In a rare venture outside the lab for me, I teamed with a group of collaborators from the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA, and from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who jointly perceived a unique opportunity to observe one important aspect of gas clathrate hydrate behavior, namely dissolution in seawater, under phase-stable conditions. The photo above shows our instrumentation in the hands of the remotely operated vehicle ROV Ventana, being lifted over the side of the R/V Point Lobos, about to head for the seafloor in the Monterey Canyon a bit more than 1000 m below. My role in the study, besides trying to keep my lunch down, was in the high-pressure refinement of our synthetic methane and CO2 hydrate samples. That work was done indoors, of course, using the ice creep apparatus in purely hydrostatic mode. Read about the work here.