Archive of September 21th, 2007

Teacher at Sea log for September 21, 2007

Today I had an amazing conversation with Dominique Weis. She told me about her life as a scientist and why she chose to pursue a career in geology. If you get the chance please take a minute to read her short biography in the section "Meet the Scientists". Over the last two wonderful weeks I have learned so much from Dominique about geology and about mentoring young people to be successful in the highly competitive environment of scientific research. She is meticulous in the accuracy of her work, which she completes with shear joy. It is contagious how much she cares about the furtherance of science.
Another member of the scientific crew with us is Karen Harpp, a researcher known to fly to the Galapagos Islands at the first signs of a volcanic eruption. She and her colleagues have camped on the rim of Volcan Sierra Negra, collecting cinders as they drop from the sky with the brilliant light of the eruption lighting the night.
Her colleague Terry Naumann gave a presentation on their trip to the eruption of Sierra Negra and shared with us the risks they were at. They collected lava while it was flowing from the volcano: flinging a chain into the flowing river hoping to pull it back sticky with the residue of fresh lava. They spent days hiking around the slightly cooled flow to reach their instruments that were measuring the GPS data of the eruption.
The sense of adventure and the range of experiences these scientists have had is unbelievable. The path to becoming a scientist has a reputation associated with school boys and nerds, but these women and men are living adventures worthy of Indiana Jones.

Science Update by Todd Bianco

The dive at Site 03 ended at about 8 a.m. (HST) today, approximately ten hours ahead of the scheduled surfacing. The watch teams had been continuously observing sediment and debris flows, and decided that we could better use cruise time by moving to the next site early. When Jason 2 surfaced, we found some interesting samples of breccias. Normally, breccias that form following a mass-wasting event often comprise clasts that have varying characteristics, like olivine content or vesicularity. Some of the samples at Site 03 had very similar looking clasts throughout, which may indicate they formed during an eruption and are primary volcaniclasts. This finding may support the hypothesis that the samples are local to Site 03.
We are currently steaming though another gravity survey over the bulge south of Kauai, and then we will continue into a more detailed preliminary survey around Site 04. Site 04 is on the center of the bulge, and we will be looking for cliff faces to sample sections that may be made of up layers of lava, rather than targeting conical features as we did in the previous dives. A section of a cliff face will hopefully expose a slice into the dive site seafloor, and will give a time-series of the local eruptive and depositional history. This is because material tends to get older as it gets deeper in such a slice.

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