Waimea Canyon Middle School teacher Linda Sciaroni returned yesterday after spending the past 28 days at sea on an expedition with an international team of scientists to map underwater volcanoes around Kaua‘i, Ni‘ihau and Ka‘ula. “The next part of my
Waimea Canyon Middle School teacher Linda Sciaroni returned yesterday after spending the past 28 days at sea on an expedition with an international team of scientists to map underwater volcanoes around Kaua‘i, Ni‘ihau and Ka‘ula.
“The next part of my journey is to figure out how to communicate this world I have enjoyed to the children of Kaua‘i,” she says in a final online dispatch yesterday.
Some 23 Garden Isle educators and many more students used the Internet to track Sciaroni’s progress aboard the University of Hawai‘i’s “Kilo Moana” research vessel. Her daily dispatches from sea were used in their classrooms to teach various topics.
Three family science nights, a lecture and teacher workshop will complete the outreach program.
“The cruise indeed was a huge success,” said Garrett Apuzen-Ito, co-chief scientist of the Kaua‘i cruise with Professor Michael Garcia. “Most of this area has never been imaged before and we were the first to see it.”
The crew surveyed for the first time ever 16,909-square-miles of seafloor, he said, which is 30 times the area of Kaua‘i and 1.5 times the size of the state of Hawai‘i.
The crew discovered “many tens of underwater volcanoes,” Apuzen-Ito said.
With the Jason2 submarine robot from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the crew took continuous video of the geology and sampled the rocks.
“Our total rock sampling effort obtained well over 350 rocks totaling over 1.5 tons,” Apuzen-Ito said.
The rocks will be taken back to the University of Hawai‘i where they will be chemically analyzed to determine their composition and date when they erupted, he added.
“While all of the volcanoes we surveyed are dormant, many formed much more recently than the main phases of volcanism that formed the islands,” Apuzen-Ito said. “This more recent ‘secondary’ phase is exemplified by volcanoes in the Koloa area on Kaua‘i.”
All of the information the expedition collected will further the understanding of how the Hawaiian Islands formed and how more recent volcanism has continued to shape the earth both on land and deep on the surrounding seafloor, he said.
“The northwestern islands of Kaua‘i, Ni‘ihau and Ka‘ula are special in that they are surrounded by a huge volcanic area more extensive than any of the younger islands to the southeast,” he said.
Apuzen-Ito credited Sciaroni and another Kaua‘i resident for their work during the expedition.
“It has been a real treat for our international team of scientists to have Ms. Sciaroni on board. Linda has done an outstanding job in sharing our activities with the Kaua‘i schools and in relaying their questions for us to answer,” he said. “It has also been a privilege to have on board Kaua‘i geologist Chuck Blay, who has taught us a great deal about what we can learn from ancient biological and coastal erosive processes that shaped the sediments that we also sampled.”
“It has been a lifetime experience for me,” Sciaroni said.
This last week aboard the Kilo Moana, Sciaroni said she learned more from the young Woods Hole design engineers about the various challenges associated with the technology that has gone into the Jason2.
“All of the electronics are packed in mineral oil and each section is attached to a reservoir of mineral oil that can be adjusted or equalized much like we equalize our ear pressure as we scuba dive or mountain climb,” she said.
Mineral oil was chosen for many reasons, she said, but the students will study how it prevents oxidation, conducts electricity poorly, is environmentally benign and is as incompressible as water.
“The entire Jason2 has a shared power source, and like sometimes the house lights will flicker when the refrigerator compressor kicks on, we have had to time some of our movements of the other equipment, like the rock storage drawer once a rock is in the grasp of Jason,” Sciaroni said. “Otherwise, the claw will flinch and the rock gets dropped.”
The family science nights, open to the public, will run from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., Oct. 23, at Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle School, Nov. 6 at Kapa‘a Middle School and Nov. 8 at Waimea Canyon Middle School.
Apuzen-Ito will give a public scientific lecture from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m., Nov. 10, at CKMS cafeteria. The second day of a workshop for the 23 teachers who have had students tracking the cruise online will follow.
“We have done our collection of data out in the field and now we are ready to go home and do a careful analysis to see what we learned,” Sciaroni says in a dispatch Sunday. “Science is fun.”
The expedition and Kaua‘i outreach program was funded by the National Science Foundation and sponsored by the University of Hawai‘i’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.
“I am absolutely grateful from the depths of my heart for the amazing month I have had,” Sciaroni said.
“I feel changed and renewed by this adventure. Now I am ready to go home to my family and my students at Waimea Canyon School.”
For more information, visit www.soest.hawaii.edu/expeditions/Kauai.
• Nathan Eagle, staff writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 224) or neagle@kauaipubco.com.
