cracked scientific flask

When 'Eureka!' turns to 'Oops!'

Elaine Smith

Imagine spending three weeks reprogramming an autonomous mini-submersible vehicle that failed on its first ocean foray, only to have it submerge and quickly return to the ocean’s surface without collecting any of the data you need for your research.

It happens – just ask Professor Kent Moore, a University of Toronto Mississauga atmospheric physicist researching the heat exchange between the air and the ocean. One of the team members on his recent expedition to the Iceland and Greenland Seas came away without the data she needed as a result of this mishap.

Kent Moore on a plane
“It’s frustrating because she put time and effort into it, but it’s just one of those things,” Moore says. “She’ll have to go back to the drawing board. It happens.”

The reading public only hears about research successes: the results that are published in journals. They don’t see the work that has gone on behind the scenes to achieve those results; it is considerable and often fraught with challenges and setbacks. It’s simply the nature of the research enterprise, and it requires flexibility and perseverance.

“The idea that research breakthroughs happen immediately probably comes from Hollywood,” Moore says. “In the real world when doing fieldwork, you have to consider things like the weather and human factors.”

Gary Crawford

Gary Crawford, a professor and interim chair of anthropology at UTM, says that conducting research requires flexibility.

“When students – or scientists – do research, it often doesn’t go where predicted,” Crawford says. “You have to be prepared to bend and refocus every time you get new data.

“I counsel my PhD students that their thesis proposals are not contracts; they reflect the state of knowledge at the time they write it. We know that circumstances change and archeology is particularly problematic. You have no idea what you’ll uncover once you start digging.”

Crawford, who is exploring the origins of rice farming in China, says he begins his projects “knowing that the proposal is the ideal and the reality is entirely different.

 “If a site is important for building local or regional identity or tourism, you need to adjust your digging plans. The powers-that-be can tweak your agenda.”

Jochen Halfar
Jochen Halfar, an associate professor of geology at UTM, researches paleoclimates – climate conditions in the past. One of his research topics/themes is to collect algae from the sea floor and date them, using their growth rings. The algae live for hundreds of years, and each annual ring tells a story about that year’s climate, just as tree growth rings do.

“Last year, I ran a research cruise from Greenland through the Northwest Passage to sample algae using scuba divers to collect samples,” he says. “Everything worked very well along the Greenland coast, since the sea floor was rocky, and algae need rocks on which to cement themselves. When we reached Canada, I realized I’d missed an important geological feature in planning; there was no hard substrate, so algae couldn’t grow.

“I didn’t expect those conditions; it had never been a challenge anywhere else in the world I’d worked. I had to quickly select other sites and modify our cruise track on the fly, which I could only do when there was Internet access. I struggled for two weeks. Now, I know for the next cruise that I need to add this aspect to site planning.”

For researchers in the field, it’s not all smooth sailing – or flying. While reading about their ground-breaking research is fascinating, the back-story to achieving those results is often equally compelling. To tweak a popular saying, it’s not just the destination, but the journey.