Erik's letter, answered by Miriam Doyle, a biological scientist from NOAAs Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle

Dear Erik,

Hi Erik and thanks for writing your letter to us asking about the upcoming experiment with the polystyrene heads and cups that you guys sent.  Today is Thursday April 29th and we’re heading south, back to our first mooring site in the south east Bering Sea where we brought a mooring to the surface, took it on board and exchanged some of the instrumentation, redeployed it, and carried out oceanographic and plankton sampling around it.  Yesterday and last night we tried to reach the mooring site that is further north but there was too much sea ice for us to get through, so we had to turn back as this ship is not an ice-breaker.  Close to the southern mooring site, we will do another transect of sampling stations, including water sampling, that runs from shallow water to really deep water off the shelf.  When we get into the really deep water, we will attach a container with your heads and cups to our CTD (conductivity, temperature and depth measuring instruments on a frame that also includes water bottles for sampling water at different depths), and send it down as deep as 1000 m if we can.  Apparently the best way to do this is to put the stuff in some sort of mesh bag so that the water can get through, and so that way the water pressure will be most effective.  A pillow case seems to very appropriate for this exercise and we certainly have plenty of those out here.  I haven’t actually seen this done before myself so it will be fun.  However, I have seen some polystyrene cups with writing on them that have been sent down and back from deep water, and they maintained their structure very well.  They were like little miniature versions of themselves, and the writing was also maintained but just shrunk.  Essentially, the water pressure will squeeze all the air bubbles out of the polystyrene and the structure will shrink.  If there are no air bubbles left when they are taken to the surface again, the structures should be maintained in their shrunken form.  Well, it’s going to be really interesting to see how that works out with the heads!

We’ll keep you posted and thanks for your interest.  Keep up the good work!

Yours sincerely,

Miriam Doyle

PS:  I’m a biologist and I study plankton, especially the early stages of fish species that occur as eggs and larvae in the plankton.  I work at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.