OASIS comes to Barrow -- With a Yellow Submarine Pilot (False Pass: floor, title)

[Floyd_Davidson]

Okay, Dusty Rhodes will be happy to know that Steve Sjostedt has indeed arrived in Barrow (he said he'd been here 18 hours already when I was talking to him on Saturday), and he has a lot of very nice things to say about Dusty too!

He wasn't exactly hard to spot, because he, well, sort of stands up in this crowd:

That was the little crowd of folks who came to the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium's weekly Outreach program that happens on almost every Saturday afternoon. This particular presentation was by submarine pilot Michelle Ridgway who has been very active in exploring fascinating places on the bottom of the Bering Sea.

Below are Linda Payton on the left, the BASC Outreach Coordinator and responsible for scheduling the weekly presentations, and who somehow manages to pull them all off; and on the right is Michelle Ridgway who gave this week's presentation. They are two outstanding people.

[InfectedMushroom]

LOL when I read the title the first thing that popped into my mind was the band

[Nephler]

Wholly Big Belt Batman.

[Floyd_Davidson]

Originally Posted by InfectedMushroom

LOL when I read the title the first thing that popped into my mind was the band

And in some other thread, they claim I have no sense of humor...

If I'd said a "blonde submarine pilot", nobody would have bothered to read it! Right?

[Barkingowl]

Originally Posted by Nephler

Wholly Big Belt Batman.

I was thinking the same thing. I want one!

[Dusty Rhodes]

Originally Posted by Floyd_Davidson

And in some other thread, they claim I have no sense of humor...

If I'd said a "blonde submarine pilot", nobody would have bothered to read it! Right?

READ, Blonde????, nope I'da been lookin' for the pics!!

Hummmmm, just out of idle curiosity, how deep does the Bering Sea get?, I doubt it would get as deep as the trench off the Marianas, but, since the landmasses approach each other?, are parted away from each other?, I would suspect some sort of rift. A canyon of some sort.

[Dusty Rhodes]

Thanks Floyd, yup, that's Steve alright, tis glad I am that he made it there safely. Now, the next part is lettin' him do what he does and gettin' him out of there safely, shouldn't be a huge problem, he is fairly well versed in cold weather land masses. Has he asked about trying any of the local foodstuffs? oh yeah, anything he said good about me is probably a lie!!! He's a yankee, a New Hampshirer, ergo the proverbial "grain of salt" notion comes into play. In spite of being a "yankee" I have always thought of him as being a good example of a Human Being, he be's kinda bright too!

[Floyd_Davidson]

Originally Posted by Dusty Rhodes

READ, Blonde????, nope I'da been lookin' for the pics!!

Hummmmm, just out of idle curiosity, how deep does the Bering Sea get?, I doubt it would get as deep as the trench off the Marianas, but, since the landmasses approach each other?, are parted away from each other?, I would suspect some sort of rift. A canyon of some sort.

I tried to find a map on the Internet that shows a few of the things that Michelle Ridgway had on her slides to illustrate her presentation, but didn't find what I'd like. So I'll try to describe this as best that I can.

The Bering Sea is divided into two areas. Draw a diagonal line across the Bering Sea from the lower tip of the Gulf of Anadyr in Siberia, to the Pribolof Islands, and then to the Aleutian Chain at False Pass or roughly that area.

Okay, everthing north and east of that line is Beringia, a shelf that is maybe 200 meters deep (and much less in some places). But south and west of that line is a huge basin that is more than 15,000 feet (4700m) deep. But the part that was news to me was that the line between those two areas is basically a cliff, an almost shear drop off. And across that plateau flowed the Anadyr River, the Yukon River, and the Kuskwim River... and when they met the ocean in prehistoric time, when sea level was low enough that the plateau was above water land surface, these rivers flowed directly over the edge of this shelf. Today those rivers flow into the shallow part of the Bering Sea and have built a massive delta, but when flowing into deep water they dug a pair of massive canyons!

Just southwest of the Pribilof Islands, and now totally underwater, is the 8th largest submarine canyon known to exist. Pribilof Canyon is where the Kuskokwim River met the ocean.

And northwest of that is Zhemchug Canyon, the largest submarine canyon with a 2600 meter vertical relief! Apparently the Anadyr flowed into the Yukon and together they flowed into the Ocean at this one point. (Zhemchug is significantly deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon, and is multiple times farther across the top so its volume is many times that of the Grand Canyon.)

With today's technology the maximum depth a manned submarine is able to explore is about 650 meters (1950 feet). Unmanned vehicles are going down to 2000 meters. But they are still not able to come close to reaching the bottom of either Zhemchug Canyon or the Bering Sea.

The Bering Sea floor has been mapped with various technologies, and they have discovered that it has massive amounts of frozen methane gas under the bottom. That might be part of the reason it is such a productive area of ocean. Michelle has a slide showing the biomass productivity, which is dark green all the way around the edges of the deep area and also along the current that flows north through the Bering Staits into the Chukchi Sea. She said that just north of the Straits she collected a sample that turned out the be the most dense biomass sample ever found in an ocean!

[Floyd_Davidson]

Originally Posted by Dusty Rhodes

Thanks Floyd, yup, that's Steve alright, tis glad I am that he made it there safely. Now, the next part is lettin' him do what he does and gettin' him out of there safely, shouldn't be a huge problem, he is fairly well versed in cold weather land masses. Has he asked about trying any of the local foodstuffs? oh yeah, anything he said good about me is probably a lie!!! He's a yankee, a New Hampshirer, ergo the proverbial "grain of salt" notion comes into play. In spite of being a "yankee" I have always thought of him as being a good example of a Human Being, he be's kinda bright too!

Don't worry too much about him, because most of those other guys are sane.

Hmm... maybe we better watch him carefully, eh? :-)

He definitely was interested in food, and I've told him to head downtown and get away for NARL. He's got this "bright eyed" look which suggests there's nothing in the way of adventure that he isn't likely to want to try.

[Dusty Rhodes]

Originally Posted by Floyd_Davidson

Don't worry too much about him, because most of those other guys are sane.

Hmm... maybe we better watch him carefully, eh? :-)

He definitely was interested in food, and I've told him to head downtown and get away for NARL. He's got this "bright eyed" look which suggests there's nothing in the way of adventure that he isn't likely to want to try.

Yeah, that would be my steve, hehehe, he always was a curious sort, but, then again, if you're not curious you wouldn't go into science in the first place. I don't think he ever really got into hunting and fishing like I did, but he does have an appreciation for the fruits of such endeavors. He is a bit of an iconoclast, really intelligent and a genuinely nice guy, able to laugh at himself.