- 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)