Hello everyone!  Haley here.  We sent down a few styrofoam cups with Jason to about 900 meters below the surface in a mesh bag, and what came back was a styrofoam cup the size of a small Dixie cup. The reasoning behind this?… When styrofoam is STP (standard temperature and pressure) on the surface, it isn’t actually completely solid and has air trapped in between the bits of styrofoam.  The high pressure in water this deep caused the air to be pushed out of the foam and shrunk the cup down to its now miniature size.  This is similar to when you put apple slices into a food dehydrator.  The slices shrink down when the water is evaporated from the fruit just as the cup shrank when the air was pushed out.  Just a little fun experiment we had to try and wanted to share with you all!

Hey all,  this is Lexi blogging from the midnight mauraders shift, as we like to call ourselves. Working from 12-4am means we’re awake and sleeping at strange hours and mischief is bound to occur. Or in all honesty we doze off and send lots of emails.  However today we have reason to be sleepy because we had a very eventful day.  We recovered 1 Jason dive OBS and 3 Popups.  The Jason dive today was particulary eventful based on the biology we saw and the ease with which we found the TRM and send it to the surface.  The sea floor was full of worm like creatues popping out of the bottom, as well as numerous flounder, rock fish, anemonies, shells, sea stars and even a shark.  After finalizing the attachment of the TRM to the elevator we spend 10 minutes exploring the ocean bottom, which was one of our deepest dives of 825 m.  We followed our shark friend around for a while, zoomed in on an enormous red snapper, and plenty of shells.  At the end we decided to grab a rock of about 20 cm.  Atop of it was a big, fatty seastar which refused to leave.  So the rock with the seastar got hauled to the surface by Jason.  I excitedly hauled the seastar around the ship to let everyone take photos with a deep see starfish and touch it, then threw it back into the ocean, here’s hoping it survived.  The rock we’re keeping for further chemical and geologic evaluation.  All in all an interesting and exciting Jason dive, with hopefully more to come!

Cheers,

Lexi from the Atlantis Team