I arrived in Ireland on September 25th—five days after the rest of the IRES crew. I came to Ireland after three months of living in Hiroshima, Japan, where the typical day was 38° C with 70% humidity. What a welcome introduction it was to step out of the airport and into the 18°C city of Cork, with its gunmetal gray skies.
The following day, Dr. Rob McAllen, Prof. John Davenport and I drove an hour and a half down a curvy Irish back road, passing herds of Holsteins, flocks of sheep, sweeps of countryside, and one road-killed red fox. Finally we made it to the Lough.
None of the photos I had seen do it justice. It looks like something straight out of National Geographic. The water is deep, glassy cobalt and hemmed in by jade hills that terminate in shale escarpments. The hills give the lough a sense of containment, shielded. It’s strangely comforting to not be able to see the horizon. In Japan, I went on a research cruise in the Ariake Sea. I remember looking out from the ship deck and being disquieted by the perspective, unable to separate sea from skyline. Lough Hyne is the opposite—the hills fold you in like arms.
A grey heron stands stately on one shore. Amethyst and ochre jellyfish pulse mindlessly on the southeast edge, near the Rapids—the single passage between the Lough and the surrounding sea of Barloge Creek. The conical shells of limpets pepper intertidal rock. Out of sight, blue lobsters loiter in underwater caves. Schools of two-spot gobies flit in the shade of a dock. Sometimes a gull has a screeched conversation with a congener, or its own echo, but otherwise the Lough is serene.
At midnight, when we take a motorboat across the Lough to our lab, dinoflagellates (microscopic algae) spark phosphorescent in our wake.
--Keats Conley
The following day, Dr. Rob McAllen, Prof. John Davenport and I drove an hour and a half down a curvy Irish back road, passing herds of Holsteins, flocks of sheep, sweeps of countryside, and one road-killed red fox. Finally we made it to the Lough.
None of the photos I had seen do it justice. It looks like something straight out of National Geographic. The water is deep, glassy cobalt and hemmed in by jade hills that terminate in shale escarpments. The hills give the lough a sense of containment, shielded. It’s strangely comforting to not be able to see the horizon. In Japan, I went on a research cruise in the Ariake Sea. I remember looking out from the ship deck and being disquieted by the perspective, unable to separate sea from skyline. Lough Hyne is the opposite—the hills fold you in like arms.
A grey heron stands stately on one shore. Amethyst and ochre jellyfish pulse mindlessly on the southeast edge, near the Rapids—the single passage between the Lough and the surrounding sea of Barloge Creek. The conical shells of limpets pepper intertidal rock. Out of sight, blue lobsters loiter in underwater caves. Schools of two-spot gobies flit in the shade of a dock. Sometimes a gull has a screeched conversation with a congener, or its own echo, but otherwise the Lough is serene.
At midnight, when we take a motorboat across the Lough to our lab, dinoflagellates (microscopic algae) spark phosphorescent in our wake.
--Keats Conley