Price is Right Rules

Gabriel Packer, B watch, Eckerd College

Greetings from the SSV Corwith Cramer! Today we took a quick break from our normal cycles of watches to do a few experiments with light attenuation. In other words, how certain wavelengths of light penetrate the water.

The first of these experiments included throwing different colored M&Ms over the railing and timing how long it took for them to disappear. What we had found was that red disappears first, followed by orange, yellow, green, violet, then blue. The second experiment that we did was lowering a Secchi Disk into the water on our deployment wire. It was basically a mirrored disk the size of a dinner plate that we lowered until it disappeared from view, and then we raised it until it was just visible again. This allowed us to figure out the depth at which light couldn’t penetrate anymore. Furthermore, we all played a game of trying to guess what that depth might be using similar rules to “The Price is Right”.

Finally, we are continuing to deploy collection nets twice daily in order to further our research into the Sargasso Sea ecosystem as we sail towards our destination in Woods Hole.

I hope everyone back home is doing well and a happy late birthday to my sister at FSU!

Gabriel Packer, B watch, Eckerd College

Contact: Douglas Karlson, Director of Communications, 508-444-1918 | dkarlson@sea.edu