Belize Trip Teaches Students the Realities of the Field

By Jessica Johns Pools

“Seeing is believing,” goes the old saying, and André Droxler is a believer in seeing for oneself. Last October, he gave 18 undergraduate and graduate students in marine geology, marine biology and chemistry a chance to see the coral reefs of Belize up close and personal.

The field trip, which Droxler conducts every other year, was part of the Reefs and Global Change seminar taught during the fall semester. It was the 10th trip to the area for Droxler, who is a professor of earth science and director of Rice’s Center for the Study of Environment and Society.

“Our department invests significantly in its students when it financially supports field studies because there’s nothing in the classroom that can replicate what you learn in the field,” Droxler said. “Yes, you can read about what ocean currents do to the geology of the marine environment, but in the field you actually feel a current’s strength and changes in temperature as you swim. You see a reef’s dimensions, its space distribution and complexity.”

Prior to departure, students hear lectures and read scientific articles about what they’ll see while snorkeling, and they study the effects of ocean currents and sea-level changes, temperature fluctuations, fluvial sediment, types of reefs, the function of mangroves, and identification of coral and other sea life.

The students stayed on South Water Caye, a small island about 10 miles offshore, located on the barrier reef off central Belize. They began each day with a lecture, followed by about five to six hours of snorkeling across particular geological formations and various types of coral reefs. After returning to Houston, the students chose a topic to write about and present to the rest of the class during the second part of the semester.

“I was one of the few people on the trip who was not an earth science major,” said junior Eric Meyer. “I found it much less difficult to understand the more complex aspects of carbonate geology taught in the class because I was able to learn about a scientific topic outside the classroom using a hands-on approach. Plus, I was surrounded by knowledgeable and approachable faculty and grad students, so I got the maximum benefit out of the trip.”

The detrimental effects of warmer water, hurricanes and pollution were obvious to the students as they swam over the reefs.

“One of the most striking things was how little live coral cover there actually was in some areas,” said senior Christopher Armstrong. “For example, on the barrier reef just north of the island where we stayed, we’d see maybe 10 percent live coral cover and lots of coral rubble.”

In addition to Droxler, a cross-functional, multi-institutional team accompanied the students, including marine biologist and alumnus Eric Borneman ’87 from the University of Houston; David Queller, Rice’s Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; earth science graduate student Walter O’Hayer; and Bradley Opdyke, a marine geologist and geochemist from the Australian National University.

“It’s an interesting mix because some of us look at the barrier reef and shoreline mostly as geologists, seeing a timeline of tens to hundreds of thousands of years,” said Droxler. “Others look at the reefs mostly as biologists from a perspective of the last 25 years.”

The geologists currently are studying the modern and past formation of Belizean reefs to gain a better understanding of how and why ancient reefs turned into such excellent oil reservoirs. About one-third of current oil and gas reserves are stored in former reefs. The biologists are looking at Belize’s ecosystem to document the effects of climate warming and human intervention over the past few decades in hopes of finding ways to halt the decline of coral reefs.

The National Science Foundation and the oil industry fund Droxler’s research.

Rice University has a long history of studying the Belize Barrier Reef and environs. Long before André Droxler’s quarter-century interest in the area, former Rice geology professor Edward Purdy conducted field research there and published seminal papers primarily from the 1960s to early 1970s about the same ecosystem. Though retired, Purdy is still active and publishes in the geological academic community. He also has published on the Maldives reef system, which comprises atolls located in the equatorial Indian Ocean and which Droxler visited in late November for a three-week research cruise.