 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It's one o'clock on a Monday afternoon, so you must be watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and today's guests are two of my best friends. We have Cindy Natman from the UH Sea Grant College and Scott Rowland, who is a professor within the Geology and Geophysics Department at UH Manoa. And it's a special topic today, because this is advanced publicity for the open house, which Manoa is holding this coming Friday, October the 20th, and Saturday, October 21st. It's the Soast Open House, which is a great opportunity for everybody watching live to come and talk to a scientist. And Cindy, we've been having these open houses at Manoa for quite a few years now. So what's the goal, and tell the watchers what we're actually planning to see? Yes. Aloha, Pete. Thanks so much for having me on the show. We've actually been having these open houses for 28 years. So this is our 14th Biennial Soast Open House, and the real reason for having it is just to invite all of the public from ages five to 105 to come up to the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus, and to really engage directly with the researchers, the faculty, the graduate students, and the staff, so that they have a chance to share the really exciting research that they're doing each and every day. So there'll be a lot of the faculty who are dropping their research for the day, or stopping teaching classes specifically, do they have exhibits or what sort of plan? Yes, absolutely. There's over 90 exhibits that are planned. And like you said, the faculty and the students are all dropping everything else that they're doing that day and focusing in on the Soast Open House, because we get thousands and thousands of people that come, so it's really a wonderful opportunity for everyone to share what they're doing. Okay, so this isn't the only advanced publicity which we've been having for the Open House. Basically, you've already contacted, what, general public schools? We have, as a matter of fact, on Friday, that's our busiest day, and we get up to 5,000 students that are coming with their schools. So they've all signed up in advance, they come up on the buses, and they have a very organized day with all of the school groups. And then Saturday is much more, a little more relaxed, and we encourage families to come and bring their students, and a lot of people, their students came on Friday, and they're so excited about it that they'd like to bring their parents, their siblings to the Saturday. And Saturday is 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., correct. And then our campus on Friday is 8.30 to 2 p.m., okay. That's correct. This is a lot of effort, Scott, and you've been a faculty member for many years, and you must have been through quite a few of these Open Houses. I think I've been part of every single one, actually doing various activities, and it's really a fun opportunity for so as students and faculty and staff to show the public who pay our salaries what we do, and try and get them as excited about those topics as we are. Okay, well, we've been talking a little bit about the crowns. Let's just go to the first image, which I think will give the viewers a little bit better understanding of what is actually laid on, and this is outside of the post-building. And Scott, you as the volcanologist, what we're looking at here is an area that seems to be roped off, and we've got a plastic dustbin. Right, you're a volcanologist. Just give us an example of what kind of exhibit is here. We've got lots of kids sat down in the foreground. What are they waiting for? They are waiting for an explosion, and this is a demonstration of what actually drives explosive volcanic eruptions, so the type of eruptions that we don't have in Hawaii most of the time, but basically it's expanding gas is what drives a volcanic explosion. And in this case, the expanding gas is nitrogen that's poured into a soda bottle and allowed to go from liquid nitrogen form to nitrogen gas form, and when it does that, it expands a huge amount and basically explodes the bottle. And so we put the bottle in a rubbish can held down with bricks and there's water in the rubbish can and a whole bunch of plastic balls so that when it does explode, it does make a big boom and all the stuff flies out and you get a sense of what a really tiny explosion would be like. So a high school student if she was watching this particular exhibit would learn a little bit about explosive volcanoes. You could certainly learn about explosive volcanoes. You could learn a little bit about chemistry because converting from liquid to gas is a chemistry process. With the balls that go in the water and fly out, you could learn a little bit about physics because they're going to fly different directions depending on whether they go straight up or off to the side and so on. So there's really a lot to be learned in there. And the emphasis would be on a lot of the STEM sciences which we've talked about on the show before in terms of math and physics and chemistry and that sort of thing. That's right. I mean this is a demonstration. One could do all of these experiments in a very quantitative way if you wanted to. And presumably the more quantitative or more detailed would be the kind of discussion that would be best done on the Saturday partly because we have many of the famous scientists from UH there. Am I correct? That is correct. Let's go on to the next slide because I think Cindy it's the variety which I've always been most enthused about for Soast Open Houses. And with Sea Grant College, I've had people from Sea Grant on the show before but here we're seeing I think a number of marine exhibits. Is that correct? Yes. Actually the most wonderful thing about the Soast Open House is that it goes from you learn about everything from the absolute deep sea to the earth to the atmospheric sciences all the way up through space. So yes we can share information about absolutely anything that anyone is interested in and this image here is I believe this was the sea moor which was learning about the tiny little microbes in the ocean. Okay and the next slide I think will show us something about sea spiders. So there's something for everybody. Absolutely. Like I was just saying you can come and you can have hands-on exhibits or anything from you can touch snails and cowry shells and see what critters they bring up from the very deep ocean and there's even exhibits about humpback whales and sea turtles and a lot of them. Presumably visitors to the open house can actually have long discussions and also decide with the research scientists to actually go and make these discoveries. Yes I mean the people are so enthusiastic about what they do that they really love engaging with both the students and the families and the public about the information that they're gleaning each and every day. Right. And now I know Scott you're a geologist so I think the next image will show us something about some of looking at thin sections in rocks. Is this correct or looking at something similar? I was thinking we'll be seeing in the next slide after this one we'll have some luminescent rocks. So what would you be telling a student if she was to come and take a look at these fluorescent rocks? I think you would be telling the student that certain types of minerals or certain minerals have this property of fluorescence and if you were a geologist trying to know if one of those minerals is in a rock or not one of the easiest things to do is to shine some ultraviolet light onto it and see whether or not that rock fluoresces. Right. And so I mean obviously if a student's only grown up here in Hawaii we see very few differences in the rocks. Fluorescent rocks that's right. To recognize that there are different types of rocks on the mainland or internationally must be quite a revelation for a young student. Oh I think indeed and I think it's important for students not only to learn about Hawaii itself but to learn about other parts of the world and you never know where you're going to end up at college or working sometime in the future so we should know about those other things. Oh indeed, yes, yes. And in fact we actually have an ultraviolet light source and camera on the Mars rover and we've looked for ultraviolet minerals. We haven't found any yet. And for the viewing public let me just point out that Scott is a member of one of the science teams working on the Mars Curiosity rover which is right now on the surface of Mars. Right this minute. Are you going to be talking about that at the open house as well Scott? I don't think so. I'm going to be playing with wax lava flows and demonstrating a more terrestrial thing. But we will get to your wax models in a minute but I believe there are people at Soast who do Mars research that if a member of the general public was interested in planetary exploration and they came along and found you at the open house and then said Scott tell me more about Mars Curiosity rover. I would do my best. You would do your best. And I would also tell them that there are many many Mars displays and experts beyond me that they should go talk to as well. You appoint them in the direction of your colleagues. Yeah I would certainly be happy to talk to them but there are many folks who are Mars experts who including yourself who will be available. Okay now Cindy you're in the Sea Grant program. Yes that's correct. Is this kind of public outreach something which Sea Grant specializes in? We absolutely do. We really love taking all of the science that happens on the university campus and bringing it directly out to the general public so that they can use it and make use of it in a way that's relevant and important to them. So just as one example at the Soast Open House on Friday and Saturday we have an exhibit that's hosted by Sea Grant that's talking about the king tides. So you probably will remember just a few months ago there was a lot of news and information about what happened. We had Sea Grant on the show in fact. That's right. That's right. So people can come to our Sea Grant exhibit and learn more about what makes king tides, why this particular summer was so much more, the tide was higher than it had been in previous years. And yes so that's really a specialty of Sea Grant is to take this very complex science and make sure that it's accessible and important to the public. And you're an education coordinator for Sea Grant which basically you're not doing the actual research yourself so you get to go and talk to all these other scientists on a daily basis or whatever. That's right. To learn something. Now if a member of the general public was really interested in say coral reefs or you mentioned sea level rise or other impacts of climate change is that the sort of time when they can come and talk to one of the scientists about this? Yes it is. As a matter of fact I mentioned that there's 90 exhibits that are happening throughout and a lot of them are focused specifically on coral reefs a lot of them are specifically focused on sea level rise and the impacts of them and if anyone has any questions at all about really any topic they can take a look at the program once they get there and hone in on specific exhibits that are talking about their interests or they can walk around and they can just interact with the scientists and really ask any question that comes to mind. And of course there's a welcoming booth actually at Open House many of the people that I've had on this show in the past have come from SOEST so if the viewers are really interested in one particular aspect of Earth Science they can go to the information booth to start off with find out where that particular person is located. That's right and actually they can even do that in advance if they'd like. They can go to the SOEST Open House website which is hawaii.ed... soest.hawaii.edu forward slash s-o-e-s-t dot hawaii h-a-w-a-i dot edu forward slash Open House. Okay, well that sounds really good. Well I guess we're going to hear a little bit more Scott about the volcanology you've brought along a model but we're almost at the break time so can you just tell me a little bit more about what kinds of things you're trying to explain to the viewing public when you come to a volcanology experiment? Sure, I think everyone would understand that volcanic eruptions and volcanic features are things that you often can't get very close to and you certainly can't control but if you want to do some sort of experiment to understand how they work then you need a model. You need a small scale not quite as hot, not quite as big, not quite as fast version of the real thing. Sure. And many people use such models to try and understand how lava flows advance, how lava flows cool, what makes them go where they want to go and so on. And so our particular display at Open House involves making quote-unquote lava flows out of wax and flowing them, just heating them on a hot plate and pouring them from a pan. Which must be particularly relevant as we live in Hawaii and we've got a killer way of volcano going off virtually all the time and trying to understand how the landscape has been produced not only on the big island but presumably in the past here on Oahu as well. That's exactly right. Well we'll come back to your experiment in a few minutes time but we're almost time for the break so let me just remind the viewers you are watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and my guests today are Cindy Nattman who is an education coordinator with the UH Sea Grant College and Dr. Scott Rowland who is a professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at UH Manoa. And we'll be right back in about a minute's time. See you then. This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. And welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and my guests today are Cindy Nattman who is an education coordinator at UH Sea Grant program and Dr. Scott Rowland professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. And Scott let's come back to you because you're talking a little bit about doing models of volcanic eruptions and I believe you brought along an image of a particular experiment which you conduct at Open House and can you just explain what it is we're looking at here? Sure. My two young assistants there are pouring melted wax onto a sloping board and as you can see we've... this was late in the Open House from two years ago. We've been... at the time had been pouring wax lava flows onto this slope for two days and we had built up quite a nice shield volcano. Pretty good model of what Kilauea or Manoa look like made of in that case few tens of thousands of flows if not hundreds of thousands not quite so many here. And it's not shown in this image but we have a thermal video camera that we will have set up as well and so in addition to watching the actual wax flows go down the slope you'll be able to look at how those flows cool with times as they move down the slope and just sit there. And that was a big example which you had at the last Open House if you brought along a model. A small one. So let's just play a what-if kind of situation. Explain to Cindy what it is that you're actually looking at. This is a small version of the large volcano and this was put together by a colleague of ours named Tom Shea who's teaching a class specifically about lava flows and he has a little boy and the little boy sacrificed a few of his color crayons to change the colors a little bit. And I'm not sure quite how many flows are shown there probably 5 or 6 episodes of emplacement and you can see how the flows have moved down the slope and they've gone around previous flows some of them have gotten long and skinny, others are a little bit shorter and fatter and again real lava flows are certainly exciting to study in real life and it's important to study them in real life but many times it's not as practical and so this would be a model of a flow emplacement process that would be very useful to try and understand how flows advance, how they cool what makes them go one way or another way and so on. And this would be a great analog to Kaimuki Shield for example. It could be that Kaimuki Shield or all of Manaloa or volcanoes on Mars could take a section through part of the model and so you could see the different layers like when we drive over to Kailua on the Pali Highway there's that lovely road cutting on the right hand side. We did exactly that after the last open house we basically didn't break it apart until the whole thing was over because we wanted it to look nice for everyone who came to visit but in the process of breaking it down we cut it into some pieces and just like a real volcano exposed in a cliff this cliff was only 2 inches tall we could see all the little layers of wax that were behaving just like layers of lava so it really was a good analog on many levels. Cindy, do we ever see students being inspired actually by coming to the open house? Do we have any? Absolutely. There are so many students that are already a little bit interested in science that just come and really decide after being able to like you said talk directly to some of the researchers that are actually out there doing the science every day and they make their connections and they hopefully will pursue careers in STEM which is science, technology, engineering or math. And I would imagine that if an undergraduate who hadn't declared her major yet came along to this open house as well you can actually interact with the scientists we have like the global environmental studies program for example that motivates students and I think also that's why it's so important that we have so many graduate students and undergraduate students participating and actually having exhibits because they can really connect well with the students and say you know I was in your same situation just a few years ago and this is the path that I pursued and this is how much fun I'm having and look at all the cool science I get to do every day The regular viewers at this particular show will know that I'll often ask the guests how did you get involved in this particular line of work? Well I would imagine the open house itself really enables a visitor a high school student or even parents of students to actually make this particular connection It really does, yes for me in particular I've always loved the ocean I grew up right next to it and really loved wanting to just tell people about it and make it important to them instead of being able to you know have the science happening in a lab that doesn't have any application or impact on the students so yeah I think the SOAS Open House is the perfect way of doing that And you say that there are 90 different exhibits so let's randomly take a look at the next slide for example and just talk a little bit more about the diversity we've seen if we can go to the next slide maybe we can see so for example who would like to take this one can you tell us a little bit about looks like we've got a rocket in the left hand side Sure I hope folks know that UH Manoa has a rocketry program I should say not rocketry I mean they're actually working to launch satellites into space and will be one of very few universities in the whole world with that capability and it's a joint venture between SOAS and the College of Engineering and it involves probably 100 or so students and faculty with everything from engineering to electronics to physics understanding the orbits and rockets propulsion and what are we going to do with the data once we start collecting them so it's a huge enterprise and a little old UH Manoa is doing it it's pretty impressive and trying to participate in some of these space missions and if you're on the Mars mission right now I know that there's like a dozen other faculty members in SOAS who are also on either planetary missions or satellite science teams which are currently in Earth orbit sort of thing so Manoa seems to be a world class institution in many of these different fields right and in the oceanography area we've got people who are working Station Aloha which is this that's right facility and talk a bit more about that they'll actually be a representative from Station Aloha at this year's SOAS Open House so they can come and talk directly to them Tell the viewers more what is Station Aloha A little bit about that A little bit, Station Aloha is a set of instruments that are attached to an undersea phone cable or telecommunications cable out to the northeast of the Hawaiian islands and there are seismic data temperature gauges, pressure gauges a number of instruments that the cable was already there because it's a telecommunications cable and so it was a really great utilization of an existing resource for getting those kinds of ocean graphic data from the remote place and the remote place is four and a half kilometers under, below sea level on the ocean floor this is a really hard to get to exciting kind of data set Let's move on to another look because it's the variety of open house which I think is really exciting Scott you mentioned that you've got a thermal infrared camera that appears to be the image in the background behind the young lady with the glasses, is that correct? That is correct, there are a number of utilization of thermal cameras in earth science and these folks are demonstrating one and you can see how people have different temperatures to them, their hands are warmer than their torsos if someone were to open their mouth you would see it's pretty warm inside there on the very right hand side of that colorful screen you can see there's somebody with glasses on and you can see how cool the glasses are compared to the person's head so thermal cameras get used in many many different types of scientific and other applications and they're really great to demonstrate how those work So the color image we see here is probably just a a crowd pleaser but I understand that actually within SOEST researchers are building their own thermal infrared cameras either to fly in orbit or to go and study the volcano so that would be an entry point for a high school student to look at the actual image and say oh there's this literally cold or hot but then there's this follow on from the research point of view where you can really get some understanding of why is a thermal infrared camera so important You're right, it's a crowd pleaser but you also have to remember who are the people giving these little demonstrations and it's pretty hard to keep these scientists down that road of why this is so cool what it can be applied to so you're right it starts out as a crowd pleaser but if all you want is a pretty picture you better get away quick because you're going to get those explanations pretty soon and it's because everybody's so enthusiastic about what we do and we really want people to understand the depth of these techniques and this science we don't want people to have a superficial image of how it works Cindy is there any better time for people to come along? I know that it's two days and it starts early in the morning just come early and stay late both days Yes, well if you're a family then I would suggest coming on Saturday instead of Friday just because on Friday we get so many school groups that you might not have as much of an opportunity to talk directly to the faculty or the graduate students as you would on Saturday So again Saturday is from 8 to 2pm And can you give us the web address so that people can figure out what would be their priorities to go into? Certainly, there's a map and there's the program and everything that anyone needs to know is available on the web so it's www.soest which is s-o-e-s-t dot hawaii h-a-w-a-i-i dot edu forward slash open house and there are different exhibits and presumably it's the same material on both days but in more detail probably That's right, and for each of the 90 exhibits there is a sentence or two informational Okay, and everybody Scott will come and see your waxed volcano Is that the plan? Hopefully everybody will see something that really grabs them Something that really excites them, that's right Well it sounds terrific, we're going to be doing a live broadcast from the first about of Soast Open House on this coming Friday so hopefully we'll get a chance to come and see some of the exhibits but unfortunately we're out of time so let me just remind our viewers that you have been watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa I've been your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and my guests today have been Cindy Nattman from UH Sea Grant Program and Dr. Scott Rowland from the Department of Geology and Geophysics and let me remind you that the insanity goes to the Soast Open House You'll have lots of fun and learn an awful lot about Earth Science So thanks for watching and see you again next week, goodbye I'm a TV star So what we're looking at there's a couple of monitors come and sit where I sit Okay So that one there would be the monitor camera which is looking at me when I induce it but this one sometimes people want to read a squid and they've heard of a teleprompter so sometimes that one's there and then this is the screen which we look at when we're actually talking about some of the pictures Yeah and this camera