Olin’s Victoria Preston ’16 Takes to the Open Ocean to Study Underwater Volcano
Over the summer, Victoria Preston ’16, assistant professor of engineering, hopped aboard a research vessel headed to the Galapagos Islands to gather data from an actively erupting submarine volcanic ridge in the Pacific Ocean.
Victoria Preston ’16, assistant professor of engineering, stands in front of the Marcus G. Langseth ship.
As part of her vein of research on using robotics to understand deep sea environments, Preston is part of a multi-institutional group studying EPR 9°50′N, a fast-spreading section of the East Pacific Rise. Discovered in 1991, EPR 9°50′N is being studied by many scientists for its dynamic hydrothermal vent system. Learn more about Preston’s group’s previous expeditions in this video.
“My group has been taking annual measurements at EPR 9°50′N for the last five years to try to predict when it would erupt,” says Preston. “Now that we know precisely when it erupted, our goal now is to collect as much data as possible for as long as possible.”
R/V Marcus Langseth, the research vessel on which Preston made the journey, was traveling from San Diego, California, to the Galapagos on a routine transit. As the vessel approached EPR 9 50'N, the ship maneuvered under Preston’s guidance to make an acoustic map of the water column and the sea floor.
She also deployed instruments over the side of the vessel—such as seismometers to record the vibrations of undersea earthquakes and profiling instruments that take a vertical slice of the water column to understand its chemical makeup and physical behavior. The seismometers were left behind to collect data for several months, and will be collected on a later mission in early 2026.
Everyone was so professional, and it was delightful to work with the teachers in School of Rock.
I was there for research work, but I also wear an educator hat at Olin. I learned so much from these teachers about my professional identity that I feel like I got more out of them than they did from me."
Victoria Preston ’16
Assistant Professor of Engineering
Read about Preston's expedition with Olin alum Solomiia Kachur ’25“Even when EPR 9°50′N is not erupting, it’s still an active site with hydrothermal plumes forming an oasis for chemosynthetic life that are uniquely adapted to live there, such as various species of tube worms,” says Preston, who says their current data indicates an eruption cycle of approximately 10–20 years. “We want to learn more about finding the line between the end of an eruption event and the status quo.”
On board the R/V Marcus Langseth, operated by the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, was a group of middle and high school teachers participating in a professional development program called International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) School of Rock to help them better understand the field work of scientists. In addition to the workshop programming on scientific ocean drilling, these educators were able to gain some hands-on experience by helping Preston deploy her instrumentation; learn more about their journey in this blog.
“Everyone was so professional, and it was delightful to work with the teachers in School of Rock,” says Preston, who was able to video chat with students from her lab while she was aboard the ship. “I was there for research work, but I also wear an educator hat at Olin. I learned so much from these teachers about my professional identity that I feel like I got more out of them than they did from me."
Additional collaborators for this expedition include Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Lehigh University, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UCSD), University of Delaware, Mississippi State University, the University of Brest, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France.