Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
The R/V Endeavor, the oldest research vessel in the country, was retired last month after 49 years of research at sea. We sent Nat Hardy from our Possibly Team to the University of Rhode Island, where the ship is docked, to talk with scientists who worked onboard.
Nat Hardy: On a stormy day in April, Oceanography Professor Jaime Palter took a trip out to sea on the Endeavor.
Jaime Palter: You can picture April in Rhode Island. It’s cold, rainy. You know, if it was 45 degrees outside, we were lucky.
Nat Hardy: The Endeavor was taking her and her team about 200 miles off the coast of New England, to the mighty Gulf Stream.
Jaime Palter: But what’s amazing is once you cross the Gulf Stream, you’re basically in the weather of Bermuda.
Nat Hardy: Even in the dead of winter, it’s 65 degrees. And the crew is swapping jackets for t-shirts. That happens because they’re floating on top of an incredibly powerful underwater current.
The Gulf Stream carries a huge amount of warm water from the Caribbean into the North Atlantic. And it’s hard to overstate just how important this underwater highway is for our weather. Jaime was out there to study it.
Jaime Palter: There’s also a fear that a component of the Gulf Stream could slow down with the threat of climate change. And with that slowdown could really alter Northern Hemisphere weather.
Nat Hardy: To figure out if that slowdown is happening, Jaime and her team went out on the Endeavor to collect data about ocean currents and temperature.
But after more than 700 research expeditions, the Endeavor has taken its last trip. I took a tour of the ship before it was officially decommissioned.
Erich Gruebel: So here in the main lab, we have displays set up for the sailing scientists to be able to see — over here we have an echo sounder and a scientific echo sounder, which gives you a layer stratification of the sea bottom.
Nat Hardy: That’s Erich Gruebel, the manager of marine scientific research at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography. He walks me around the dark hallways of the ship, through the wood-paneled library and into the mess deck, which looks like a 1970s diner.
Erich Gruebel: Endeavor’s also famous for our ice cream freezer which I’ll show you now.
Nat Hardy: Erich’s worked on the ship for 13 years.
Nat Hardy: Do other ships not have an ice cream freezer?
Erich Gruebel: Not one this big or well stocked.
Nat Hardy: He’s the liaison between the crew and the rotating teams of scientists.
Erich Gruebel: We get their equipment running, a lot of times repair it when it breaks, and allow them to access the full capability of the vessel.
Nat Hardy: The Endeavor has played a big role in what we know about the ocean. The first in-depth measurements of the gulf stream were done on the Endeavor back in the 70s. It’s data that researchers still use today.
David Smith: It’s pretty sad actually. Endeavor has just been here so long and long. I’ve been here almost 29 years. And she was here when I got here,
Nat Hardy: That’s David Smith, another professor of oceanography at URI. The Endeavor docks right by David’s office at URI’s Narragansett Bay campus.
David Smith: I always look to see, is the ship at the dock or not? Every day I do that, just kind of knee jerk. It’s gonna be sad.
Jaime Palter: It does feel like a part of the family even though it’s a boat, you know?
Nat Hardy: But URI’s research at sea isn’t ending with the Endeavor. A new ship, called the Narragansett Dawn, is set to arrive in Rhode Island in 2027. It’s up to date with new research technology that the Endeavor didn’t have.
But both ships are owned by the National Science Foundation, which has been a target for funding cuts by the Trump administration. Everyone I talked to at URI worried that potential cuts would bring consequences for the new ship and its crew, but no one knew exactly what those consequences might be.
In total, more than 8,000 scientists spent time onboard the Endeavor. Jaime Palter told me that the ship is the through line between generations of oceanographers, who’ve all gone out to sea, taken some small samples of water, and chipped away at the same big questions.
Jaime Palter: It always makes me really appreciate the part of oceanography that is about community, because one measurement doesn’t do very much, but it’s only as a collective when we put all our measurements together that we start to make sense of the world.
Nat Hardy: In Narragansett, people are sad to see the Endeavor’s life come to an end, but the research that happened onboard, still has decades of life left to live.
Megan Hall: Great! Thanks Nat!
That’s it for today. You can find more information, or ask a question about the way your choices affect our planet, at askpossibly.org. You can also subscribe to Possibly wherever you get your podcasts or follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Bluesky at “askpossibly”
Possibly is a co-production of Brown University’s Institute for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, and Ocean State Media.
