{"id":65638,"date":"2007-07-31T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-31T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-oceanographers-first-trip-to-seafloor-a-riveting-scientific-endeavor\/"},"modified":"2007-07-31T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-31T00:00:00","slug":"uri-oceanographers-first-trip-to-seafloor-a-riveting-scientific-endeavor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2007\/07\/uri-oceanographers-first-trip-to-seafloor-a-riveting-scientific-endeavor\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 oceanographer\u2019s first trip to seafloor a \u2018riveting\u2019 scientific endeavor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tShe travels 3 miles deep to study how continents form<\/p>\n


\n\tNARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 July 31, 2007 — When 溏心vlog免费B站 oceanographer Katherine Kelley climbed into a submersible vehicle for the first time last September, she felt considerable anxiety and worried that she would be claustrophobic.<\/p>\n


\n\tWith good reason. She was about to travel three miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean to the southern end of the Mariana Trench near Guam, one of the deepest places in any ocean on Earth. She was crammed alongside two pilots in a two-meter sphere within the Shinkai 6500, a mini submarine that would not be tethered to the Japanese research vessel R\/V Yokosuka, from which they departed at the surface.<\/p>\n


\n\tIt was her first time in a submersible \u2013 although given her career choice, it will not be her last \u2013 and as they descended, she was somewhat surprised at how quickly it got dark (within 200 meters of the surface) and how quickly it got cold in the vehicle.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe Japanese pilots did a great job of putting me at ease during the two-and-a-half hour trip to the bottom,\u201d said Kelley, a 溏心vlog免费B站 assistant research professor. \u201cThey practiced their English language skills with me, and we listened to Japanese pop music. Once we got to the bottom, I was very focused on my scientific procedures, so I forgot about my concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kelley\u2019s trip to the seafloor thousands of miles from home was designed to help her gain a better understanding of how continents are built by studying the rocks ejected from the Earth\u2019s mantle when tectonic plates collide and create underwater volcanoes. She said the Mariana Trench is an excellent place for studying plate tectonics because it is in a subduction zone \u2013 the place where two plates collide and one is forced beneath the other.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cWhen one plate moves downward, it goes into the Earth\u2019s mantle with a cargo of oceanic crust laden with sediments and water,\u201d she explained. \u201cThe water is later released into the solid mantle where it causes melting, which creates magma and volcanoes at the surface. You end up with a chain of volcanic islands.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tKelley\u2019s expedition in the submersible was aimed at finding rocks from the earliest stages of the subduction, approximately 40 million years ago.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cWhen we got to the bottom, it was very dark so we couldn\u2019t see very far, but I was riveted to the six-inch porthole,\u201d said Kelley, who lives in Wakefield but grew up in Mankato, Minn., and earned her Ph.D. from Boston University in 2004. \u201cI just couldn\u2019t keep me eyes off it, even though video cameras outside the vehicle were broadcasting images to monitors inside.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tHer eight-hour trip in the submersible traversed 1.5 kilometers along a steep ravine looking for large rocks under the sediment. During the course of the nine-day expedition, Kelley and her colleagues collected numerous rock samples that represented a \u201ccomplete crustal sequence\u201d \u2013 rocks from every layer of the Earth\u2019s crust.<\/p>\n


\n\tIn the 10 months since she returned to 溏心vlog免费B站 from the research expedition, Kelley has been analyzing the rocks using a state-of-the-art laser ablation system at 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Graduate School of Oceanography to determine their composition.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cWe definitely found some boninite, a rock type that has high silica and magnesium content and is almost exclusively identified with the very early stages of subduction,\u201d Kelley explained. \u201cI was very excited to find boninite. We also found basalt, which has a lower silica content and is the rock type that composes most of the rest of the Earth\u2019s oceanic crust.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tAs she continues to analyze the rock samples from last year\u2019s cruise, she is planning a follow-up expedition in the summer of 2008 to the Santa Rosa Bank, another area of the subduction zone in the Mariana Trench.<\/p>\n


\nShe also recently received a National Science Foundation grant that will find her studying rocks from a very different geologic setting \u2013 a mid-ocean ridge where tectonic plates are separating instead of colliding \u2013 to compare how the mantle melting process there differs from that which occurs in the subduction zone. That project is now in its early stages.<\/p>\n


\n溏心vlog免费B站 Assistant Research Professor Katherine Kelley prepares to enter a submersible vehicle to explore the ocean floor.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

She travels 3 miles deep to study how continents form NARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 July 31, 2007 — When 溏心vlog免费B站 oceanographer Katherine Kelley climbed into a submersible vehicle for the first time last September, she felt considerable anxiety and worried that she would be claustrophobic. With good reason. She was about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65641,"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-65638","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\/65638","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=65638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}