Explorer: Week 3, Day 2

Daniel McGuire commented on Tuesday's adventures: "We woke up this morning at 7:30 feeling very tired after yesterday’s long day of fun, which included night snorkeling in the evening," adding that, he, "had previously never seen a creature that used bio-luminescence until last night. The females would come up and shine and wait for a male to come and find them. Although we only saw about 3 or 4 it was still an amazing experience for me...

 He continued, "the super awesome highlight of Tuesday's camp was for sure our awesome dive at the Rita Zovetto! Never have I ever fallen so madly in love with scuba diving! The water visibility was amazing! Perhaps as good as 50 feet! We saw this radical school of sergeant majors, living on the wreck, the Rita Zovetto, and making a home for themselves out of the once great ship. It was the best dive I have ever gone on."

Nate and Ryan continued, "Later on in Clarke Lab, we worked on many scientific principles relevant to diving and had to make our own science projects based on them. We were introduced to a few intriguing concepts that we’d learned in school before, but never in depth. These concepts include buoyancy, density, pressure, and displacement. We applied these ideas to scuba diving by constructing individualized projects from the Cartesian Diver to the Depth Gauge to 'Lifting the Titanic.'

They described the Cartesian Diver experiment as, "slightly positively buoyant objects made of tiny paper clips and balloons. These were contained in an enclosed airspace inside a bottle of water which, when squeezed, sank. This was due to the increased pressure of the airspace in the bottle. When increasing the pressure on air, air compresses."

Daniel described the 'Raise the Titanic experiment as, "A man by the name of Archimedes was trying to figure out the volume of a tricky object. He was stumped. So, like most people, he decided to take a bath. As he got in, the water level in the bath raised, he cried out EURIKA! He had discovered water displacement! Conveniently, as well, the measurement system was created to match up with the weight of water, I.E. 1 ml = 1 g. So we figured out that in the everyday occurrence of raising things from the ocean floor. However much the object weighs, we must displace more water than it, so we did experiments involving weights and different objects such as corks and packing peanuts in order to raise the weights."

Bryson Doers offered a different perspective: "There were many different ways to do the Raise the Titanic experiment; one way was to attach packaging peanuts to fish weights using paper clips, but I used Zip-lock bags attached to the Fish weight, connected to two tubes. After that I blew into and that caused the bags to inflate, and lift the weight/Titanic up from the bottom of the tank. The experiment works because the buoyancy of the air is greater than the weight of the fish weight and causes the fish weight to raise."