Archive of October 7th, 2007

Teacher at Sea log for October 7th, 2007 by Linda Sciaroni

We had completed several student experiments aboard that Jason. The first involved sending foam to the bottom and seeing how much it contracted under 400 atmospheres of pressure. The students from Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle School asked to have half their foam and their manikin heads sent to the bottom again. Finally, we crushed a foam cup under the pressure of the 38,000 pound mass at the base of the "A frame crane" (treatment 1) and it got very small. One of my new engineer mentors is calculating the actual pressure the cup was under so we can compare it to the cup that went to bottom of the sea (treatment 2) and the cup that stayed up on the boat (our control). Back at school we will calculate the volumes of all of these changes. We will post our results soon at this site. We are in the same spot in the timeline as the University of Hawaii scientists, 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. Science is fun!

Presented by the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii, with financial support from the National Science Foundation.