The URI research vessel the Endeavor has provided a good home for research from researching carbon cycles to greenhouse gasses. PHOTO CREDIT: 41nmagazine.org
The Research Vessel Endeavor ship has been with the University of Rhode Island for about 50 years, according to Paula Bontempi, the dean at the Graduate School of Oceanography and the Narragansett Bay Campus.
Bontempi said the ship is a critical part of the campus because its role is to help with different types of oceanographic research and education. Some of the research it does includes looking at the seafloor and finding microscopic megafauna in the ocean, which are animals living in the ocean so microscopic megafauna would be algae, according to The National Geographic Society.
According to uri.edu, this research is used for teaching and training purposes. The Rhode Island Endeavor Program has a project called “Ocean Classroom: Teachers at Sea” where teachers collect research on the Endeavor and show their findings to their K-12 students.
“The Endeavor has done everything, looking at carbon cycling in the ocean, what’s going on in greenhouse gasses, things related to climate research,” Bontempi said.
Bontempi stated that some of the research is funded by federal and state agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“They fund the research to go out and collect information to analyze,” Bontempi said. “Then the researchers will typically present those results and publish papers with the information or they will write news stories to tell the public what they found.”
Most times, the information is utilized to make management decisions. For example, if they find fish migrating north from the fishery they used to live in, researchers figure out why the fish migrated and, depending on the result, change their practices, according to Bontempi.
Bontempi also said the ship belongs to the National Science Foundation. URI’s role in operations is using the research vessel Endeavor on behalf of the National Science Foundation and the University’s national laboratory system for oceanography.
Bontempi said the RV Endeavor is URI’s current ship, but they will have a new ship ready to sail on the Bay campus waters in 2024, called the Narragansett Dawn.
“The latest update on the Narragansett Dawn is that she is supposed to hit the water sometime later this year,” Bontempi said. “Then she’ll go through sea trials and hopefully we’ll take her at the end of 2024.”
Bontempi says once URI receives the Narragansett Dawn, the RV Endeavor might be sold to someone who wants to use her for continued research or the National Science Foundation may choose to scrap her because it’s worthwhile.
Director of Marine Operations at the GSO, Thomas Glennon, says before getting RV Endeavor, there was another ship called the Trident which they had from 1965 to 1975. Now, the RV Trident is located at Texas A&M University of Galveston, according to tamug.edu.
Glennon also said that the National Science Foundation built two other ships called RV Oceanus and RV Wecoma, which are currently located at Oregon State University. The purpose of these three ships is to serve the oceanographic community and their research and to be able to cover different areas around the world for these principal investigators.
“So they were set up to be able to collect scientific data for oceanographers all over the country,” Bontempi said. “We even have international principal investigators that go on the ships. There’s always an opportunity to engage, we are an open public campus. People are welcome to come down and see Endeavor at the pier.”