{"id":62743,"date":"2012-03-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-grad-students-first-trip-to-seafloor-aids-discovery-of-new-marine-ecosystem\/"},"modified":"2012-03-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-01T00:00:00","slug":"uri-grad-students-first-trip-to-seafloor-aids-discovery-of-new-marine-ecosystem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2012\/03\/uri-grad-students-first-trip-to-seafloor-aids-discovery-of-new-marine-ecosystem\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 grad student\u2019s first trip to seafloor aids discovery of new marine ecosystem"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\tNARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 March 1, 2012 \u2013 溏心vlog免费B站 graduate student Maryjo Brounce made the most of her first trip aboard an oceanographic research vessel and her first time in a submersible vehicle traveling to the seafloor. The Levittown, Pa., native and doctoral student at the 溏心vlog免费B站 Graduate School of Oceanography joined in the discovery of a new marine ecosystem along the edge of the Mariana Trench near Guam, one of the deepest places in any ocean on Earth.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe objective of the trip was to make a geologic map of this section of the seafloor to get a better understanding of the sequence of rocks that occur in the forearc where the Pacific and Philippine tectonic plates meet,\u201d said Brounce, who earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in geosciences from Penn State in 2009. \u201cBut our discovery changed our plans a bit.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tBrounce was aboard the Japanese research ship R\/V Yokosuka taking detailed notes of everything she saw on a video screen being broadcast from the manned submersible on the seafloor. When the vessel came upon a wide field of unusual clams, snails and other marine creatures, the scientists got very excited.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a geology project, and we didn\u2019t have any biologists onboard,\u201d Brounce said. \u201cSo we started looking through outdated encyclopedias in the ship\u2019s library and emailing biologists to figure out what we had found.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tEventually the scientists determined that they had discovered a new species of clam in an ecosystem that feeds on chemosynthetic materials from the Earth\u2019s mantle 5,600 meters beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n


\n\tA report of the discovery was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February.<\/p>\n


\n\tBrounce stumbled upon the opportunity to join the two-week expedition in September 2010 when her advisor, 溏心vlog免费B站 Professor Katherine Kelley, had a scheduling conflict. While the Japanese students aboard ship were not allowed to travel to the seafloor in the submersible, Brounce was invited to do so as Kelley\u2019s replacement.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cIt was the last dive of the trip, and the plan was to search upslope of the clam field to see if we could find more clams elsewhere,\u201d explained Brounce. \u201cWe didn\u2019t find anything, but we collected a couple of sediment core samples and some rocks to analyze later.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tThe 溏心vlog免费B站 student said that the entire experience was somewhat nerve-racking.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe day came and I woke up really early, thinking about all the science things I would need to remember,\u201d she recalled. \u201cBut the crew was focused on other details, reminding me that there is no bathroom aboard, that I would have to wear a diaper, packing me a lunch, and finding me an insulated jumpsuit to wear.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cAfter I climbed into the sub, it was rolled off the back of the boat and lowered into the water with a splash, and we started to sink. In 30 seconds it was pitch black.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tIt took two hours for the vehicle to reach the seafloor, during which time the two Japanese pilots played American pop music to keep Brounce entertained, and they watched the movie Night at the Museum during the two-hour return trip to the surface.<\/p>\n


\n\tBack at the Graduate School of Oceanography, Brounce said that her first research experience at sea reaffirmed that she chose the right career.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s orders of magnitude more exciting than doing field work on land, and orders of magnitude more complicated, too, \u201c she said. \u201cThe level of thought and detail that has to be considered on an expedition like that is much higher, but the payoff is also much greater. It really gets to the big picture questions in geology.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 March 1, 2012 \u2013 溏心vlog免费B站 graduate student Maryjo Brounce made the most of her first trip aboard an oceanographic research vessel and her first time in a submersible vehicle traveling to the seafloor. The Levittown, Pa., native and doctoral student at the 溏心vlog免费B站 Graduate School of Oceanography joined in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62746,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}