Archive of September 18th, 2007

Teacher at Sea log for Tuesday September 18, 2007

Yesterday we brought up the Jason 2 for the first time. Everyone was excited to see what types of rocks we had collected. As the rocks were being collected, we tried to be careful to collect rocks that were in situ rather than loose. If a rock is still attached to its original neighbors you can be more certain how it got where it is. If a rock is sitting alone on the ocean floor you cannot know where it came from, for example, it could be ballast rock brought from another place. Another thing that is a little tricky is all the rocks are covered to some degree by sediment and manganese coating. These two features make it so we sometimes think we're collecting lava rock, but instead we sample soft sedimentary rocks with a hard manganese covering. Luckily we have a sedimentologist along (Chuck Blay) and he is delighted with the mistakes.

Once the rocks have been described, washed and photographed, we saw them in half to look inside. There is a variety in what we found. Some have tiny bubbles, some have larger bubbles, and some you can see the olivine crystals. Almost all of them have a thick layer of manganese coating around the outside.

The Jason team repaired a laser that was not working quite right to prepare for the next dive. They also put about one-third of our student labs aboard for the dive today. I cannot wait to see how they turn out.

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