Oden News Flash! Before we get to today's topic I need to make an announcement....It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas aboard Oden. Check my upcoming journal posts for photos and descriptions of how the international members of our expedition are preparing for the holidays.
Fika, the Swedish Word of the Day
Dr. Katarina Abrahamsson , Dr. Melissa Chierici and Dr. Agneta Fransson lead the team of Swedish ice researchers. While we were collecting ice cores they taught me an important new Swedish word. Fika is a casual way to refer to a coffee break. The trick to a successful Fika while on Antarctic sea ice is to have something to lean or sit on (like the ice block in the photo) and you must have a very well insulated thermos to keep the coffee hot!
An Experiment: Going to the bottom of the Amundsen Sea
Everyone knows that if you dive to the bottom of a deep pool you can feel the pressure build on your ears. This is because the weight of the water above you puts pressure on the small air space behind your eardrums. Imagine the gigantic pressure of seawater if you were over a mile beneath the sea. Actually, it is so great that most of our biggest submarines would be crushed if they tried to go a mile below the surface and that is only half the average depth of Earth's oceans. In my December 11th journal I described the CTD probe that is lowered to the bottom of the sea several times each day on the Oden. The CTD is a collection of instruments and water collecting bottles that stands over 6 feet tall. Recently, the CTD was sent on its deepest mission of this expedition and I was able to create an experiment of my own that I sent down with the probe.
If you examine Styrofoam, the material that foam cups and coolers are made out of, you will notice that you can compress and dent it between your fingers. As you do so, you are driving some of the air out of the foam beads that the cup is made of. In my experiment I wanted to measure what the pressure of a deep-sea environment would do to common Styrofoam. First, I found some thick Styrofoam packaging in the Oden's garbage. With the help of one of the crew, I cut the foam into blocks that measured 10cm long, 6cm wide and 5 cm high. I then heat-sealed the cut edges so that they would not break off in the sea. I then decorated the blocks with waterproof marker and placed them in a mesh bag (my laundry bag). I saved one of the blocks so that I could easily compare the size of the compressed blocks to the uncompressed block. The mesh bag of blocks was tied to the CTD for a trip to the bottom of the Amundsen Sea. The trip took over 2 hours and the maximum depth was 3047 meters. That is nearly 2 miles deep! Check out the results below.
Each of these Styrofoam blocks was cut from the same piece of discarded packaging aboard the Oden. Before their trip to the bottom of the Amundsen Sea, each measured 5cm X 6cm X 10cm (300 cubic centimetres). Some of the scientists aboard decorated them with waterproof marker.
Jeremy Lucke is a marine technician who works for Raytheon Polar Services and he helped me secure the foam blocks inside my mesh laundry bag and then we tied the bag inside the frame of the CTD for its long trip to the bottom of the Amundsen Sea.
After a 2-hour trip to the bottom the sea and back, the blocks now average about 2.5cm X 3cm X 5.5cm. Aren’t they cute?
Student Question
Today I offer the 2nd in a series of questions for my students back in Liverpool High School. They are to record the question and their answer in their PolarTREC Journal. Everyone else is welcome to answer the questions by posting their answers to me through the Ask The Team section. Fire up your calculator, here goes.
Question #2: Based on the results from my Styrofoam block experiment above, what percentage of the original volume of each block was lost to the compression of the seawater?
Photo of the Day!
Co-Chief Scientist, Dr. Walker Smith poses with the largest core we have extracted from the sea ice. We had to send the 1-meter hollow core drill down the same hole 3 times before we reached the bottom of the ice on this floe. When we put the pieces together, this core shows that the sea ice was over 8 feet thick. There was also over 2 feet of snow on top of this ice floe. In an upcoming journal I will send a video that shows just how we cut cores like this.
Making memories on the ice,
Jeff Peneston