MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Nature magazine has announced the results of its annual Scientist at Work photography contest. NPR's Ari Daniel says the winning entries are dramatic and intimate portraits of research.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: It was November 2020 in the Norwegian arctic, a season when the sun never peaks above the horizon.
EMMA VOGEL: It's one of the most beautiful times. It'll be like a sunset but for hours.
DANIEL: Emma Vogel is a spatial ecologist at the University of Tromso, and she studies how whales interact with fisheries. One morning, she was in a small boat with her then-supervisor, motoring into the fjord.
VOGEL: Sometimes you'll start to hear the whales before you can see them. And if you're downwind from that, you definitely smell their fish breath (laughter). Yeah, not the best.
DANIEL: During a moment of relative calm, Vogel took her camera and captured the riveting scene aboard her little boat.
VOGEL: In the center of the photo, you see my supervisor. And he's in this bright-yellow survival suit, sitting with his headlamp on, just kind of looking into the distance.
DANIEL: Behind him is a large fishing boat - it's crew on deck. There are hundreds of seagulls wheeling about anticipating the imminent haul of fish.
VOGEL: The background is really beautiful snow-covered mountains.
DANIEL: And in the distance, you can just make out...
VOGEL: A killer whale surfacing, swimming towards the fishing boat. And I had no clue the whale was in that shot. Yeah. It gives me a feeling of a dream-like state.
DANIEL: To Vogel, this image captures the patient intensity of field work. It won the overall prize from Nature magazine. The other winners were just as striking. In one, a scientist kneels in a forest, beaming at eight tiny frogs in her hands. In another, a researcher crouches atop a foggy Greek mountain, measuring the cloud forming around him. And then there's the photo taken in Siberia at midnight, outside a little cabin.
JIAYI WANG: And I find, wow, what a beautiful night, and I just capture this image.
DANIEL: Jiayi Wang is a geology PhD student at the China University of Geosciences. He studies gold deposits and why they form. Wang's photo is mostly the night sky, dripping with stars. The landscape is a silhouette at the bottom, with the cabin in the middle. It casts light upon a single human form in the doorway, one person alone in the cosmos.
WANG: So many geologists, they have to go for field work maybe 10 months a year. They spend little time with their families.
DANIEL: Wang's parents discouraged him from geology for exactly this reason.
WANG: But I still insist because I love science.
DANIEL: A love that, so far, has actually provided him with good friendships and stunning new places to photograph.
Ari Daniel, NPR News.
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