We are in a place of tremendous elegance, both on and off the land. On the land it's one paradise after another. A flower here, a palm tree there. The way that the rope swing hangs just so, and the precise position of the digits on a passerby's hand. On the ocean: spectacular sunsets; the mesmerizing, even sensual swell of the ocean... These are things that all people can see.

We are not here for the sunsets, though. We are here for something else: something that not everybody can see. Few people see beauty in rock. I am not talking about gems: diamonds and rubies are beautiful in simple ways. There is no simplicity to be found in the samples we scrape from the bottom of the ocean. No, these are beautiful for another reason: they belong to something greater. They give us a glimpse at the process that drives the earth.

It works in the same way that a slab of sandstone in the Grand Canyon cannot convey the whole picture, or a single tree of Yosemite does not begin to capture the essence of the entire scene. Like a tourist in Yellowstone, we are here to witness the inner workings of the most wonderful thing we have: our planet. We are just in search of understanding. To an untrained eye like mine, the rocks we bring up at great cost look like most every other rock I've seen. To science party out here, when they are deemed 'good', they hold countless secrets from the innermost part of the earth. The excitement they get is unfathomable, but pretty similar to the excitement I get when I see a nice climbing rock in Joshua Tree: A-Ha, here is potential.

The whole is what we are after and, as scientists, we must go after this goal through specifics. It is easy to be lost in endless series of boring photographs of rocks, in ALIA-103-5 this or 10% CPX phenocryst that. The samples themselves are of the utmost importance, but they are in no way what we are after. We are not here for a hunk of igneous rock, we can get that anywhere. I must constantly remind myself of this, or I would dump the lot overboard. We are here for answers. We are here for beauty.

Daniel Staudigel onboard the R/V Kilo Moana.