 |
| Panorama of Catalina Island |
Well, the last few days have been completely eye opening for me. I have been on a little trip to the
USC Wrigley Marine Science Center near the town of
Two Harbors on Santa Catalina Island. Alas, this has not been a vacation. This has been work trip. I was invited a bit ago to come to a workshop here by
Bill Nelson, a friend and colleague of mine I used to work with at
The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). Bill is part of a project called the
Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI). The workshop he invited me to was to discuss evolutionary studies as part of this project.
I note this is a general post about the trip - I will post more about the individual science topics including C-DEBI and Virgin Oceanic later.
As is usual, I did not fully commit to going to the workshop immediately and I dragged out committing for a very long time (driving Bill I am crazy I am sure). But eventually I accepted and then kept flip-flopping on exactly when I would go, but eventually settled on dates too.
What is C-DEBI:
When Bill first invited me to this workshop, I had no clue what this C-DEBI project was. And Bill must have assumed I knew because he did not provide any detail about what C-DEBI was. So of course, that is what that Google thing is for. And what I found was quite intriguing:
A simple description comes from
their web site:
Welcome to the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI), a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Science and Technology Center on the deep biosphere. Our mission is to explore life beneath the seafloor and make transformative discoveries that advance science, benefit society, and inspire people of all ages and origins. We are a multi-institutional distributed center establishing the intellectual, educational, technological, cyber-infrastructural and collaborative framework needed for transformative experimental and exploratory research on the subseafloor biosphere.
