Antarctic Undersea ROV
Update
Meet the Team
Teacher - Mindy Bell
Mindy Bell grew up on an island in southeast Minnesota. Swimming in algae-laden waters, ice-skating around beaver lodges, and watching the wetlands come to life in the spring were instrumental in her decision to study science. Her liberal arts education at Carleton College included a term studying marine science on Catalina Island and at Hopkins Marine Station, where her fascination with marine life was fueled, yet her passion was for teaching rather than scientific research. After graduation, she took the ferry to Alaska and started teaching. After five years of teaching grade 7 to 12 science in Skagway, Alaska, and running a school fish hatchery, she attended the University of Washington in Seattle and earned a Masters degree in Biology Education. Ms. Bell now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches secondary science at the Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy.
Researcher - Stacy Kim
Dr. Stacy Kim is a research professor at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and began working in the Antarctic in 1988. Her prior work has focussed on human impacts and developing technology, with the larger goal of understanding a relatively undisturbed ecosystem--the Antarctic seafloor. Stacy will be the coordinator and lead diver for the 2010 IceAged project. To learn more about Dr. Kim’s scientific interests, please visit her faculty biography page (http://www.mlml.calstate.edu/faculty/stacy-kim/).
Journals
November 17, 2007 – The Longest Day
November 16, 2007 – My Last Day in Antarctica
November 15, 2007 – Passing on knowledge
Project Information
Where are They?
The team was working in the waters around McMurdo Station, Antarctica. McMurdo is the largest station in Antarctica with more than 100 buildings, a harbor, landing strip and helicopter pad. More than 1000 people live and work at McMurdo Station during the austral summer!
What are they Doing?
The research team was exploring remote regions of the seafloor around McMurdo Station, Antarctica with a newly developed remotely operated vehicle (ROV) for underwater research. The new ROV can be deployed through a small (15 cm) hole in the sea ice, enabling access to regions beyond scuba diving depths (at 40-170 m). The researchers located historical experimental structures on the sea floor around McMurdo Station and investigated the colonization of these structures by species of sessile invertebrates. This provided an unprecedented opportunity to explore and document the rates and patterns of ecological succession from one of the most extreme habitats in the world. The team also tested protocols for conducting sonar mapping with the new ROV as a first step towards creating high-resolution, bathymetric maps of the entire seafloor around McMurdo Station.
Vocabulary
- Austral
- Bathymetric Maps
- Benthic
- Ecological Succession
- Invertebrate
- Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV)
- Sessile
- Sonar
Relating to the southern hemisphere. The austral summer is from December to February and the austral winter is from June to August.
Bathymetric maps show the underwater topography, including depth and contour of the bottom surface of lakes, rivers or oceans.
Benthic organisms live on or in the bottom sediments of a sea or lake.
The more-or-less predictable and orderly changes in the composition or structure of an ecological community. For example, the recolonization of a new, unoccupied habitat created as a result of a landslide, lava flow, a forest fire etc.
An animal without a spinal column, or backbone such as a worm or a snail.
A remotely operated vehicle is an unoccupied, maneuverable underwater robot operated by a human above the surface of the water. The ROV is linked to a human operator on land, ice, or on a ship by cables that carry electrical signals back and forth between the operator and the vehicle.
Sessile organisms are permanently attached to a substrate and therefore not free to move around such as a barnacle.
A method or device for detecting and locating objects by means of sound waves sent out to be reflected by the objects.