DAILY QUESTION Draw a picture of what Earth scientists think a mantle plume looks like. Write one question that you would like to ask Jamie about the research she does.

SAMOAN ISLANDS Doing Research in the Tropics

RESEARCH PROPOSAL Scientists need money to pay for research, maintaining their laboratories and performing experiments. The project I work on needed lots of money. The scientists all needed to fly to Samoa, rent a large boat and collect the samples. Scientists will write proposals to the government or people asking for money to do their research.

GOING ON EXPEDITIONS After you are awarded the money, the fun begins … Scientists get to travel all over the world collecting information and samples to study at home in their labs. Right now, a scientist I work with is in Antarctica. In the last few months he has been to Australia, China, Greenland and Hawaii.

RESEARCH CRUISE The rocks I study are from the seamounts of Samoa. A team of scientists and graduate students traveled by boat around Samoa for 23 days to collect these rocks.

SHIP TRACK The ship track of the R/V Kilo Moana during the ALIA Expedition is indicated as a dashed white line in the bathymetric map below.

COLLECTING SAMPLES To collect rocks from the bottom of the ocean, you drop a large “bucket” off the back of the ship. This is called dredging. The dredge bucket is dragged for a while and then brought back up to the surface.

Emptying the Dredge Bucket COLLECTING SAMPLES

Still Collecting … 24 Hours Operations COLLECTING SAMPLES

Once the scientists (and rocks) returned from Samoa, it was time for me to prepare the rocks for age dating. This included using a rock saw, jaw crusher, ring mill, magnet, hand picking … and many long hours. The final step was to go to Oregon State University to perform age dating on the rocks … more long hours.

SAMPLE PREPARATION

Have you ever heard of carbon or C14 dating? Certain elements are radioactive. Radioactive elements slowly change over time. To date rocks, you measure the amount of the original element and the new element it has changed into. AGE DATING OF ROCKS

We know how long it takes the element to change from the original element to the new element. In this case Potassium (K) changes into Argon (Ar). So, using lots of equations, we can calculate how long ago the volcano that formed the rock erupted and became a rock. AGE DATING OF ROCKS

To date my rocks I needed to measure the amount of Argon (Ar) in the rocks. To do this, I had to heat up and melt the rock samples using a laser. AGE DATING OF ROCKS

After all this work, I had to analyze all results. This is where you compare what you actually found out to what you hypothesized in the beginning. ANALYZING THE DATA

For the last year and a half I have been working on getting ages for the seamounts of Samoa. I am trying to find out if the Samoa chain has a linear age progression, like Hawaii, or not … JAMIE’S RESEARCH