Boredom is the Root of All Evil…Unless You’re a Glider

Tina Fey once said, "It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring."

Well, Tina, when it comes to gliders, you're both wrong and right. When we prepare, deploy, and pilot gliders, perfection is our number one goal. Perfection can never be overrated. However, when I write about glider deployments, perfection is indeed boring. Without some issue or problem, the glider story arc is flat as a pancake.

That's why Glider Piloting with Jen has been dormant for almost two years. We didn't skip our annual Antarctic glider deployment last season; on the contrary, we deployed two gliders for 61 days in the Bransfield Strait, between the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands. Together, they performed more than 1,000 dives and sampled more than 1,500 miles of ocean.

They just did it so well that I struggled to write about it. No middle-of-the-night text messages to troubleshoot and restart an aborted mission. No gargantuan icebergs to navigate around. No crazy-strong ocean currents to fight. From a piloting perspective, it was the best deployment we've ever done. Our secret sauce recipe is a whole bunch of experience plus a little bit of luck.

The gliders just…glided. They were perfect. And, well, a little boring to write about.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not sitting in front of a blank document at my computer, hoping that something goes wrong with one or both of the gliders we deployed in Antarctica a couple of days ago so that I have a good story to tell. Quite the opposite! I want this deployment to be even more boring than last year's deployment.

A boring deployment just means that I have to find a different story to tell.

This year, let's delve deeper into what the data we collect with gliders tell us about the marine ecosystem in Antarctica, and why these data are so important for managing Antarctic resources. In past blogs, I've written about what data we collect and how we collect it. Now it's time to let those data tell their own stories.

But don't worry. If this glider deployment isn't perfect and boring, I'll let you know right here.