 So just to give you some perspective, we're in Texas right over here, and these guys are past Europe in the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey. So I have another map to show you guys. So this is the Black Sea, so Turkey is here, Greece is here, Russia is here, so it's sort of all in the middle of everything. And we're going to see a display in a little bit of where they are, and you'll see that they're right in this area, right here. So on the ship, what you're seeing here are live images, and they don't actually go into the water, the scientists don't go into the water. What they do is they drive these ROVs. ROV stands for Remotely Operated Vehicle, and they have, I don't know how many, three of them? Four of them online, and I have pictures of two of the raised ones. This is the Argus, and you can see this is a live shot of the Argus right now that's on the back of the boat that's in the Black Sea. And the other one is called the Hercules, and Hercules was in the water earlier today with his little robot arms picking up stuff from the bottom of the Black Sea. This is the gentleman that we're going to meet today. He's an educator at sea, his name is Tom, and he is standing by waiting to talk to us. There's actually another group speaking to him right now, but when it gets to be 227, what did I say? 227. We're going to dial in, and what we're doing is we're going to call a phone that's connected in the United States, and that phone is going to actually, through satellite, allow us to talk to Tom. So, do you guys have any questions about what I've said so far? Good, because I don't know if I have all the answers. I'm not a scientist, I don't know how big that vote is, but that would be something that we could talk about. So, are we cool? Yes. Alright. And she is getting ready to patch us in to the Nautilus ship. I'm Rodgers, and I am a high school science teacher from Virginia Beach, Virginia. And right now I'm aboard the Exploration Vessel Nautilus, which is out in the Black Sea. That's okay. I'll tell you what the ship is up to right at the moment. We are imaging the sea floor using what's called side scans using sound waves to give us a sense of what the shape of the sea floor is and what's down there. Oh, I'd be happy to. One of the main reasons that we're studying the Black Sea this summer is because it has a very interesting chemistry. The Black Sea is sort of a sea within a sea. If you look at a picture of the Black Sea region on Google Earth, you'll notice that there's a part of it that's deeper than the rest by quite a bit. That part of it is the ancient Black Sea that's been there for a very, very long time. And then at the end of the last Ice Age, as the glaciers retreated, they flooded this valley and made the sea deeper. And the current Black Sea fills a lot more of the valley than the original Black Sea or the Proto Sea filled in the era before the Ice Age. And that water from the first sea has really stayed where it was. It's saltier than the water from the melted glaciers. And so sea life has used up all of the oxygen in that deport life. And then up near the surface of the modern Black Sea, the water has oxygen and you will sometimes see fish and life forms. And then there's a region in between called the suboxic layer between the area that has enough oxygen to support life and the area that can't support any life. And we are investigating the suboxic layer. So much of what we're looking at is in an area where the water just doesn't have enough air in it for any fish to breathe or for any plants to grow. And that's why you're not seeing a lot of sea life. Hey Tom, we've got a team here named Benjamin who was asking if you could describe to us what is the weirdest thing that you've seen so far on the expedition this year? Oh, that's a good question Benjamin. And we saw something sitting on the sea floor. At first we were really excited about it. We thought it might be a piece of wood perhaps from a shipwreck. One of the things that's good for archaeologists in the suboxic region is because there isn't a lot of plant life or a lot of bacterial life. Wood decays very slowly. So things which sink to the bottom, particularly ships which sink to the bottom, are preserved for a very long time. And we thought we might be looking at a piece of wood. And the more we looked at it the more it looked like it might be made of metal. And it looked like it might be of modern construction. And we never quite decided what it was. Some people said it looked to them like a heat exchanger maybe from a refrigeration unit. And we decided that it probably wasn't of archaeological significance so we moved on. We took a couple pictures of it and made note of where it was and moved away. But we still haven't quite figured out what that thing was. So you found something that was a total mystery. That's pretty cool. I've got another question for you. Archie is asking why is the Black Sea called the Black Sea? Storks can pop up pretty suddenly in this region. And sometimes they can be quite severe. And so from a sailor's perspective that was a bad thing. And somehow the idea of a bad sea or a sinister sea became a dark sea or a Black Sea. At least that's what we believe to be the morphology of that name. I'm going to ask Eli's question. I have a question from Eliza. She's wondering how did you get your job as a scientist? And how long have you been studying the Black Sea? I have the opportunity to come aboard this summer. So I personally have only been studying the Black Sea for a few weeks now. However, I interviewed a Turkish scientist who's with us on this cruise today. And he's been studying the Black Sea since 1996. And we have other crew members on board who have been studying at least that long and longer. We have people who are studying the Black Sea from a perspective of archaeology. The looking for traces of human society on the sea floor. Often in the form of shipwrecks. Although we're hoping we might see evidence of human life along the proto shore. Where in the era before the Ice Age there might have been human settlements along the edge of the original sea. We also have scientists here who are studying the chemistry of the sea and the biology of the sea. And geography and geology of the sea. So there have been a lot of people here studying it for a much longer time than I have. So everybody aboard has a different expertise. And we're hoping that you can answer this question. We noticed that there were different types of ROVs that you all are using to carry out experiments and stuff like that. Can you explain to us just briefly what are some of the differences, the different capabilities of those ROVs now on board? Absolutely. Right now we're using a vehicle called Diana, which is the sonar fish I mentioned earlier. And it might not be quite accurate to call that one an ROV because it, although it does run on power from the ship through a tow cable. Its operations are pretty simple. It's just beaming back sonar data to us. The electronics are pretty sophisticated, but it doesn't have any cameras on it or any manipulator arms. And there's not much we can do to control it to operate it remotely while it's underway. When we are exploring the seafloor more closely, Nautilus uses two very specific and very unique ROVs. One is called Argus, and it looks like a large metal rectangle. You've probably seen it in the video, lashed down to the aft deck, the back end of the boat. And the other one is called Hercules. That's the big yellow ROV. And the two of those ROVs work in tandem. Argus is attached directly to Nautilus via a heavy cable, and Argus weighs about two tons. When we lower it into the seawater, the buoyancy force exerted by the seawater supports about 1,000 pounds. So it has an apparent weight of about 3,000 pounds. And that 3,000 pounds pulls down on that cable, and we just lower it straight down into the sea behind the boat. And if the boat's moving slowly, which it generally will be when the ROVs are deployed, the Argus ROV just hangs directly beneath the pulley that the cable runs over. Attached to the Argus ROV by a tether of about 30 meters long is the ROV Hercules. And Hercules is equipped with a lot of lights and a lot of cameras, including a very good production quality high-definition camera, and two robotic arms. And the Hercules ROV can drive all through the water using thrusters controlled from the control van by an ROV pilot. The ROV Hercules can travel anywhere in the water up to 30 meters away from Argus. And Hercules is the one that has the manipulators and the great camera that brings back all the shots you see. And those two ROVs are almost always used in tandem. That is to say, they're both in the water at the same time working together, connected together. Thank you for that, Tom. I have Jessica here, and she's going to ask her question. I was going to ask, you were talking about the storms in the ice ages earlier. Well, I was going to see if you all could come in with, like, any evidence of the storm in the past messing with the settlements at the bottom of the sea. And if, like, there was any cool stuff about it? I'm afraid that we have not yet actually found any settlements along the proto shoreline. We have clearly identified the proto shoreline. You can see evidence of waves lapping up on the edge of the old sea, or the new sea from the old sea. But we haven't found any evidence of settlements there. However, we have found a lot of evidence of the severity of the storms, mostly in the forms of shipwrecks. A few days ago, we found a vessel that we have designated a rillius g, based on its location and when we found it. And we believe that it may have sunk in the storm. It's a very large vessel, and it has a copper bottom, or at least a copper clad bottom, which indicates that it was built relatively recently, and it has some very sophisticated joinery. So all the evidence is that it was a very sound and very stout boat, and yet we found it on the bottom of the sea. So that's an indication that it may indeed have sunk in a storm. And we have an archaeologist on board who's been doing research and believes she has begun to track down evidence of which ship that was. And it may indeed be one that sank in a storm several hundred years ago. Thank you for that, Tom. We've got one more question for you. Well, it's actually two that we're going to combine into one. Scott and Erica are asking what got you interested in doing this. And Amber is asking if you could tell us, sort of in a nutshell, what's the whole purpose of the experiment and the expedition this summer? I'll be happy to answer both of those questions. The way or the reason that I became involved in this is because at my school I coach a robotics club, and the robotics club builds an ROV, a remotely operated vehicle every year, to compete in what's called the Mate ROV Challenge. And that's available or open, by the way, to boys and girls clubs as well as schools. And each year we build a remotely operated vehicle, which we launch into a pool to complete a simple, compared to what we're doing here anyway, simple mission, although it's always challenging for us. And because of my connection with the robotics club and because of the school's connection with the Nautilus program, it seemed like I would be a good teacher to send out this summer to report back on the operations of the ROV's board Nautilus. I can also answer Amber's question, the larger question of what's this all about and why are we doing it? And the answer to that question is because we are explorers. This is the core of exploration. We are looking to reveal the unknown. Right now approximately 95% of the world's oceans have never been explored. And when you consider that the oceans constitute a large fraction of the surface area of the Earth, you realize that we're talking about regions larger than any continent that no one has ever seen. And for a long time, that was the only way it could be. We couldn't swim deeply enough. We can't see when it's that dark. We just could not explore the sea the way we've explored dry land. In fact, as you know, we explored the moon and in fact we explored Mars before we were able to really explore the deep, deep parts of the ocean. But now we finally have the technology and Dr. Ballard has the drive and he's put together this core of exploration, brought the technology and the people and the hardware and the drive together, and we are looking to see what it is we're going to find. We're exploring for exploration's sake. Everybody has their own thing they're hoping to see. Maybe it's a settlement. Maybe it's a new form of animal life. Maybe it's some sort of important shipwreck, but we're all just looking to see what's out there. And it's exploration for exploration's sake and I cannot tell you how excited I am to be part of it. I hope that you all will take part too. Follow along in the program. If you go to the website, NautilusLive.org, you can see the video feeds and you can click on the link and ask questions. If you don't have a chance to get back to the library to use their hardware there, you can do it from your home computer on Nautilus at NautilusLive.org. There's a participate tab. Click on that tab and you can write in a question and it will be answered by either me or one of the other educators or one of the scientists or technicians on board. We all love to get those questions. So I hope to hear from some of you very soon. It was great talking to you all. I hope you're having a day. I have to go to work now. It's almost midnight and my work life shift's about to start. So goodbye.