From Deep Blue to Black Ink
By Katherine Yungmee Kim
Thomas Hayden romanticized oceanography. “You think of Jacques Cousteau
drinking red wine and working in a Speedo,” the U.S. News and World
Report journalist laughs, conjuring the stereotype. But in his fifth
year of graduate school, after studying marine biology and biological
oceanography at USC College, he found himself alone at four in the
morning, in the middle of campus at a microscope, sucking tiny marine
fecal pellets through a very small straw.
“So I saw something better,” Hayden says. “And I jumped at it.”
That something was an AAAS—American Association for the Advancement of
Science—fellowship that links young scientists with media outlets for a
summer. Hayden applied on a whim, went out to sea on a research
mission, and on an ice breaker in Antarctica received an e-mail that
asked for him to be in New York City to work at Newsweek magazine about
a week after his return to land.
Two weeks later, he was sitting in his cubicle at the Newsweek offices
overlooking Central Park, giggling to himself. “It was so much fun,”
Hayden recalls. “I thought to myself, ‘This is it!’”
After he completed the internship, he was offered a job at Newsweek,
where he edited and wrote for three years, before moving to his current
plum position in Washington, D.C. at U.S. News and World Report. He
writes mainly on science and technology.
Calling the prairies his home, Hayden—who was raised in Saskatoon,
Saskatchewan—studied agriculture as an undergrad. At the College he
earned his M.A. in Marine Biology.
His thesis dealt with the foramniferans, or single-cell marine
organisms, which live in a sewage outfall off of Palos Verdes. He moved
on to biological oceanography and became deeply entrenched in his
dissertation, which involved the chemical analysis of the fecal matter
of zooplankton. “I was going out to sea and trying to figure out how
much nutrient and how much carbon dioxide was being carried to the
bottom of the ocean in the form of microscopic turds,”
Hayden simplifies.
The significance of his data is that the sinking fecal pellets carry
carbon deep into the ocean, removing it from the atmosphere. This
phenomenon of the “biological carbon pump” counteracts the greenhouse
effect, but to what degree is unknown.
After wanting to be a research scientist since elementary school, and
after five years of doctoral studies, Hayden says that “turning my back
on the research and leaving work undone really felt at the time like I
was betraying something important. But I’ve since come to realize that
I’m much better suited to writing about science than actually doing
it.”
He compares his job to going to graduate seminars, in that he is
constantly learning something new. Every week is a new story. “The work
I do as a science reporter is strongly informed by the work I did at
USC,” he acknowledges. He still maintains connections with his
professors and colleagues, sometimes using them as sources in his
articles.
When asked what one thing unifies his stories, he answers carefully. “A
combination of a fascination with the way the world works,” Hayden
details, “with a healthy dose of skepticism with how the scientific
process works.”
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