Dispatches from Sea >>
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| March 2007 |  Laura Preston, educator, UNH/Salem High School, Salem, NH. |
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| April 2007 | |||||||
April 19, 2007
Outside the box – by Karen Neely
“The most interesting things in science are the anomalies, if you can just figure out what they mean.” This is the mantra chanted by my advisor whenever I have results that don’t match my expectations. I hope it’s true…it sure makes me feel better.
The funny thing about science is that it can never really PROVE anything. The nature of the scientific method is in fact to DISPROVE things. Experiments are, for the most part, designed to test for no effect. For example, this drug will be no more effective than this sugar pill, this fish will be found in the seagrass just as often as on the reef, and this area of the brain will be exactly the same in men and women. Now disprove it, if you can.
Just because apples have fallen on the heads of Newton and countless others throughout history, it only takes one apple to fall UP, and the rules of gravity as we know them have to be completely rewritten.
Think how interesting that upward-moving fruit would be. Something about that apple or that location in the universe would alter everything we know, and a good scientist should always be on the lookout for such anomalies. Build slowly, work carefully, but never discard the outlying point until you have a good reason to.
In the early hours of this morning, we very literally had to think outside the box. We were searching for a seismometer partially buried in the lava of a recent underwater eruption. We had the coordinates for where it was put down, and started a very methodical search pattern with our video-equipped remotely operated submersible. We made a perfect square of search lines, then a bigger square, and a bigger one. No seismometer.
Then someone suggested a new method of searching. The instrument was sending out sound signals, so why not dispose of the idea that we knew where it was, and instead just follow the noise. Follow it to the edge of the box. Outside the box… A full 150 meters away from the box we’d been plowing for hours.
And there she was, tucked neatly into some lava, yellow floats glowing and red flag flying. A little tug on her hardware, and the knocking off of a few rocks weighing her down, and she started her long ascent to the surface. What will the data she holds reveal? Her simple presence tells us that when the volcano erupted a year ago, the lava flowing down the shallow slope physically picked her up, rafted her 150 meters downhill, then solidified into rock. Hopefully a look at the data she collected can tell us the date it happened, how long the molten river carried her, and a whole stream of information about the movements of the earth before and since.
For an instrument that was moving on a river of molten rock, she looks pretty good. There are a few bits of charred metal and a faint smell of melting plastic, but the hardware and electronics seem to have held up, and I can only hope that for all her trials and tribulations, she gets to share her story with us.
 Karen Neely and Todd Ericksen have a bit of fun. |
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