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- [Woman] Yeah, we are here. So we are climbing.
- [Man] Oh, that's --
- [Woman] The slope of the volcanic dorm.
- [Man] Right go,
did we record that? - [Woman] We will be
at the top.
Looks too big at, it is below hydrothermal--
- There's so much time and energy and money
that is put into doing cutting edge oceanographic research
on a platform like E/V Nautilus.
That ensuring there are facilities and places
to curate and manage all of that data
that we collect
is absolutely paramount to the mission.
My name is Megan Lubetkin
and I am a curatorial assistant
at the Marine Geological Samples Lab.
Here at the University of Rhode Island.
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I'm always in awe of all of the moving parts on a ship.
Not just the ship itself,
but the people and all the equipment
and all of the goals and objectives.
And that isn't definitely not forgotten
when I'm handling samples here.
Having that perspective of being on land, working on
the data that was collected at sea,
it's really nice to have an appreciation for all the work
and all the people that were involved to help get that data.
It's a huge team.
It's a big effort that involves many, many people.
From the ship to the interspace center,
to the research institution
that eventually gets the information.
It's a process that's ongoing.
And even when you think it's over,
and we put the samples up in the collections
and they're stored away in our library here,
you never know who might request to do a different project
or different analysis on samples.
And we get that happening all the time.
People requesting to do work on stuff
from different parts of the world.
It's just an ongoing process,
involving so many people (laughs).
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ROV Hercules has two methods
of collecting geological samples.
One of which is a push core.
Which is about a foot long plastic tube
that you push into the sediment
and it takes a cross sectional core
of that sediment profile.
And you get to look at the interface between the seawater
and the sea floor.
Then the other type would be using the manipulator arm
on the vehicle to collect either a rock
and you grab it.
Or you could use maybe a scoop to scoop up some gravel.
So we kinda categorize these as rocks and cores.
Once we collect those samples
and they get stored in the vehicle
and Hercules comes back on deck,
then we'll take them out of the vehicle,
out of their sample holders,
and we'll process them in the wet lab on the ship.
So that involves the whole science team.
So as a science manager,
my role is to sort of, conduct
and help manage the processing of all of these samples
in the wet lab,
as well as the processing of the digital data
and all the sort of metadata associated with the samples.
But then once those are ready to go
and they've been documented and processed in the lab,
we'll ship them here,
and we'll receive boxes in the mail,
from the Nautilus,
with these beautiful samples,
and we'll take them and process them here.
Often what we do to preserve
and store cores is we'll slice them down the long axis.
So then you have sort of two identical copies,
and you can have one archived and one used for science,
and there'll be incorporated into our database and available
for scientists anywhere to request and study them.
They're used for different types of science.
Cores can be used to study paleoclimate
and look at past sediment records.
Push cores are not very deep.
So often they're used to look
at the interface between the seawater and the sea floor,
and maybe the microbes that live there.
Whereas rocks can be used
for a ton of different types of things.
We'll do a visual inspection.
We have some rock saws where we can cut a rock open
and see what it looks like on the inside.
If it's like a pillow lava
or volcanic rock.
Versus a mineral deposit or hydrothermal vent deposit.
Different types of science can be done
on different types of rock samples.
What we're doing in the Marine Geological Samples Lab
is curating the samples.
So this facility
is one of only a handful in the nation
that has the quantity of samples we have.
Pushing something like 10,000 samples,
and the ability to curate these types of samples.
And we're incorporating them into our database
and into our facility
so that people elsewhere can do science on them.
If you think about it,
if you go out and do all of this science
and collect all these samples
and a few people use it for a year or so,
and then those just get lost in their lab
or in some building
or you don't really know where they ended up going.
It's a lot less useful
to the greater scientific community,
than if they're part of a library
and an archive and a system that is designed to share
and promote collaborative work.
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