris peers and I shared how good it felt to have something real to contribute to science, to feel like we are a part of a bigger scientific community. 

In that span of a week, final exams were largely forgotten, the stress of college academics dropped away, and we got to be real scientists contributing to the world’s growing knowledge about natural systems. But I was also struck at AGU about how much out there we don’t actually know. And that’s not at all a fault in our system. I found it exciting to talk to people considered experts in their field and hear them outline all of the research needed in the future to better understand natural phenomena or to answer a question with “we’re not sure yet” or “we don’t know.” Too often, we are taught to find an answer rather than to live in the questions. I left AGU with gratitude to all the people who shared their learning and acknowledged the inevitable cascade of questions that new research provokes and the fact that there’s a lot out there that we don’t know. 

At the end of the week, members of the 2019 Polaris Project expedition headed back – some to finals exams and others home. We don’t know if or when we’ll all be back together again, but to have the opportunity to come together 6 months after our research and share it with a bigger audience was a pretty special opportunity to share together. 

— Anneka Williams is a student at Bowdoin College and was a member of the Polaris Project’s class of 2019