9UNP1258HD_Theresa_Paulson_WordPress

- Tonight's speaker, without further ado, is Theresa Paulson, master of science. Theresa has been teaching science in the area for about 17 years. She is a graduate of UW-Madison. Go Badgers. Received her master's degree from UW-River Falls. Currently, she teaches science nine and applied science at Ashland High, and in the fall, she will also be assisting with the new Ashland charter school. Theresa was selected as the 2015 NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association-- Did I get that right? The 2015 NOAA Teacher at Sea, and in 2011 was our first female speaker here at Ashland Science on Tap. At that time, she was fresh off her experiences as a NASA Airborne Astronomy Ambassador. Theresa is always on the lookout for more students interested in conducting real-world research with partners such as NOAA and NASA. 

Tonight, Theresa will speak to us about "Why Explore the Ocean Floor." Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Theresa Paulson to Ashland Science on Tap. 
(applause)

- Thank you very much for coming out on this rainy evening. I know that we're gonna be learning about water, but we definitely have water coming down all around us. I am a teacher first and foremost, so definitely ask me questions. Raise your hand if you, and I'll call on you.

I'm working with this mouse from afar, so hopefully this will work out. The first thing I wanted to share with you. We're getting a little feedback. 

The first thing I wanted to share with you is a video that I made to kinda entice your interest.

(dramatic music)

That's just a short little clip. 
(applause)

The NOAA Teacher at Sea program began about 25 years ago. They're celebrating their 25th anniversary this year. 700 educators have been onboard their vessels since that time. Those educators can come from anywhere between kindergarten up through college. You don't have to be a science teacher. You can be of any discipline. 

They're interested in educating as many people as possible. You also don't have to work for a public school system. Many of the teachers at sea this year weren't actually teachers. They were educators from museums and other kinds of avenues like that. You don't necessarily have to be a teacher. If you know of somebody who is interested, encourage them to apply.

There are three types of research experiences that you can be on when you're a Teacher at Sea. Fisheries research. Obviously, they're looking for monitoring fish populations. If anybody has been over on the other side and has enjoyed the ahi tuna, you realize that is an ocean critter, so there's definitely tie-ins to the Midwest through fisheries. 

Then there's the oceanographic and atmospheric research and the hydrographic surveys that can be done, the three fields. I was actually very lucky. I'm not a fisherman and I... I don't like to even eat fish. That's terrible, I know. 
(laughter)
 I did not get pegged on a fisheries cruise, although I did say that I would do anything, 'cause really, I just wanted to go.

The vessel that I was paired with was the Okeanos Explorer, which was right up my alley. The Okeanos Explorer is the very first research vessel that is a nationally owned vehicle that, its sole purpose is to explore the ocean. It doesn't go out and monitor things that we already know about. 

It's looking for new stuff, and that is totally where I like to be.

They're boldly going. Stealing that little mono from "Star Trek."

One of the things that people don't realize is that we really do know more about objects in space than we know about our own oceans. If we really look at it, we have...

95% of the Earth's oceans are unexplored. We don't know anything about them. Why is that? Why do we know more about the objects in space? Not that I'm knocking space, I love space, too. 

But the reason is because we can send satellites out to space objects, and they can circle them and they can get information from light very easily, but light doesn't penetrate into the ocean, or very far, anyway, and so we don't know very much about what's underneath the ocean. We need to send out ships and we need to develop technologies that can help us understand that. 95% of the ocean is unexplored. If the Okeanos were to go and map, how long do you think it would take 'em to map the entire ocean?- 
[Audience member]
 Forever.

- Forever. A hundred years? A little more. About a thousand years, a little more than a thousand years. 

1,042 years it would take them to map what is left to be mapped. We have a lot to learn. Why? Why do we care? Why do we wanna know? NOAA identifies these main areas, which we're gonna break down. The first one is climate change. Climate change has an impact on our oceans, and we need to understand that.

One of the things that it can possibly impact is the currents. We need to examine that. 

How are these nutrients and the heat, how is it all being circulated through our oceans. We also need to be paying attention to sea level rise 'cause that affects everyone who lives on oceanfront areas, coastal regions. Then we have the decline of coral reefs, which is part of the base of the food chain in the ocean, so we need to be monitoring that because then you could clearly have extinction of species if you don't know more and are able to protect it. That's part of the reason. Another reason that we need to study the oceans is because they could potentially help us solve some energy issues that we have. When we're out mapping, sometimes we find things like gaseous seeps.

NOAA's not the only boats that are out there. There's actually a lot of commercial boats that go out and map. As they map, they're looking for these gaseous seeps, natural gas bubbling up from the ocean floor. Those show up. 

When they find them, they can sell the coordinates to people that are interested in using those resources. We have the seeping natural gas and oil. We also have methane hydrates. How many of you have heard of a methane hydrate? All right. Couple people, awesome. Most of the research for methane hydrates has happened since 2000. That's how newly that we really understand anything about a methane hydrate. I didn't know anything about methane hydrates before I went on this cruise and learned more.

Methane hydrates are a potential resource for energy, but they're also very dangerous. 

Basically, what a methane hydrate is, it forms on the bottom of the oceans where it's really cold and under a lotta pressure, or under permafrost in layers. It's basically water molecules that form ice in a little three-dimensional, almost like a soccer ball, and it traps methane. That methane then stays in there, so long as the ice is frozen. But if we increase our temperatures, it's possible that then some of that can melt.

When it does melt, it can even catch fire.

It can then get into our atmosphere. Methane is a 10 times worse gas in our atmosphere than carbon dioxide is. It's something that you really need to be paying attention to. Here's an examples of where the methane hydrates can form under the permafrost and on the bottoms of the oceans.

These are areas where we've actually recovered methane hydrates, are the areas in blue.

In red are the inferred, places that they think that there are methane hydrates. The Unites States Geological Survey estimates that there is twice the amount of methane hydrate out there than all of your coal, oil and natural gas combined. All of those resources combined. There's potentially twice as much methane hydrate. It could potentially be an energy source in the future.

At first, everybody was really concerned that it was gonna bubble up and really affect our climate. Now researchers are saying maybe it's gonna take a little bit longer, so we don't need to be worrying about digging it up and burning it for a fuel source before we know how to mine it safely. Another aspect that we need to study the ocean floor for is for human health.

Many corals actually provide cool drugs for us. We have anti-cancer, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, all these anti things: anti-wrinkle cream, anti stuff, is used to make new pharmaceuticals. 

Very potent. These critters that produce them in the ocean have to produce 'em in large quantities. They're much more potent than the terrestrial plants that we have. They can also provide new medical materials.

For example, corals are used to make some implants. Shark skin has antibiotic properties to it.

It prevents infections, so that could potentially be a medical material that we could use. We also need to be monitoring oceans because of the potential for tsunamis. When we were on the boat, there was actually national and international Tsunami Warning Day.

All the kids in school, we're used to tornado warnings and fire drills, they had a tsunami warning. 

They all to practice that.

Then we also wanna, of course, monitor ocean health for its own self. We know that we're polluting the ocean. We know that there's lots of trash in the ocean. We need to figure out how to get rid of it, how to maintain a healthy ocean. We need to make sure that we're not reducing habitats, making our resources sustainable, and we need to be monitoring for invasive species as they interact with the native ones. Over-exploitation is always a problem. Commercial fishing operations, when they overfish, can be a problem, but when they're done in a regulated way, they can make it so that we can again enjoy our tuna and do it sustainably.

Another concern is that as we emit more and more carbon dioxide, that carbon dioxide does get absorbed by the ocean. How many of you are drinking sodas tonight? 

You know what happens when carbon dioxide absorbs into water, it produces carbonic acid.

That is a problem for all of your mollusks, all of your species that produce shells. Then NOAA is also very concerned about making sure that we are a literate society and that we are educating or nurturing our young explorers. That's why I'm here. That's why they've run the program that I was part of. One of the other cool things that they can do, this is a picture of the NOAA Okeanos Explorer. It has this big satellite bulb. That communicate with satellites that then communicate to scientists around the world. Scientists around the world can actually be saying to the scientists on the boat, "Hey, go five meters this way. "I wanna take a look at that." 

Then they can actually do that. You can have really focused research that produces truly tangible results.

Then you can also, as they're developing the technologies to research these hostile environments, then there are spin-offs to that that we can use in our society, as well.

Then, of course, there's education outreach like I'm doing right now.

Specifically, our mission, this is the meat and potatoes of what I got to do, I was on leg 
(squeal)
. Sorry, sorry. I was on leg two of the Caribbean exploration, deep sea diving, looking at the trenches. I was specifically looking at the Puerto Rico Trench, or our group was looking at that. 

The Puerto Rice Trench is the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is about 8,600 meters deep.

It is formed by the North American plate sliding past the Caribbean plate. You can see that in the image here.

Where the two are colliding, they're actually sliding past each other, so it's sort of like the San Andreas Fault, but there was some subduction going on, too, which is why it gets so deep.

It could potentially have some very interesting life forms as the plate boundary continues to grind past. Specifically, we were looking at, let's see. I need my pointer.

All right, there we go. We had this priority one area. 

You can see that this area was already all mapped. Each of these additional legs, they map a little bit more. Then they put it all together to make a bigger piece of the puzzle. This area needed to be mapped, and then so did this area need to be mapped.

The trench itself is really too deep for the multibeam to work effectively, so we were not able to use the multibeam to map the actual trench, but we were able to drop a free vehicle in here periodically to do some testing, to test the free vehicle, actually. Then we were able to do some sub-bottom surveys. That's what the white lines are for.

Here's the Okeanos. When I showed my kids this at school before I left, some of the kids were saying, "Mrs. Paulson, that doesn't look very comfortable." 

(laughs)
 I said, "It's not a cruise ship, it's a work boat." 
(laughter)

This was our crew. These are the scientists that were onboard. We have people from Puerto Rico that were there, we have people from NOAA, and then we have college interns that were learning how to do the mapping.

Our first thing was that we had to do the man overboard drills. We had to do all of the safety checks. We had to don our little Gumby suits and make sure they fit. We tested the fire hoses. 

That was kind of fun. Then we were trained in how, used the control room, what all of the displays were on the control computers so that we knew what was going on. We also were fully aware that we were on camera 24/seven pretty much. Well, not while we were sleeping.

But if you got outta your bed, you were on camera.

The multibeam SONAR is a very cool thing. The ship sends out a ping of sound waves that are at 30,000 Hertz, so they're ultrasound. It sends it down to the bottom of the ocean floor and it times how long it takes to get back. Multibeam means that it sends out one ping, but then it has sensors that are oriented in 432 different directions, so that as that sound wave comes back up off the floor, you can figure out where it came from in those 432 directions.

Here on the top, you can see, each one of these little lines is a sensor reading. 

Each of those 432 sensors are reading right here. The 421 is our depth at the time.

This shows what the sensors are picking up. The red picks up land that is higher up, higher elevation. Then blue is the deepest. It kinda goes by the rainbow, red being highest, blue being lowest.

Underneath, this is the water column backscatter, which can be really interesting. If you find gaseous seeps, you'd see little interference patterns in this backscatter. If a whale, let's say, were in the way, you'd actually see something going on. You wouldn't see the picture of a whale, but you'd see something interfering. 

That would tell you to go look for what is interfering there. If they did spot a whale, we had to turn off the SONAR and wait until 20 minutes after we couldn't see the whale anymore. Then we could turn it back on and continue the mapping because there's a correlation between marine mammals beaching themselves and SONAR. Question back there?

- 
[Audience]
: Did you see any whales?

- I did, I did. I did not see any awesome breaching, no big tail fins coming up or anything, but I did see a little bit, which you'll get a picture of. I'll show ya the picture.

On this part, this is the bottom backscatter. That shows us not only how far away things are, but this helps us know what this bottom is like. Where it hits a hard surface and bounces back up, that's gonna produce a lot of energy, so you'll get a white image. But where it's hitting soft sediments, it's gonna come back with less energy, and so it's gonna be darker. The darker regions are the more softer sediments, and the brighter whites are the hard surfaces.

Then underneath that, because remember, we're dealing with sound, and the sound has to travel and come back, so it's basically a calculation between sound speed and the depth, we need to be paying attention to how the boat is moving. The boat is not a still thing. It's moving up and down and it's rocking back and forth. That is actually keeping track of that, and it's adding it into the calculation.

Also with sound speed, we need to pay attention to the density of the water. 

There's a couple of probes that we used for that. One of them is a large CTD. This is very big, by comparison to the XBT. It's very large and it is tethered to the ship, which means the ship has to stop, it has to lower this thing down into the ocean. It goes down about 2,000 meters and comes back up. It takes about an hour to do that.

During that time, you're not mapping 'cause you're not moving. You don't wanna have to do that too often. In the interim, in between, we start out with that, and then we go to these XBTs. The XBTs, that stands for expendable bathythermographs. 

It's just measuring the temperature of the water as it goes down to only about 700 meters. Ya lob this thing about this big into the water and it measures the temperature down that far. Then if everything is looking great, you don't have to go back out and get your CTD to test that again. But if you're starting to get funky readings, then you have to go back and do that. We did the XBT about every three to six hours. We did the CTD only three times during the whole three weeks.

One of the cool things you can do when that CTD is going down, though, is you can take Styrofoam cups and decorate them up. You can see that we decorated them up. Then we attached them to the CTD with a dive bag. Then we sent 'em down, the 2,000 meters. 

When they came back up, they looked quite different. I have them here.

They're kind of fun. You can take a look at them, but please don't smush 'em. 
(laughs)
 Hm?

- 
[Audience]
: 
(speaks too low to hear)

- Yes, yes.

Another cool thing that was happening on the boat. Yes, ma'am.

- 
[Audience]
: 
(speaks too low to hear)

- About six miles an hour. Perfect trolling speed, but you know what? We never caught a fish. 

There were guys that were fishing the entire time, it seemed like, and they never caught anything.

The free vehicle is an interesting idea. This is the vehicle. It's not something you ride in. It's just two spheres that are attached to some sensors. It's dropped into the ocean. The free vehicle team was trying to design, Bill Schmidt from the University of Puerto Rico, received a grant to produce five of these vehicles. The idea is that he wanted to make something that is really portable, could be deployed in a moment's notice. You could throw it on the back of a fishing boat and go out and launch it if you needed to. You didn't have to have some huge ocean vessel to do it. 

This was his test run. I got to be witness to the first run of this engineered thing. His crew, with him were two students that he worked with, but they weren't actually the engineers. They were just kinda helpers. His engineers were in the middle of their final exams, so they couldn't take off and go help, which would be really too bad, I would think. The idea of it is ya have these two spheres that are keeping you buoyant. Ya have the sensors here and then you have weights. Ya send this thing down. It's supposed to gather the information that it needs at the bottom, and then it drops that weight and it comes back up. Then you pick it up. 

Pretty simple.

The other really awesome thing about this is that it can go into super deep water. His goal was to get that thing to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench because that's into the hale zone, where we have very little information about the deepest parts of the ocean. Most of the ocean is only about 4,000 meters deep. To produce something that can go deeper than that, there's not a big market for it, so we don't have a lotta data for these deep places. We don't know a lot about them. He's trying to design this very inexpensive vehicle that can go, basically, anywhere. It can go to the deepest parts.

After his first test run, it worked out great. Everything was fine. 

But after the next couple, there started to be some issues with the data. Then they realized, when they opened up the top sphere, that there was a little crack in the sphere. There was a little bit of water in there. He thought he was at a standstill and he was kinda bumming. But he didn't show it. He had that attitude of I'm gonna figure this out, and he recalculated and he tried to figure out if one sphere would actually be buoyant enough to get that vessel back up.

He did his calculations, and sure enough, it did seem like it would. They did a float test.

The second float test that they did, they attached some buoys to it to make sure that it wouldn't just float, but it could also pull the sensors back up from the deep.

They let it go, attached to a very long string. 

The buoys were there. They didn't really wanna lose this thing. I say it's inexpensive, but really, they're about $10,000, so you don't wanna lose it.

On the buoys, there's a long string. It goes down and it comes back up, and it worked great. He was good to go. They sent it down to the bottom of the trench. Everybody's crossing their fingers that this thing is gonna make it back up. It took a lot of time. The transducer, when it comes back up, or the transmitter, sorry, when it comes back up, it's supposed to send a signal. 

It's supposed to tell you where it is. That signal wasn't happening. In the time that it was supposed to come up, it wasn't. He wasn't getting a signal. Everybody was just on pins and needles trying to find this thing. Why isn't it working? Finally, a couple hours after he had predicted it, he got the coordinates, and then we were able to go and look for this thing. You can see how tiny it is when it's bouncing up in the ocean. We were surveying a two-mile radius looking for it. Finally, the watch standers have very good eyes.

We were able to bring it back up.

He believes this is a record, that he was able to get this free vehicle down to almost 8,500 meters and collect data.

He wasn't able to tell me what the data really means yet because he said that's gonna be one of his graduate student's Ph.D., so I told him, "Send me the paper when it's written."

Here he is with his thumbs up.

Other things that we were able to deploy, a Navy Glider was one. The video is a little choppy on this, but I'll play it for a little bit while I'm talking.

Navy has these Slocum Gliders that they put out into the oceans. They're kinda cool little vessels. They dive, and you program them and they'll dive and they'll do what you want. 

Then when they're done with their mission, they'll come back up and they'll send their information back to the Navy. The Navy will send them new instructions, basically, new programming. It'll do another dive. That's the goal, anyway. As it turned out, after I got back to school, I heard that they thought they had lost it, that it didn't do its right thing.

They weren't getting the information that they wanted to. They were on the lookout for it again as they were mapping in the area. Again, those watch standers are pretty good, and they found it. It does have new orders now. I asked what are they looking for, what's the Navy looking for.

That's all classified information, so I couldn't find out for sure, but they said for the most part, what they do is they're monitoring for tsunamis. They're listening for things, for different things.

Otherwise, it's classified. 
(laughter)

My project that I got to work on, I, again, was working with NASA because NASA, while you're out on the boat, they want all these vessels to be collecting aerosol data. I used the sun photometer. They called it the funtometer.

I pointed it up at the sun when no clouds were in the way. Pointed it up at the sun and then tried to keep this little dot in the center of this bigger thing for seven seconds. I had to do this like five times within two minutes, every two hours. 

Then that helps provide information. The idea is that the sun produces energy and it comes through our atmosphere. Based on the aerosols in the atmosphere, it's gonna absorb some of that energy. You're monitoring how much aerosol is in there by measuring that. That can be used to help

calibrate the satellites, to make sure that the satellites are functioning properly.

Kinda giving it ground truth. Yes.

- 
[Audience member]

(speaks too low to hear)
- How was I with?

- 
[Audience]
: 
(speaks too low to hear)

- I'll show you a picture here later on a little bit so you can judge for yourself. It really wasn't that bad. They treated us pretty well. 

It was not the Hilton. I'd have to say that.

It met my expectation, I can say. I did not get seasick. Very thankful for that.

Another thing that ya have to do, when you're Teacher at Sea, is you want to go and job shadow everybody on the boat. You don't just work with the scientists, you work with everyone. I also went down to the engineering room and learned all about how the ship functions underneath, which was really pretty cool. This is Ricardo Gabona. He was quite entertaining. 

He was telling me about how the ship was actually first designed to be a submarine hunter. Back in the Cold War, it was designed to be this really quiet ship that could go out and find submarines. Now it's been retrofitted to, obviously, to do ocean floor mapping with sound waves, so it has to also be a very quiet ship. That was kinda cool to realize. He showed me, also, some interesting things about how we get water.

Our trip was 19 days. I think that was another part of your question, wasn't it, that I didn't answer. Our trip was 19 days. To have 26 people plus 10 scientists would make that 36 people. 36 people on a boat for 19 days are gonna run outta water.

We were able to make our own water. The ship takes in water to cool the engines as the engines are running, and then it gets that water to about 80 degrees. Then you send it to this vacuum distiller, that's what this thing is, it's a vacuum distiller, that lowers the pressure to the point that the water will boil. Then you can distill it. We were able to get clean water. It was pretty hot. There was no problem getting a nice hot shower, but it was a little more of an issue to get cold water to drink, so we'd drink it out of a ice machine, which was pretty tasty. The water has to be treated, too. Everybody is doing things on the boat. 
(laughter)

 You have to make sure that the water that goes back into the boat is clean. We had our own little sewage treatment facility, a tiny little one that works like a city's. It goes into one tank, gets treated with bacteria, goes into another tank, gets treated with ultraviolet, a little bit of chlorine. By the time it heads out to the ocean, it's only at 15 parts per million total solids, which is much less than,even a city is required to have, 200, 200 or less. That's pretty good. The other things that they were showing me is how the ship is propelled. Lots of energy transformations that I can explain to my ninth graders as we study energy. The diesel that comes in first has to be cleaned very much 'cause you do not wanna have engine trouble when you're that far out at sea. Then it goes into a generator, so it fuels the generators. There are four generators on the boat. 

Those power hydraulics.

It goes from chemical energy to electrical energy and then into pressure that make the propellers go. The reason that you have to convert it into electrical is so that your dynamic positioning system will work. They can be doing really very delicate maneuvers using electricity, whereas if you just had a diesel engine that was going direct to your props, anybody who's been a boater knows that's not so easy.

Ya have the props in the back that are pushing. You also have stern thrusters and bow thruster. The bow thruster's a cool thing. It actually can go 180 degrees to make it so you can turn.

Then I got to go upstairs, and I worked with the bridge. They even let me drive the ship for a little 90-degree turn. 

When you're turning a 224-foot boat, that's a pretty cool thing.

I learned all about how the navigation screens worked.

They also definitely needed to make sure that the navigation systems were working properly, so they were checking it with charts on a very regular basis. She was not just doing this for the picture. I caught them up there doing that several times, so I know that it wasn't just for show. They were checking these charts to make sure that their navigation equipment was working properly.

Then I also got to work in the galley. We made fajitas one afternoon. I learned how to make palm trees out of carrots and celery, and dress the line. Those guys were pretty fun, pretty entertaining, but very hot. 

I would not want that job.

Then I also worked with the multibeam team, the mapping team, to learn how to process the data as it comes in. This is a little video I'll run while we're talking again. This is Mimi Lobecker. She was our expedition coordinator. There were a lotta women on the boat. It was really pretty refreshing to see. As a woman who graduated from UW-Madison and was only one of four girls in my entire physics class of 500, that was amazing to see, that almost 1/2 of the scientists on boat, it was half the scientists and then there were other crew members, too, that were women. That was pretty cool. She's processing the data. 

Basically, you're looking for anything that is random out here that doesn't really match. You highlight it and you just hide it. You don't delete it, you just hide it. That way you can get it back if you do think it's something later. There can be lots of weird things in the water column that are gonna be throwing you interference patterns that you don't really want in your maps. You asked about accommodations. Here's a picture of my bed. I really enjoyed this thing where you have a curtain that goes all the way around your bed. That's a pretty good thing. For dorm living, I'm thinking that's a, universities gotta get onboard with that. 

(laughter)
 We also had a nice library that people could hang out in, watch movies. They had a huge array of DVDs that you could pick from to watch. I never really had time to watch. I was always trying to find a whale or something.

Then there was the mess deck where we ate. This is a cool thing I thought maybe would work in my classroom to keep the skidmarks off the floor, but then I'm thinking, I think my students are probably gonna grab those little tennis balls and they're gonna whip 'em at each other. That would not be a good thing.

The fitness room was quite entertaining to go work out in. I do like to work out. 

I would go down there. At first, I tried doing, I'm a P90X fan, so I tried to do my P90X workouts. I'm doing my push-ups. The boat is heaving six to eight 
(laughter)
 meters. You're doing your push-ups and you're feeling like, hey, I'm really rocking this. Then all of a sudden, 
(grunts)
 I can't get up, very difficult. 

Then you're on that elliptical and it does the same thing. 
(groans)
 
(laughter)

We also had chess tournaments, which I found out I am not very good at. I got knocked out in the very first round by the chief steward, but then he later was second place, so maybe that's not so bad.

Then we sometimes, a couple times during the trip, we got to watch movies on the fan tail. The back end of the boat has this area that you can hang just a sheet, and they projected "Star Trek," of course, 'cause we're boldly going. 
(laughter)

Critters. 

We saw interesting flying fish, which I had never seen before. At first I thought I was seeing things, but there's little fish that are flying over. I'm thinking, what the heck are they getting? There's no insects out here, even, but they're evading predators, I guess. Then there were these brown boobies that loved the front of the boat, the bow of the boat, and they would hang out on. They're called boobies because they don't land very well. They're very clumsy birds. They catch fish very well, but they don't land very well. We did see some dolphins. We saw some bow-riding dolphins. 

This is the one little picture of a whale that I got. I know it's not very spectacular.

I'll cherish that memory.

This is our picture of the bow-riding dolphins. This was taken by Chelsea Wegner.

She was one of the interns on the boat. Just a quick little video of those dolphins.

The coolest thing, really, other than the critters, were the way the maps came together the produce these movies. I was able to take the data and turn it into a little movie. I realize it's choppy because I'm not a video gamer. 

I don't handle my mouse very well, but I did get to make this movie. I have all of the data, too, which means that my students can so the same thing. They can navigate over the area that we were, so that's kinda cool.

This is our priority one region. This is where there are lots of canyons, clearly. What the people back home were doing while we were collecting this data is they were trying to figure out where, the next leg of the ship used an ROV, a remote operated vehicle. They sent it down and they dove. They used our maps to help figure out where would be the best place to do those dives, where would there be habitats that there might be interesting animals and things to look at.

One of the places that they dove was in this Mona Canyon.

A thing that we looked at, too, was the backscatter data. 

A thing that we looked at, too, to show where there's soft sediments and where there's hard ones. With that information, then, they decided on a few dive locations. When I got back to school is when they got out the rover. At first I was kinda disappointed at that. I wanted to see the rover work. That would be pretty cool. But then I realized that while they're on the boat, they're looking at the same TV screens that I'm looking at when I'm in my classroom. They're inside the boat. They're not looking out, they're not enjoying the scenery. They're just inside looking at these monitors, so I thought, I think I got the best deal, really.

They were looking at particular regions in the Mona Canyon. The Mona Canyon is a rift that actually this little snippet tells ya about.- 
[Video]
 The Mona Rift is another one of those mysteries here in Puerto Rico because a rift is a place where, presumably, there have been extension.

One part of the Earth is moving away from another part of the Earth.

This is a very deep rift. It is over 3,000 meters deeper than the surrounding area.- 
[Video]
: The bottom line, it's big. The Grand Canyon would easily disappear within the Mona Canyon. 

The Mona Canyon itself, which, if you remember, is small in terms of depth compared to the Puerto Rico Trough, is still bigger than pretty much any canyon that we can find on the land surface of the Earth.- 
[Voiceover]
 We're at a depth of 3,783 meters. We're about 30 miles northwest of Puerto Rico in Mona Canyon, surveying the west wall.- 
[Video]
: The part of the wall we're looking at today was created by an enormous landslide. That landslide, we're not sure when it happened. It may have happened in 1918 when there was a magnitude seven earthquake just to the north of us.

From a geological perspective, this is kinda cool. We can just see underneath here the massive carbonate with sediment streaks, sediment shoots coming down, and just raising this question of, is this just one enormous block that has broken up, off, and fallen down the slope, or is it actually in situ? 

The importance of that is it constrains how thick the carbonate sequence is. We know the carbonate sequence is at least a kilometer to 1.5 kilometers thick. Question is, is it even thicker here than perhaps is thought, or is this just an enormous block that fell down the side of the hillside?- 
[Video]
: I'd like to remind people that although we're not seeing a lot of macroscopic organisms or larger organisms, like sponges and corals and fishes and crabs and things that you may be familiar with, there's also entire other community found living within the sediment in deep sea, in deep-sea sediments.- 
[Video]
: From what we've seen, and again, we have a very limited spatial view of this little tier, we're seeing bits and pieces of a bigger picture.- 
[Video]
: We had a long, deep dive today. We managed to cover 750 vertical meters from nearly 4,000 meters at the bottom, towards the bottom of the canyon to where we are now.- 

[Voiceover]
 Part of the purpose of these dives and why they were, why these areas were chosen is because of some of these 
(mumbles)
 questions and hypotheses that we're trying to answer. This is a very interesting dive.

- When we got back to the classroom, it was really pretty cool to be able to show videos like that and videos like this one. This is a little chaunax, a sea toad. He's a walking fish. Pretty cool. What I did is they run these live feed from the ship.

While we're doing labs and things, I can run this on my smartboard. The kids were looking up and, "Mrs. Paulson, look at that." It's a very cool thing to be able to be part of the research, even though you're not on the vessel.

He's gonna take off here in just a second.

Those little dots there on the screen, they actually are a way that they can measure how big things are. They know how far those dots are, and then they can use that to put things to scale. There are lots of these little snippets out there from their previous research. If you're interested in any of the areas that they research, you can go to their website and look at their past experiences, but you can also see what they're doing right now.

- 

[Audience]
: 
(speaks too low to hear)

- Yes, actually, that's my next slide.

In closing, we're definitely wanting to continue to boldly go, continue to nurture our young explorers, making sure that people are aware that ocean research is very important for our own health, for the ocean's health, for the health of our planet. Again, if you wanted to be part of that research, we can see what they're doing now, right now, on this very evening. They're diving in Hawaii.

When you come to this website, you'll find that while they're doing a dive, there are two different cameras that you can use, or you can click on. The one here.

Here, you can hear them talking.

- 
[Voice 1]
: Direction that we were heading.

- 
[Voice 2]
: Yeah.

- 
[Voice 1]
: How fast were we moving?

- 

[Voice 2]
: At 0.2.

- 
[Voice 1]
: Give me 10 meters.

- 
[Voice 2]
: 10 meters 
(mumbles)
.

- 
[Voice 1]
 We'll add more.

- That vehicle that you're seeing right there is the Deep Discoverer, or D2 for short.

Seirios is the vessel that's on top of it, or connected to it. They're tethered together. That's the video that you're seeing of the D2. Both of them have cameras on them. It helps to have Seirios up above that so that you can see if there's anything interfering, like if there's, say, a squid that's wanting to come up and look at the explorer, you can see that with the Seirios. They run the two in tandem.

If the one camera isn't showing you what you wanna see, you can go to the other camera. You can also, if ya scroll down, find out where they are. Here it says that they're, "The Deep Discoverer is exploring "the East North Gardener at depths "of over 2,000 meters."

Then you can see some of their video that they've taken previously, some of the highlights. Kinda fun to just run this in the background. I do it at home, even, sometimes, at school. I love to do it during labs. It's pretty neat to stay connected to what's going on. Thank you all very much for coming. I'll answer any questions that ya otherwise have. 

(applause)