GW teacher to set sail for trench

A marine biology teacher from Guam will join a team of scientists later this month to explore the deepest spot on Earth -- the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench.Very little of the Marianas Trench has been explored, said Linda Tatreau, a teacher at George Washington High School."We know more about the surface of the moon than about the bottom of the ocean," she said.She will board the RV Kilo Moana research vessel May 23 to join researchers from Hawaii and the U.S. mainland. The vessel will sail 200 miles southwest of Guam to the site. The team will use a deep-sea remote operated vehicle, the hybrid-ROV Nereus, to collect samples, Tatreau said.The research will lead to "a better understanding of the processes that are forming or have formed earth, including plate tectonics," she said.The Nereus will descend seven miles to the bottom of the trench, where it will collect rock samples, sediment samples and water samples, Tatreau said. The Nereus is brand new, she added, and it can operate without a tether attached to the ship.The team of scientists will "look at everything," Tatreau said. For example, they will be looking for rare earth elements in the samples, she said.Tatreau will be working with scientists as an observer and reporter. She also will be performing chemical analyses and "doing anything that needs to be done," she said.She will be working in cold conditions, she said, because chemicals in the deep sea samples react when the temperature changes."The shifts will be four hours on, eight hours off, four hours on," she said. Four hours are spent monitoring the equipment, she explained, and eight hours are spent completing lab work and performing other duties.The Marianas Trench is 1,554 miles long and 44 miles wide, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.It was created by the convergence of the Pacific Plate and the Mariana Microplate, Tatreau said.The Challenger Deep has only been visited twice so far: once in 1960 by the Trieste, a two-man submersible owned by the U.S. Navy, and again in 1995 by the unmanned ROV Kaiko from a Japanese research vessel.The ROV Kaiko found worms and shrimp at the bottom of the trench, said Tatreau. She added that scientists found 200 different kinds of microbes in the samples collected during that trip.This is Tatreau's second deep-sea research vessel trip. During a 2003 deep-sea expedition, she was education coordinator with a research team studying underwater blue mud volcanoes west of the Mariana Islands."I loved it," she said about the previous trip. She says there is no doubt she will feel the same way about the upcoming expedition."I'm in my own at sea. If I could teach marine biology on a ship, I'd be there," said Tatreau, who has been teaching marine biology at GWHS for 19 years.