Print page	Email to friend
	Read Email responses February 23 » February 24 » February 26 » February 27 » March 1 » March 2 » March 3 » March 5 » March 6 » March 7 » March 8 » March 9 » March 10 »

My question is for Kevin LeBouef. Last year, when you were on a different ship, and the swells were higher than the bridge, was it possible for the ship to be damaged, or even sink?

Tim Dougherty
St. Philip Neri School
Lafayette Hills, Pennsylvania

Good question Tim. The horrible weather you are asking about occurred on the ship I am on now, the Laurence M. Gould. Yes, it is possible to damage a ship in such weather. On that day the ship was not damaged but we did damage our port (left side facing the bow) lifeboat and we also lost two life buoys with lights attached to them. As far as sinking, the possibility is always present. Damage may occur to the ship from uncharted rocks, icebergs, or flooding from rough weather. To prevent these accidents our bridge team is very careful with navigation and keeping all watertight doors on the ship secure at all times. In the event of an accident I feel our engineering staff could repair or overcome any problems and return us home safely.

Thank you for your question.

Kevin LeBouef
Chief Mate
Laurence M. Gould

Thank you for communicating with my students and answering their questions. This has been a great and inspirational learning experience for us all. Samantha Hahn asks: How long do salps live?

Mary Cook
teacher

Dear Samantha:
I wish we knew the exact answer! Part of our study is to try to find out approximately how long they live. It is hard to keep them alive for long on the ship, so we can't just watch and see how long they live. We are measuring how fast they grow, and looking at the different sizes in the population to make an estimate. Right now I think we would say that the salps down here live for several months but not several years. I hope we'll have a better answer in the future, but there are still many things we don't know about salps.
Thanks for your question.

Larry Madin
Chief Scientist
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

My science class is reading your daily entries and watching your slideshows on our new Smartboard. What you would name a new species if you found one?

Anna Terrizzi
Duxbury Middle School
Duxbury, Massachusetts

Dear Anna:
Thanks for your question. As you probably know, scientific names of species have two parts, the genus name, which puts the organism in a larger group (kind of like your last name) and the species name, which applies only to that particular species (kind of like your first name). Often a newly discovered species is similar to other known species and is put in the same genus, but given a new species name. There are some rules for the names. The genus name is always capitalized, and the species name is not, like Homo sapiens for humans, or Salpa thompsoni for salps. The name can just be made up, but usually it is based on Greek or Latin words that help describe the particular characteristics of the species, for instance, sapiens is Latin for 'intelligent'. Other times the species is named after a person, like thompsoni named after a scientist who studied salps, or the place where it was found, like Callianira antarctica, a comb jelly that lives down here.

I'm not sure yet what we would name a new species if we find one. It will depend on what it looks like, where it was found and what it is related to. The advantage of scientific names over common names is that they are the same in all languages and for all time.
Larry Madin
Chief Scientist
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Awesome job with the photography... that panoramic view of the bridge was super high-tech..WICKED!!! Is it true that due to the Coriolus effect when you flush the toilet in Antarctica the water goes down counterclockwise? If so, is it different when you are on the ship than on Palmer's Field station?

Dear Pat:
Coriolis is a dominant controller of fluid flow on the large scale but a toilet is just too small to notice the effect. Even a bathtub is too small. The problem is that the fluid coming to the drain must bring with it the angular momentum it had on the moving earth and this really counts when the distance is miles but is terribly small when the distance is a foot. To make matters worse with the toilet, the designers introduce swirl for more efficient cleaning by adding a jet or a set or grooves to get the water to swirl and the direction of swirl owes more to these than to Coriolis forces.

But when a fluid, like the air, moves towards a low pressure region as it is doing just to the north of our ship, it is apparently deflected to the left (to the right in the northern hemisphere). A way to think of this is to imagine a cannon, say, that is pointing towards the south pole from somewhere to the north of the south pole (is there anywhere else but north?). The earth is turning to the east, which we experience as sunrise to the east at lower latitudes. The cannon is also moving east although it is pointing at the south pole. The cannon fires and the projectile starts out going due south but it also has the east component of its velocity from its source not on the axis of rotation. This causes the projectile to miss the pole and go past it to the left. The gunner would experience the trajectory as being curved to the left.

The air trying to get to the low-pressure region to our north has the same curve to the left. But it still wants to go toward the low pressure and as it curves to the left and misses the center, it tries again to go towards the center and this ends by the air going around the low pressure clockwise, constantly going left of where it would like but actually slowly getting closer but circling around clockwise.

Picture a very large pool with a drain in the center (not exactly in the center, it really matters little where the drain is as long as it is on the bottom) and the water is allowed to get very still, no wind, no filling vortices, no thermal convection. Now, remove the plug and as the water starts to flow towards the hole, it deviates to the left. Before the pool is empty, all the water is swirling around clockwise. The tendency to turn left ends by making a swirl to the right.

Sandy Williams
Ocean Engineer
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

[Back to top]