Each year MSDS Marine offer two grant awards, the first to support work on protected wreck sites and the second to support students. In this blog the 2022 Mel Taylor and Shu Yang recipients of the awards give an update on how the award has helped them.
Mel Taylor – 2022 Protected Wreck Award Recipient
I don’t think there would be too many dissenters if I said the weather this year has not been particularly favourable for diving the coast around the UK. Accessing the Mary site has been particularly challenging for us, being on the exposed south-west end of the Skerries archipelago and requiring neap tides to dive, a rare combo this year in the Irish Sea. Therefore, information obtained, through our use of the new hull mounted multi beam sonar (Lowrance Hook Reveal Triple-shot) that we purchased with our MSDS Protected Wreck Grant, has been highly significant. Using the hull mounted tech we have been able to visualise the complexity of the site, with multiple large boulders and shear drop-off, as a whole.
We have also been grateful for the accuracy of the built-in GPS, having to rely on it to guide us home when a thick fog rolled in taking us by surprise. The day had started out with clear blue sky and flat calm sea. In the short period of a 30 minutes dive thick fog rolled in and the three boats out had to make their way back to Holyhead, around the coast without visual reference points. This episode did though provided us with a fresh insight in to how disorientating thick fog is at sea, even with GPS technology. In turn this led to a reflection on how much worse it would have been for the crew of the Mary without it or visual reference points until it was too late to evade the rocks of the Skerries in the tides around them.
Shu Yang – 2022 Student Award Recipient
Big thanks to the MSDS Marine Student Award that’s come my way, which has been instrumental in advancing my PhD research and shaping my future career. Not only has the generous support enabled me to afford these isotopic analysis costs, but it has also ensured that a sufficient number of bone samples can be tested. This is vital for achieving a representative sample size, thereby strengthening the validity of my findings on the historical use of marine resources in animal management.
As I currently move into my PhD’s thesis writing stage, I am deeply aware of how the grant has impacted my journey. Without this grant, I could not be able to complete the experiments, let alone harvesting the valuable carbon and nitrogen isotopic data. It has not just funded a project; it has invested in the development of scientific studies that underscore the importance of interdisciplinary research in understanding human-animal-environment relationships and bridging the past with present ecological concerns. I would like to thank the MSDS grant again, which has enhanced my confidence, especially as a foreign researcher like me conducting scientific research in the UK. This is a very precious honour I received in my research career.
