 This is State Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. And welcome to our live outside broadcast today. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and today we're actually on location at the School of Ocean, Earth Science and Technology's open house. So we're on the UH Monoa campus, and this is a really special event. Every two years, they have an open house, and they display a whole variety of their science and research to the whole community. And we've got literally thousands of school kids here today from DOE. We're trying to instill in them excitement for science, math and engineering with a whole variety of things. And for background, the School of Ocean, Earth Science and Technology covers many different things of earth science. So we've got oceanographers who are studying not only the ocean floor, but also the circulation of ocean currents, as well as looking at microbes within the ocean. And then we have people who are concerned about Hawaii's coastline. We're soon talked to somebody from the Sea Grant program about how we're trying to preserve our coral reefs and our shoreline and the threat of sea level rise. We have meteorologists here who worry about hurricanes, which might be affecting Hawaii. And then we have a whole series of earth science projects. And earth science might be volcanoes, or it might be tsunamis, or it might be earthquakes. And then within the school as well, as viewers to ThinkTech already know, we have a variety of people who are studying different planets. So we have people who are looking at the geology of Mars. We're looking at meteorites. We're looking at very detailed aspects of how the solar system was put together. But as you can look around and we can take a look and see, we've got a whole variety of different exhibits here. And let's just take a look. We're going to take a walk down here just for a short minute. We're going to see some of the educational aspects that SOAST is involved in. And basically we've got youngsters who are learning here about the various fisheries around the coast of Hawaii, as well as how we can actually preserve. Sea Grant program here in Hawaii, for example, runs the visitor center at Hanama Bay. So it's really important that locals understand how we need to preserve and protect our coastal ecosystem. Fisheries are an important thing, not only as a food supply, but also for attracting tourists. Tourist dollars are really important as well. So as we go further along here, we've got a variety of individual instrumentation. And we've got here a particular exhibit. John, can you tell me what it is? You're live on Think Tech Hawaii, which is a local science program. Can you just tell us a little bit about what the exhibit is here? So today we're demonstrating how we use sonar or sound waves to make maps of the seafloor. So in the ocean, this light only penetrates through the top few hundred feet or so. So we can't see anything using light in the deeper ocean. So what we do, so what we have over here is a model research ship. On the bottom of that little ship there is a transducer that's emitting sound waves. And then it basically listens for the echo off the seafloor. So based on how long it takes for the sound to get back to the ship, we can say how far away the seafloor is so we can get depth measurements of the seafloor. And John, this is important not only if you're trying to do the geology of the ocean floor, but also presumably oceanographers are interested in how deep the ocean is, which would influence ocean circulation. Is that correct? Yes, yes. You can also see things like shipwrecks and things like that. You can see even you can see large schools of fish in the water. The sound will reflect off a large school of fish. So fish finders that people use in lakes and stuff like that. It's the same technology. And I understand in the Department of Ocean Resources Engineering, there are people who study the acoustic properties of the ocean trying to infer what the salinity is at various levels or what the temperature distribution is. And all of that feeds into the kind of work which you're just describing here. And I'm intrigued by the actual piece of hardware. Was this built especially for this demo because it looks... Yes, actually I was the one that built most of the frame. Another guy did all the programming and electronics part of it. But yes, we had an earlier version of this that was a wooden frame and then we were able to get a grant to build a nicer version of it. All right, so outreach, community education is another important thing of what you're doing. All right, well, thank you very much, John. Thank you. All right, let's go back. As we were talking about oceanography, we have a display. Many of the investigators in our Oceanography Department had sourced. They actually go and they study the ocean floor and they look for various fish and various microbes. So in another exhibit just along here, we'll see some of the live video from the ocean floor. And as you can see, as we just walk along here, we've got a large number of students. We have over 6,000 students who are actually attending this particular event. And what, as we're just passing by here, what we're seeing is part of the Sea Grant College Program. And those of you who are regular viewers of Thick Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa will know that last Monday, we had two people from SOES who are coming here to talk about the open house. And in front of me now, we have Cindy Natman, who is the Outreach Coordinator for the Sea Grant College Program. Cindy, good to see you again. Aloha Pete, it's great to see you too. The day finally arrived. The day is finally arrived and we're standing in front of the Sea Grant exhibit now. We're surrounded by students. But can you just give us a brief introduction again to what Sea Grant Program does here at Manoa? Certainly. So the Sea Grant Program falls under the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. And we really think of ourselves as one of the outreach arms of SOES. We do a lot of outreach and education directly to the community and try to bridge the university and the scientists and the community and make sure that all the fascinating science that's happening here makes its way to the community and people that can use it. And obviously, getting the science to the community is just the first step. Trying to help people use this information to improve their own lives. Whether it's going to Hanama Bay to see the fish, avoiding the monk seal at Kairana Beach, or just trying to... Where do they build houses along the coastline in the advent of sea level rise? All of that is covered by Sea Grant, correct? That's exactly right. We try to make sure that we really understand what the needs of the community are. And we try to identify the extension faculty and the work that we do based on those needs. And you mentioned extension faculty. I believe there's about 50 such people who are scattered all around the Pacific Basin. That's not just based here in Manoa. Is that correct? That's right. So actually Sea Grant is comprised of about 45 people total. So that's all of our administrative staff and our extension faculty. And yes, we're based all throughout the Hawaiian Islands and also down in American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. And for our viewers, we're talking about Sea Grant. But in addition, recognize that SOAST is in charge of the Space Grant College Program, which is funded not by NOAA, as in the case of Sea Grant, but by NASA. And then there's another program, the Land Grant Program, which is operated by our College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. That is also here on campus. So UH Manoa really has this emphasis to try and get scientific information, practical knowledge out to our community. So this is a major role of what we try to do here at the university. So Cindy, thank you very much. We're going to take a look at the ocean floor. Maybe you can join us and you can tell us a bit about the ocean floor as well. I can walk in with you. I certainly can. All right, Ian. Our cameraman Ian is going to come in with me and we're going to try and see what it is we've got here on the ocean floor. And as you can see, we've got some high technology here. We've got a class that is basically looking at a computer display screen. And what this display screen is showing is the ocean floor. And we can tell that the depth of the water here is over a kilometer. So it's almost a mile underwater. And one of the things which some of our faculty have been doing in source is to go down into the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest part of the earth's ocean floor. And they've been discovering new fish. They've been trying to understand the geology. And some of you may have heard of the term plate tectonics. Well, the Mariana Trench is where two of the plates collide and one dives underneath the other and trying to understand how that operates, how the geological properties of the earth's surface really operate, why the ocean floors are much younger than the continents, for example. We've got a whole variety of geologists here at SOES who are trying to understand volcanic processes, earthquakes, as well as the general characteristics like the magnetic anomalies or the gravity variations on the earth's surface. And this is important because understanding the way plate tectonics operates is also important for trying to understand things like the distribution of earthquakes and volcanoes. And what we can see here is SOES has both its own unmanned research vessel, which will go down to water depths of over six kilometers. And we've also had faculty who have been involved in trying to go down in submarines. SOES has two submarines which could go down to over two kilometers and going down to actually see with your own eyes what some of the geologists. It's really spectacular. I did it myself back in the 80s with the submarine Alvin. And you really get a different perspective. It's just like going to explore a new planet, for example, because its cold visibility is really poor. You can only see about 50 feet around you and it's just a totally alien environment. So let's move on and we'll try and find some other research activity here. And unfortunately throughout this morning's show, we're not going to have a chance to see everything because there's actually about five different buildings worth of exhibits and we've only got a fraction of the time. Many of them are inside laboratories. Many of them are in areas which we can't really get to in a short period of time. But let's just walk out here. We go through a corridor and what we've got through this part of the facility is a variety of geology exhibits as well as a variety of marine related activities. So you can see that we're occupying yet another part of the school's facilities out here in the courtyard. Let's go and take a look at some of the exhibits over here. And what we've got is a whole variety of earth scientists. We've talked to people with Sea Grant who are interested about marine geology. But what we're going to do right now is we're going to walk over and we can see they've got an exhibit of how a volcano explodes. And exploding volcanoes are things which we don't have here in Hawaii but trying to understand the distribution of lava flows where volcanic risks are also really important. So if we can wander over here and take a look, we're getting really close to having a demonstration of what an explosive volcano would look like. Some of you might remember Mount Pinatubo which erupted in 1991 or Mount St. Helens which erupted in 1980. What we're trying to do here is to show the students some of the physics behind why a volcano explodes. And basically what we're going to have is we're going to have a container full of dry ice. It's probably a soda bottle filled with dry ice which will be really cold. And once it's put into a bucket of water, that dry ice is going to start heating up and as it heats up it's going to expand and as it expands it's going to explode. And I think we might actually be just a few minutes too early for this particular exhibit. So let's come back here in a couple of minutes time and we'll see some of the demonstration over here for example. And let me just say how many students are actually around the facility here today. As we look around you can see literally we've got dozens of exhibits and around every single exhibit. We've got little clusters of school kids. Soast Open House is happening today, Friday, but also remember it's open also on Saturday tomorrow from 10 in the morning to 2 p.m. in the afternoon on the UH Manoa campus outside the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. So if you're watching this show live and you say, oh I wish I could have come along to see some of the exhibits, talk to some of the scientists, get a better understanding of what the research is doing and why it's relevant to people in Hawaii or my child would like to have seen some of these exhibits. Come along tomorrow between 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. There won't be so many people so you'll have a great chance to talk to a variety of the research scientists one on one and if you've got any questions whether it's about say the recent discovery of the two colliding black holes way out in space or whether you want to talk to an oceanographer who's dived in the submarine down to the depths of the ocean floor or you're concerned about hurricanes or volcanic eruptions. This is a place to come tomorrow, Saturday, between 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. So we've got a break in the activity here but here we've got Dr. Brian Gleeser who was on our show a few weeks ago. If I'm just in your mind, Brian, you've been on Think Tech Hawaii. We are live right now. This is Dr. Brian Gleeser. Brian, can you tell us a little bit about your exhibit, please? Of course. So over there, they're talking about volcanoes. Here I've got a model of Luihi, which is our newest volcano coming up off the Big Island. I like to go to Luihi when it's not erupting and take expensive equipment like this with ROVs and understand the chemistry and microbiology of the system. But we also do that around Oahu. So you can go to Sandy's Beach and find where air and water and waves and sand mixed together and look like this. Or you can go to Heia Fishpond in the mangroves and find not beach that looks like this. So, Pete, let me get you to have a smell. Yeah. Yeah, it's very stinky. What about this one? That's even what I say. Yeah, right. So they're both black. There's no air mixing into these. One's really bad. One's kind of bad. What if I told you you could taste salt in this one and no salt in this one? What's the source of the salt? It must be seawater. Seawater. So different kinds of organisms live in seawater or freshwater and mix. Take a breath. We breathe oxygen. Bacteria breathe different things. So what we like to do is build sensors to help us measure the chemistry and the biology of the oceans. And you've got another group of students here. So what is it that you're trying to tell them? Inspire them to do marine sciences. If you like chemistry, we can understand the chemistry and how that reacts with life. If you don't like chemistry or biology, but you like to be a computer programmer, we need new tools to understand how the science works in the oceans. And back here, they'll be telling you more about the engineering. And we just missed one of the volcanic eruptions, which you haven't. No, need a watch. And the third table back here talks more about the science going on in Haiti of Fishpond. Great, great. So if you're a high school student or middle school student interested in chemistry or in engineering or physical oceanography, you're the place to come. We can do it all. We can do it all. Terrific, Brian. It's good to see you again and good luck with the exhibit. Okay. All right, let's keep wandering around. We're sorry we missed the explosion. We have it on tape from an earlier part of the show. So maybe we can cut that in later on. But let's wander over here. It's a major challenge to walk backwards through all these school kids though, because we've got so many people here. But let's see what we have over in this exhibit. And we have Andrea Gabrioli quite often on the show on Think Tech Hawaii. So let's come and take a look and see what he's doing over here. It looks like in addition to doing explosive volcanic eruptions, Andrea is showing us how you build a volcano out of lava flows, very similar to volcanoes that we have here in Hawaii. Kilauea is active right now. But of course, Oahu would have been just like Kilauea maybe three million years ago. So if we can zoom in on what Andrea is doing, we had Scott Rowland on the show last Monday and Scott was showing us a small version of this active lava flow. And what we're actually seeing in this screen, this is a whole series of molten wax and the molten wax simulates active lava flows. And what we've got on the computer screen, we've also got one of these thermal cameras which is showing temperatures. So we're actually able to tell the way in which the lava flows are cooling and whether or not they are stopping or flowing down the slope because they've run out of, in this case, molten wax, but also whether or not they're changing the temperature. And I got Sarah Fajens there. Sarah, can you come over? Dr. Sarah Fajens is another of the faculty members here in SOAST and she's a specialist in doing the American modeling. Good morning, Sarah. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're demonstrating here? Well, what we're doing today is we're making lava flows out of wax and we're varying the rates at which we pour the lava onto the surface here to show how different effusion rates affect how far the lava will flow. We also have two different types of demonstration here. We have the can over on the far side which is constantly erupting lava onto the surface here which shows the different types of shapes and lava tubes and lava channels that we can form from our wax lava simulant. And on the other side we have here a volcano, a wax volcano that has periodic eruptions, so shorter eruptions. And we can see the different shapes that are being produced as a result. We're building a wax volcano. Now, of course, you've been on Think, Take, Hawaii yourself talking about volcanic eruptions on other planets. How would this exhibit have to be changed to think about an eruption on another planet? Well, if we could somehow change the gravity that we were operating under here, we could simulate eruptions on Mars, for example. Other planets have different atmospheres as well, so Mars has a much lower atmospheric pressure than we have on Earth and that might cause these eruptions to be more explosive perhaps than we see on Earth. Eruption on the Moon have no atmosphere whatsoever. We might see very different cooling conditions on different planetary atmospheres. But the takeaway would be it's possible either in the laboratory or as your speciality is numerical modeling. Once you've got the basic ideas from an experiment such as this on Earth, in Earth gravity, in Earth's atmosphere, you can take that physical process and then understand what the role of gravity might be, what the role of different changes in magma composition might be, presumably, and so forth. Exactly right. We can develop our numerical models by looking very closely at what we see under terrestrial conditions and then we can change the parameters in the models. We can swap out the gravity for a Mars gravity or a Mars pressure and then we can apply those models to other planets and try to match up the predictions of the models with the sizes and shapes of the landforms that we can see on planets such as Mars. And of course, on my show, I always ask the planetary guests, who cares? What do you think you learn that if you're teaching a student about planetary volcanology, why should that be of relevance to people in Hawaii? Well, I mean, it's all about how the universe works, how our solstice informed and evolved over time. In studying other planets, we can also look back at the Earth and get insights into what early Earth might have been like. For example, Io has very, very hot eruptions and early on in Earth history, we had possibly very similar eruptions. So by looking at a body like Io, which is one of Jupiter's moons, we can get a glimpse back into early Earth history and understand how our own planet evolved. And presumably, this sort of information also feeds back with the recent Puna lava flows from Kilauea. You want to know when they're going to start or how far they're going to go. So there are relevant things that people in Hawaii can learn from the kind of experiments, right? Oh, absolutely, yes. We can develop these models, apply them onto other planets, apply them back to our planets to try and understand the hazards posed by such lava. So anyway, well, we need to move on. It's starting to rain, which is unfortunate, but we'll thank you again, Sarah, and we'll look forward to having you on the show again in the near future, all right. So let's move down here. We'll try and stay in the drive for the cameraman and we go on to a completely different set of exhibits. Here we're looking primarily at some activities related to... I don't know what. This is kind of interesting. We've got a lot of... Let me ask this young man here. What are you here for? You're on Think Tech Hawaii. Field trip? Field trip. This is great. This is a field trip. Are you a scientist? Are you going to be a scientist when you draw up? Yeah? Are you getting excited? What do you think is the most exciting thing about the exhibits you've seen so far? Um... I don't know. The explosions, huh? Yeah? How about you? Did you enjoy the explosion? Mm-hmm. Yeah? It's exciting, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. Well, let's see if we can find something else just down here. I'm not sure Ian, our cameraman, is trying to stay dry, so we'll go around here. And obviously, we've got students of all ages from elementary school students to a whole variety of high school students. Some of the activities, such as what we're seeing right now, is primarily to just get the younger students really engaged in trying to understand the environment, recognizing that they're saying, ah, there's physical laws, I don't know, you have physical laws. Recognizing that they're saying, ah, there's physical laws, that you have to be respectful of the environment, whether or not you're looking, say, ah, I think we're seeing some seaweed over here, and we're trying to produce illustrations of wild animals and that sort of thing. So, although obviously at the university, we teach a whole series of courses both for undergraduate and graduate students, we see this as part of our role as a state university to actually engage the local community. So whether you've got a child who's like six or seven years old and is really trying to understand what she wants to do as a career, here's something that's really important for them to study, or if you're a PhD student and you're trying to understand how to build a remote sensing instrument to better understand what's going on there. So all of these kinds of exhibits we'll try and find somebody who we can talk to. Here we've got somebody from Fish and Wildlife. You do not have a name tag, but can I just say hello? You're live on Think Take Away. Tell us your name and what you're showing. My name is Amy Olive. I'm the education and outreach specialist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. I'm showing albatross boluses. It's basically the undigestible bits from an albatross' stomach. So before they fled, before they become adults, they are able to regurgitate or throw up everything in their stomach that they can't digest. So we find things like squid beechs, which we love to find, but we also find things like plastics and fishing line. So this is a coated albatross bolus just to make it. And so would you go to Kiana Point or some of the western islands where they say in Ireland where obviously there aren't as many people? You can go to Kiana Point. Obviously there aren't as many breeding pairs at Kiana Point, so you don't find quite as many. But we get our boluses from Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in Papahana Mukuakea Marine National Monument because it is the largest albatross colony in the world. And you're showing us an old toothbrush and we've heard a lot about the explosion of plastic in the open ocean. Is this a concern for birds as well as animals? What can we do about it? It is a concern. Luckily albatrosses are able to regurgitate. They're able to throw up all this plastic in their stomachs. So it's not as big of a concern in certain species of birds. Other species, they're not able to regurgitate like the albatross. And of course we're looking at large pieces of plastic. It's actually a real problem I understand. All the smaller pieces of plastic which might get into the food chain. So what we're looking at here, this toothbrush obviously that's pretty easy to clear up because the microscopic pieces of plastic are the real problem, correct? Yeah, that's correct. The microscopic pieces are able to make its way through the food chain even into the fish that we eat. So that microplastics will get into our systems if we're not careful. Well, thank you very much. And it's great to see somebody here from fish and wildlife. I hope you're having a very productive, so-so open house. So thank you for spending a few minutes. Now of course, here in Hawaii we're really concerned about a whole variety of earth science. We mentioned ocean plastics. We've mentioned something about sea level rise as well as trying to inspire the next generation. So what I hope we've given you a brief glimpse of is the diversity of research which is being conducted here at SOS, the School of Ocean, Earth Science and Technology at the UH Manoa campus. This is just one of the schools at the Manoa campus. So, you know, whenever you hear about what is UH Manoa doing, does it get too much money? One of our key missions is to help the state with a whole variety of things. So I hope you've had at least a glimpse this morning about what SOS is doing to help the community. We have world-class scientists here. And hopefully if you have the time tomorrow, Saturday, come along to the second day of the open house, Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at UH Manoa campus. So hope you enjoy the show and talk to you again on Think Tech Hawaii, researching Manoa every Monday at 1 o'clock. Goodbye from now. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mar. Goodbye.