This year marked the 25th annual running of the Bigelow Laboratory Orders of Magnitude program.

One local high school junior was lucky enough to participate alongside 15 of her fellow students from across the state of Maine. On Thursday, May 22, the group showed off their culminating presentation.

Bigelow chose Hannah Welborn, a student at Wiscasset High School, to attend the week-long Keller Bloom program. Started in 1989 and named for the two scientists who initially organized it, Maureen Keller and Clarice Yentsch, the program each year allows a group of junior high school students to work side-by-side with marine scientists. Welborn described her week as thrilling and a good fit for budding scientists.

“It's been a really cool experience doing a specific type of science,” she said about her marine-based research. “I got to see what was happening on a river I pretty much live on.”

She was speaking about the Sheepscot River, where she and the other students conducted much of their research. Thursday, the group of 16 gathered in the main hallway of the Bigelow Laboratory to present their research methods and results to a group of onlooking parents, friends and Bigelow staff members.

In front of a projector screen that dropped down from the hallway's ceiling, the students cycled their way through multiple series of informational slides. Although the group as a whole collected water samples and performed tests throughout the week, they presented the different categories of their research in groups of two, three and four students each.

Welborn and her partner, Tess Fields from Lincoln Academy, spoke about using net tows to collect phytoplankton and zooplankton, preserving such organisms in various chemical solutions, utilizing Niskin bottles to collect deep and shallow water and spoke about the salinity of the water at specific Sheepscot River locations. Other groups discussed nutrients and pigments, further analysis of phytoplankton and zooplankton and the proliferation of viruses and bacteria.

Within approximately an hour, the presentation was over and the students had explained the bulk of their week. Welborn said the amount of data the group collected and analyzed was staggering.

“There is so much information,” Welborn said, explaining how hard it was to fit everything into a 60-minute presentation.

“Scientists do this for years,” she continued. “We did it for five days.”

Overall, Welborn said the program was an experience of which she was happy to be a part. She spoke about the bonding that took place between her, the other Maine students and the Bigelow researchers.

“We've just bonded so much. I really appreciate all the people here,” she said. “I think we all worked together well.”