Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 05/13/2008 - 06:14
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Drake Passage Opening

 This is Emily again with more questions from Ms. Thomas's fourth grade class. 

 1. How can coral live in such a cold climate?

 2. Why is the team so interested in the growth of the Antarctic ice sheet?

 3. What type of tests will be run on the rock samples at Cardiff

 Email back soon!

      Thanks,

         Emily

 P.S. Ms. Underwood says the baseball team blew it. Apparently There was bad pitching and they weren't getting hits while people were on base! Ouch!

Thu, 05/15/2008 - 10:03

Katie Pena

Hi Emily, Ms. Thomas, Ms. Thomas' class, and Ms. Underwood,I asked Rhian, a biologist from the University of Hawaii, to help me with answering your question about cold-water corals. Here is her information.
1. These corals don't have algae in them to photosynthesis, instead they survive on food fall from above (so dead plankton raining down, smaller animals dying and decomposing all reaches the seafloor eventually). Thereare two main 'types' of coral - zooxanthellate (which only live in the photic zone) and azooxanthellate (which can also live in the photic zone, but are mainly found in the deep ocean).
2. There are actually deep-water corals around Hawaii too and that's what I study back in my lab at UH. Deep water (also known as cold-water) corals occur all around the globe - from the Antarctic to the Arctic, from just afew meters in really cold water (like down here) to well over 6000m in the deepest ocean. Around Hawaii the shelf drops off from the islands very rapidly to deep-water, and we have good strong circulation with productive upwelling, making an ideal environment for deep-water corals to grow. These deep-water corals can be remarkably similar to their shallow water counterparts, they can form large reefs and attract a wide array of associated fauna like fish, crabs, snails and starfish (among many others). The corals we find down here are remarkable to live in such cold water (itcan be just 0.5C on the bottom here), and we don't really understand how they do that - understanding how they live, grow and thrive in these conditions is one of the major goals of my research.
The team is so interested in the change of the Antarctic ice sheet because by knowing more about its past and the events that changed it we can hope to understand more about its present day conditions and its future.
The type of tests that will be performed at Cardiff will involve many steps. Matt described the process to me, here it goes. 1st use a very thin and small rectangular rock sample to smash up and put into a machine that will make the sample into a very fine dust. 2nd take 2 grams of the rock dust and cook it in an oven for 2 hours at 900degrees C. They cook the dust at such a high temperature to burn away any extra material, so that they are left with a pure rock sample. 3rd mix the dust with a solid lithium compound and heat it until it forms a molten mixture.4th mix the molten mixture with Nitric Acid and water until the molten mixture dissolves.5th add this solution to a bottle with 100 ml of water6th put the bottle into a mass spectrometer, that will analyze all the elements in the sample.Also, Alan will take some samples for further isotope testing and Argon dating. Many of the rock samples will be cut down very thin into thin sections for using under a microscope.
Thanks so much for your excellent questions! Tell Ms. Underwood hi for me, and too bad about our baseball team-- I thought they might turn it around when "Big Bird" had that no hitter and shut out back to back-- oh well!
Mrs. Pena