2024 Challenger Society Conference

Maddie Shankle

University of St Andrews

Earlier this month, I attended my first meeting of the Challenger Society for Marine Science, thanks to the support of a Challenger Travel Award. I am happy to report it was a productive, educational, and fun experience! As someone who has just finished their PhD in palaeo-oceanography and who is moving into studying modern oceanographic questions in a post-doc next month, it was an excellent way to meet the UK oceanographic community and get caught up to speed on all latest exciting research being done.

The meeting took place in picturesque west coast town of Oban, Scotland. It was excellent getting to walk along the pier to the conference every morning, taking in the salty air and the views of the Isle of Mull and the Atlantic farther afield, and I can’t imagine a better place to have held an oceanography conference. It was also excellent getting to visit the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), somewhere I had heard lots about (being based in Scotland myself) but have never managed to visit.

The conference venue was in a local hall with both a large poster hall and gathering space for large talks and a few smaller rooms for parallel talks as well. This made it easy to find and meet people, and I found it overall a much more intimate and friendly conference than many I have been to! I was able to both reconnect with old friends and colleagues from my MSc programme and a summer school I attended and meet new ones. (This was also facilitated by a series of social activities that took place mid-conference. I attended a tour of the local Oban Distillery!)

I was also very impressed and pleased with the breadth and depth of material covered in this conference. My own work is very multi-disciplinary, and I was happy to be able to attend talks spanning everything from physical oceanography and eddy parametrizations to biogeochemistry and carbon cycling! Especially helpful was a modelling special-interest group meeting I was able to attend on the last day of the conference. It was fascinating to see the parallels between questions we study in Earth’s past in palaeo-oceanography and those that modern-day oceanographers investigate, and I learned that there is so much still to understand about how our ocean works. The talks I attended gave me several ideas to pursue in my post-doc, and I even re-visited my old MSc thesis, which my MSc supervisor referenced in her talk and which a few people took interest in. These and other meetings I had truly sparked my excitement to be entering this dynamic and friendly field, and I can’t wait to attend the next meeting!


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Maddie Shankle is currently finishing a PhD in palaeo-oceanography at the University of St Andrews, in which she studied the ocean’s role in taking up carbon from the atmosphere and driving the planet into glacial conditions over Earth’s past ice ages. This work involved both proxy-data generation documenting past ocean carbon content and physical properties as well as numerical modelling experiments testing various proposed mechanisms (physical and biogeochemical) of ocean carbon uptake. This was preceded by a MSc degree in Physical Oceanography at Bangor University, and she will stay on at the University of St Andrews for her post-doc in which she’ll investigate dynamics of sub-polar gyres using idealised models.