A 28-day marine expedition entering its final week off the coast of Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau has made science fun for students studying underwater pressure and Hawaiian volcanism. Kilauea Elementary School sixth-graders Sarah Britt and Kaitlin Alamida recently wrote an article
A 28-day marine expedition entering its final week off the coast of Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau has made science fun for students studying underwater pressure and Hawaiian volcanism.
Kilauea Elementary School sixth-graders Sarah Britt and Kaitlin Alamida recently wrote an article on what they have learned as their class follows online Waimea Canyon Middle School teacher Linda Sciaroni’s progress aboard the University of Hawai‘i’s “Kilo Moana” research vessel.
Students decorated cups and a Styrofoam mannequin head that was sent in the submersible JASON2 robot, which an international team of scientists is using to collect rock samples from the ocean floor to learn more about the history of the underwater volcanoes.
“Our hypothesis is that when we get them back after the voyage they will have been reduced to a smaller size due to the underwater depth pressure,” Britt and Alamida state in their article.
A photo posted Friday shows scientist Terry Naumann holding a significantly shrunken, painted mannequin head.
Chiefess Kamakahelei teacher Fred Sasan’s students now question if the pressure will shrink the foam art even more if it is sent down again with JASON2.
“We have bundled their cups and wig heads in net bags and put them in milk crates strapped onto the JASON2,” Sciaroni says in a Friday dispatch. “This art has gone down to the ocean floor at 4,000-plus meters of depth and been crushed by the pressure of 400 atmospheres. … Stay tuned — science is fun!”
Kaua‘i students have e-mailed questions to Sciaroni ranging from what life at sea is like to how the ship functions.
Fourth-grader Kaumalani asks how JASON2 collects samples.
Sciaroni responded in a new online question-and-answer page that the remotely operated vehicle uses its robotic arm.
“It can reach out and grab things,” she says. “Then it can be directed to move the rock into a basket that is on the Jason. Then when the Jason comes back to the surface the scientists empty the baskets.”
Sciaroni said some educators, such as Kilauea School Technology Coordinator Maureen Chung, have asked their students to write her questions and then discuss the answers in class.
“There was a really good one about the rate of decay at the bottom of the sea that got me into a conversation with a Jason pilot about his annual visit with a researcher to a rotting whale that was anchored to the sea,” she said in an e-mail Sunday.
Sciaroni is now a regular part of one of the watch teams working in the “Jason van.”
“This has been completely amazing,” she said in an e-mail. “We log and record all the information as the Jason team and the scientists work. My job is to take frame grabs (photos) from the video feed and put them in a document that is printed at the end of the dive to help us identify each sample.”
Todd Bianco, a University of Hawai‘i at Manoa doctoral candidate studying under a chief scientist aboard the Kilo Moana, on Saturday posted information describing the amount of glass and olivine collected in the samples.
“We can already begin to understand differences in the volcanic history of our sample sites,” he says. “Gathering this information during the cruise rather than later in the lab is important. It gives the team a developing picture of the range of where we have been and what we have sampled, which is not always controlled by moving around to many distant locations.”
Sciaroni said despite the sea floor’s diversity, one common feature has been manganese.
“Manganese coating thickens with time and paves our dive sites like cement, making it difficult to pry samples loose,” she says in a Saturday dispatch. “In 36 hours, we collect between 30 to 60 rocks; that works out to just one or two samples an hour.”
On Friday, Sciaroni said the Kilo Moana headed north of Kaua‘i to an area that shows an “interesting but extremely puzzling bathymetric structure.”
Bathymetry is the study of water depths.
“The most prominent feature in the area is a long and narrow ridge, extending northwest from the banks of Kaua‘i,” she says. “There are numerous irregular mounds and seamounts to the northwest of the ridge. There are also large angular blocks further north, that appear to be massive chunks of landslide debris, much like those seen offshore of O‘ahu and Molokai.
“In the past, prior to such high quality bathymetry data, this whole area north of Kaua‘i was thought to be a large landslide area,” she continues. “But what appears to be missing are large embayments (indentations) of Kaua‘i’s coast or its near coastal plateau from which the landslide came. That is, if there was a landslide, where is the evacuated scarp it slid from?”
Sciaroni says the alternative hypothesis is that the north Kaua‘i ridge and seamounts are volcanically constructed and the crew plans to test this theory.
To track the expedition online, visit www.soest.hawaii.edu/expeditions/Kauai.
• Nathan Eagle, staff writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 224) or neagle@kauaipubco.com.
