Of course, if you want to check out the materials from past CC programs, they’re still up on the Archive page.

Thanks for another successful program! is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection

WebDay #6 is posted.

What would you want to know about the ocean? How would you find out? is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection

Here are some activity/assignment ideas for students to do while browsing the Alvin dive log:

1) Have the student chronicle the dive history of a specific site. The student could look up the latitude/longitude of the site and do a little background research on it.
- How many times did scientists take Alvin to that site?
- What were they looking for? (Chemistry? Biology? Geophysics? etc.)
- What did they find?
- What did they sample?

2) Have the student chronicle the dive history of a chief scientist. The student could look up the scientist, find their website, find some of their references, etc.
- Where did they go?
- What were they looking for? (Chemistry? Biology? Geophysics? etc.)
- What did they find?
- What were they interested in sampling?

Suggestions for deep biosphere chief scientists:
Becker
Childress
Cowen
Delaney
Fisk
Fornari
Giovanni
Lilley
Reysenbach
Sievert
Teske
Tivey
VonDamm
Wheat

3) Have the students chronicle the discovery of life in the deep sea.
- Start with “Dives in 1970′s”. Find the dives to the “East Pacific Rise”. What were they looking for here?
- Go to “Dives in the 1980′s”. Look through a couple of the “East Pacific Rise” dives.
- Go to “Dives in the 1990′s”. Check out a few of the dives for “East Pacific Rise”. All of the sudden the word “biology” is now associated with the East Pacific Rise.
- How did this discovery of life influence future dives to the East Pacific Rise? (They were almost entirely dominated by “biology” dives after that.)

Here are a few fun facts:
1) Titanic site was visited on dives 1705 – 1715 though no notes of what they saw were documented here.
2) The first dive with a female observer (Ruth Turner) was #345.
3) Beth Orcutt, our shipboard contact on this expedition, went down in Alvin on dive #4538 (amongst others, I’m sure).

WebDay #6 is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection

What would you like to do on a future Classroom Connection project? is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection

Newfoundland. Photo Credit: M. Brown

Massive cranes. Photo courtesy of B. Orcutt.

Greetings from Maine!  I think everyone has made it back home now following our 3-day off-loading extravaganza in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.  While some of our science party were able to get off of the ship and go exploring the coast (check out this awesome photo of the coast taken by the Videographer Michael Brown), I spent a lot of my time waiting by the dock for different trucks to come by to pick up boxes of scientific equipment and our precious samples.  Before those packages could come off the ship, we had to use some massive cranes to off-load the containers that house all of the Jason gear, and then to load up the ship with containers with equipment for the next scientific party.  It was a very well orchestrated dance of heavy machinery!  Once everything was off of the ship, and all of the labs and staterooms had been cleaned thoroughly, I was able to head out to explore all that St. John’s has to offer, including eating lots of salad (we don’t get so many veggies on the ship)!!

Now I am back at home and preparing a plan to work on all of the samples that we collected.  When I was on the ship, I started some incubation experiments with some of the rocks that we collected; now I have to finish up those experiments and start analyzing the samples.  The incubations basically consisted of offering a fancy food (13C-labeled sodium bicarbonate, if you want to get technical) to the microbes that might be living on the rocks, and I hope that some of the microbes ate that fancy food and made some new cellular material with it.  I will be extracting DNA and other biomolecules from the rocky incubations to see which, if any, of the microbes at the fancy food, and this will tell me something about the function of the microbial community eeking out a living on the rocks. Wish me luck!  My buddy “Professor Pressure” – Dr. Peter Girguis interviewed a few weeks back – and his lab also ran some similar experiments with some of the fluids that were collected from the CORK observatories.  I can’t wait to see how our results compare!

Thanks for following along with our research expedition!  It has been a blast introducing you to some of the great people I get to work with when I go to my ‘home away from home’ on the sea.  Stay tuned – many more adventures await!

Blog #6: Back home and ready for Phase 2 is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection

Until then, we hope you have enjoyed the SciMath Career Series interviews as much as we’ve enjoyed writing them. We also hope that you have learned a TON about all the important jobs needed on board to make an expedition successful. It sure takes a lot of people to make the operations run smoothly!

We hope to see some of YOU on our future cruises!

No Interview this week is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection

SciMath Career Series interview #6 is posted.

What career would you like to do? is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection

or by emailing Amanda (agturner [at] usc [dot] edu).

Week 6 Q&A is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection

Our last Q&A is posted, but not to worry! You can always send us questions even if it is long after the CCv.2 program has ended.

If you could pick the topic of the week, what would you choose? is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection

ES = Elementary School
MS = Middle School
HS = High School
SE = Special Education

Oceanography Jeopardy (MS, HS)

A nice review of oceanography we found on C-MORE’s website.

Instructions: .pdf

Create your Own Cruise (ES, SE)

Students make basic decisions about what they would like to study about the ocean, where they would like to study, what tools they would use, etc.

Instructions: (.docx), Student Packet: (.docx)

Week 6 Activities is a post from: North Pond Classroom Connection