What is a soliton?

To help me explain, I want you to think about these situations:

Situation #1: Imagine jumping in to the water. Waves would spread out in all directions around you, making bigger and bigger circles.

Situation #2: Now imagine that the when you jump in the water, waves only spread in one direction. There’s no circle getting bigger, just a line of waves traveling in one direction at a constant speed.

I’ve jumped in water lots of times, and the waves have always acted like situation #1. Situation #1 is also how waves have acted when I’ve thrown things in the water or seen fish jump out of the water. It’s just how waves act.

Solitons are a special kind of wave that acts like situation #2. Really. This is one of those times when science gets weird. It doesn’t happen often, but if the tides are just right, the time of year is just right, and the location is just right, solitons will form.

One of the really wonderful things about being a scientist is that I’m allowed to forget everything else for a while to study just one thing. Imagine the most interesting thing you’ve done in school all year and getting to do that for as long as you like. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last few days with solitons. I’ve been looking at figures, equations, and maps, trying to understand everything that has happened.

An important thing to know about solitons is that they’re internal waves. That means that they’re not on the surface of the water, but they’re inside the water where colder and warmer water meet (7th & 8th grade science club: remember the tank experiment?). Most of our measurements have to be below the water. However, there is a sign on the surface of the water that a soliton is going by: a band of breaking waves in an otherwise calm sea. It looks so unusual that sailors back in 1922 wrote about it but had no idea why it happened. Here’s what it looks like:

The whitecaps (those breaking waves) might not look big, but they were stretched out in a huge line across the horizon. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before.

Don’t worry if you don’t really understand what a soliton is, or why they're important. Most college students don’t even know what an internal wave is, and certainly don’t know what solitons are. So you’re already ahead of the game.

Q & A with class 8Awesome

Hi everyone! It’s great to hear from all of you. You asked some excellent questions, and I’m going to try to answer all of them.

-What happened to your friend Jake's bracelet? Did it shrink? Did it break? Did it remain unchanged?
Jake’s bracelet came up looking exactly the same as it did when it went down. But now he can tell all of his friends that his bracelet has been down to the bottom of the ocean.

-How do the drawings look? Have they changed size too? Can you still read our names?
The drawings are very clear and very tiny! Yes, I can still read your names

-Can we get more data from the big yellow thing (Shaliyah)... AKA the CTD?
I’ll do some more posts with CTD data. I’m also going to try and find someone to explain to you how all of the instruments on the CTD work.

-Will you be going underwater at all too? Can you send cameras underwater?
We’re all staying on the boat. People do send cameras underwater, but we won’t be. Sorry about that. Most of the things we study can’t be seen even with a camera – they have to be understood from the data.

-Try to get pictures of wildlife too!
I’m trying! I saw whales yesterday but by the time I ran inside and got my camera, they were gone.

-What's the next experiment you're going to do?
Check out the post about the mooring! That’s a big experiment. The next one will be our study of solitons. Solitons are a very special kind of wave. I’ll do a post on them once I collect data.

And now for the sunsets:
Abby – we don’t have daylight savings time in the Philippines. But I agree that it could have effected the sunsets if I thought I was taking my photos at the same time every day and forgot to account for the changing of the clocks!

Bryan – they may have been at slightly different times of day, you’re right. I think that the bottom photo was taken earlier in the evening than the middle photo was.

Ms. Brooks – I agree. There’s lots of pollution in Philippine cities, and when the wind blows it towards us we can even smell it. Lots of pollution can mean a prettier sunset.

Alvin – yes, they were taken at different locations. But the locations were similar, and not too far apart.

Shaliyah – excellent observation. The size of water droplets can change the type of cloud we see. Also, as with Ms. Brooks’ answer, whatever is in the atmosphere, whether it’s pollution or water vapor, can change the way we see the colors of sunset.

Class 8A, you are living up to your name! I can’t wait to see you all when I get back.

And class 71 – it is cool that you were checking the blog while I was posting! It must have been around 1 or 2 in the afternoon your time. I work from noon to midnight Philippine time, but last night I was working late and decided to post before I went to sleep.

Mooring Recovery

Here's a video of the mooring recovery we did today. Drew, our
Restech, is going to tell you what's going on. First, here are some
definitions that will help you understand him:

- a mooring is a scientific instrument that gets attached to an anchor
and left in the ocean to collect data
- a buoy is something that floats in the water - in this case, it's
part of the mooring
- lifelines are cables that act as railings around the ship

Let me know if there's anything else that's unclear. Also, I'd like to thank Drew for doing the voiceover and Suzanne and Pach for doing the video recording.

The Cups, Part I

The first batch of cups is back! I have to sink them in batches of about 50 because I don’t have a bag big enough to hold them all. We sent them down at station 49, located at 8°45’ N, 122°44’E. Those numbers after the degree symbol are called minutes, and they represent parts of a degree. There are 60 minutes in one degree, just like there are 60 minutes in one hour.

So how did they turn out? Well, here they are in the lab…

And here they are in the bag (the green tape keeps them from getting stuck together)…


And here’s my friend Drew securing them to the CTD frame…

And here they are with my friend Jake’s good-luck bracelet that he wanted sent down too…


And here’s the CTD going into the water…


And here they are, safe on the ship…

And here I am, cutting them off the CTD to bring home to you!


Look how empty the bag seems to be! It’s the same number of cups that I started with; they’re just very small. You know that their size has decreased, what do you think has happened to their density?