Coral close-up: Etnoyer examines coral samples in the cold room.Photo:Jeffrey Pollack

The name "cold room" is misleading--it is absolutely freezing in here! The small metal room looks like a meat locker. It is empty, save for a large, white laboratory table and a few buckets of seawater, and there's a strange salty-sweet smell that I can't quite place. Etnoyer doesn't seem to notice the cold, even though he is wearing far fewer layers than I am. Before him on the table are a dissecting microscope and a half-dozen petri dishes with coral clippings of various shapes and colors. He cycles through the samples, placing one on the lighted platform under the scope just long enough to glance through the eyepieces and mutter something that is inaudible over the noisy refrigerator fan.

"Jeffrey Polyp," he sings out suddenly in a Yiddish accent, stepping back from the scope. "I can't get these things in focus." He is using a digital camera to photograph the magnified coral polyps and sclerites. Sclerites are spindly, crystal-like calcareous bones that are found inside the coral polyps and in the fleshy tissue (coenenchyme) between polyps. Sclerites of different shapes are given names like rods, clubs, needles, and thorn-stars, and while each species of deep-sea coral has a dozen or more different shapes of sclerites, all of the species within a given genus exhibit similar sclerites. Sclerite morphology--categorizing sclerite shape and size--is one of the key modes of description used to identify different coral species.

Traditional taxonomic classification of deep-sea corals is based on a combination of branching morphology (the branching pattern of the tree-like coral colony), polyp retractability, and sclerite morphology. Traditional taxonomy is now augmented by genetic analysis, but contemporary genetic advances have yet to eclipse the traditional methods.

"Back in the day, all of the scientists on a cruise like this would have amazing illustrators," Etnoyer tells me. "Art--sketching--was part of old biology curricula. Some of the best old-timers at the Smithsonian are the guys whose drawings our coral taxonomy is based on. That's why these pictures are so important." He readjusts the mini-halogen under the backlit petri dish.

"All those guys ever saw was dead, dried-up coral."

Scientific illustration may be a dying art, but there are new digital photography and videography techniques that, judging from Etnoyer's almost imperceptible adjustments of the microscope-mounted camera, require their own artistry. Many of the photographs that he has taken on this cruise are the first-ever photo documentation of live polyps for certain deep-sea coral species.

"For every coral sample that we send to the Smithsonian, we want to be able to send video taken from the Alvin's on-board cameras of that species alive, in situ," he says. "The museum exhibits of the future will be multi-media."

That's where Etnoyer's background--an unusual blend of arts and science--comes in. He majored in English as a Duke undergraduate. At the same time, he was one of the first participants in a certificate program in film and video. This early exposure was the beginning of a decade-long stint in the film industry. After five years doing camera work on feature films in California, he moved back to the Northeast, where he spent another five years directing commercials and music videos in Philadelphia and New York. As his success in the film industry grew, so did the disposable income that allowed him to go scuba diving. And the more Etnoyer went diving, the more his boyhood fascination with marine science was revived.

Etnoyer says he knew he wanted to integrate two very different disciplines, marine biology and physical oceanography, even before he enrolled in the Coastal Environmental Management program at the Nicholas School. "I started working on my master's project, studying larval dispersal in the Philippines and ocean circulation patterns in the Caribbean, the day I walked through the door."

During his first year at Duke, he worked with the U.S. Navy on its Layered Ocean Model, three-dimensional computer simulations of oceanic circulation. This was the first in a serendipitous string of experiences that would help him carve out a professional niche developing methods to visualize the ocean and the distribution of marine life within it. Etnoyer recently created a consulting firm, Aquanautix, in part to meet the demand for oceanic visualization products.

Etnoyer's adviser in the Nicholas School, Larry Crowder, helped steer him into a position with the Marine Conservation Biology Institute (MCBI). At MCBI, Etnoyer went to work on the "Baja to Bering" project, a product of the NAFTA Commission for Environmental Cooperation. Etnoyer and partners compiled vast amounts of marine-science data--including records of the distribution of deep-sea corals--to identify biodiversity hotspots that could be part of a chain of marine protected areas (think oceanic national parks) in the northeast Pacific Ocean.

In the summer of 2002, fellow Nicholas School alumnus Jeremy Potter M.E.M. '03, who had heard about his work with deep-sea corals, called Etnoyer from the Office of Ocean Exploration to offer him a berth on a research expedition to study seamounts and deep-sea corals. It was this first Gulf of Alaska expedition that allowed Etnoyer to capitalize on his Duke background in spatial analysis and his familiarity with video editing to create fly-throughs--animated, three-dimensional maps that take the viewer on a virtual roller-coaster ride through the terrain of the seamounts being studied.

After participating in the 2002 Gulf of Alaska expedition, Etnoyer received a series of subsequent grants from the Office of Ocean Exploration, including one to develop protocols for deep-sea coral collection and one that landed him a spot as a P.I. on this 2004 Gulf of Alaska exploration.

In planning for this mission, Etnoyer wanted someone with the skills to help him make fly-throughs and other visualization products accessible to the household viewers who would be tracking the expedition on the Web--part of his commitment to taking science out of the lab and using it to enrich the everyday lives of nonscientists. He had Shapiro in mind from the beginning.

Etnoyer leans on the lab table to Shapiro's right and squints at the computer screen in front of her. "That satellite data isn't bad, huh?"

Shapiro bobs her head to the drumbeat thumping from her computer speakers. "Dude, no one should be dissin' satellite data. When I use Landsat imagery like this to map coral reefs, it's accurate within fifty meters. When we overlay that satellite imagery with nautical charts from the northwest Hawaiian Islands, the satellite imagery gives us better shallow-water detail than the nautical charts."

Etnoyer seems impressed. I learn later that Landsat 7 is a U.S. satellite used to capture images of Earth's land and coastal regions.

Aurlie Shapiro exudes style, from the silver stud in her left nostril to her hand-knit, mustard-color winter hat. She is almost always wearing one of her funky home-made necklaces, which sell faster than she can make them in boutiques around Washington, and on her website, aurelgrooves.com (a word play on the feeding apparatus--called the oral groove--of a single-celled organism called a paramecium). Whenever her shipboard tasks necessitate a work vest and hardhat, she always color-coordinates--even when she's working in the middle of the night.

Shapiro could have opted for a career in music (she's a classically trained cellist who now plays in a hip-hop band), but instead she went to the Nicholas School, where she and Etnoyer were classmates, to study landscape ecology--the study of the distribution patterns of ecosystems and communities and the processes that affect those patterns over time.

On this cruise, in addition to dominating at the Ping-Pong table (she attributes her prowess to a summer spent at a table-tennis camp near her grandmother's house in southern France), Shapiro's main focus is a high-resolution, sonar-based mapping technology called Multibeam. Sonar systems measure the time it takes for signals emitted from a transducer in the hull of the ship to reflect off features on the sea floor and bounce back to the ship. Traditional sonar devices generate a narrow line of soundings; Multibeam provides a swath of coverage by sending out multiple sonar beams in a fan-shaped pattern that is oriented perpendicular to the ship's track. With this technology, scientists aboard the Atlantis can map an entire seamount in less than a day of surveying.