Antarctic Undersea ROV 08
Update
Meet the Team
Teacher - Cameo Slaybaugh
Cameo Slaybaugh has dug for mammoth bones in South Dakota and searched the mountains of Mongolia for the elusive Pallas’ cats, but after earning a degree in Geology from Colgate University, she spent the next ten years working in the business world. During this time Cameo volunteered at the National Aquarium as a herpetology assistant and taught classes at the Maryland Science Center using a variety of live animals. Ms. Slaybaugh finally gave in to her love of teaching and went back to school and earned a Masters degree in Special Education from Old Dominion University. For the past 15 years Ms. Slaybaugh has taught for the Southeastern Cooperative Educational Programs (SECEP), a regional public day school for emotionally disturbed children. She currently teaches a variety of subjects to students in grades 8 to 12, and is the school’s Science and Math Chair. Ms. Slaybaugh lives and plays on the Chesapeake Bay in Norfolk, Virginia.
Researcher - Stacy Kim
Dr. Stacy Kim is a research professor at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and began working in the Antarctic in 1988. Her prior work has focussed on human impacts and developing technology, with the larger goal of understanding a relatively undisturbed ecosystem--the Antarctic seafloor. Stacy will be the coordinator and lead diver for the 2010 IceAged project. To learn more about Dr. Kim’s scientific interests, please visit her faculty biography page (http://www.mlml.calstate.edu/faculty/stacy-kim/).
Journals
February 22, 2009 A Dream Come True
December 22, 2008 There’s No Place Like Home
December 17, 2008 Good-bye Antarctica
December 16, 2008 The Really Big Balloons
December 15, 2008 SARA Takes a Dip in Antarctica (Videos)
Project Information
Where are They?
The team worked in the waters around McMurdo Station, Antarctica. McMurdo is the largest station in Antarctica with more than 100 buildings, a harbor, landing strip and helicopter pad. More than 1000 people live and work at McMurdo Station during the austral summer!
What are they Doing?
The research team continued exploration of remote regions of the seafloor around McMurdo Station, Antarctica with a recently developed remotely operated vehicle (ROV) for underwater research. The new ROV can be deployed through a small (15 cm) hole in the sea ice, enabling access to regions beyond scuba diving depths (at 40-170 m). The researchers located historical experimental structures on the sea floor around McMurdo Station and investigated the colonization of these structures by species of sessile invertebrates. This will provide an unprecedented opportunity to explore and document the rates and patterns of ecological succession from one of the most extreme habitats in the world. The team also tested protocols for conducting sonar mapping with the new ROV as a first step towards creating high-resolution, bathymetric maps of the entire seafloor around McMurdo Station.
Vocabulary
- Austral
- Bathymetric Maps
- Benthic
- Ecological Succession
- Invertebrate
- Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV)
- Sessile
- Sonar
Relating to the southern hemisphere. The austral summer is from December to February and the austral winter is from June to August.
Bathymetric maps show the underwater topography, including depth and contour of the bottom surface of lakes, rivers or oceans.
Benthic organisms live on or in the bottom sediments of a sea or lake.
The more-or-less predictable and orderly changes in the composition or structure of an ecological community. For example, the recolonization of a new, unoccupied habitat created as a result of a landslide, lava flow, a forest fire etc.
An animal without a spinal column, or backbone such as a worm or a snail.
A remotely operated vehicle is an unoccupied, maneuverable underwater robot operated by a human above the surface of the water. The ROV is linked to a human operator on land, ice, or on a ship by cables that carry electrical signals back and forth between the operator and the vehicle.
Sessile organisms are permanently attached to a substrate and therefore not free to move around such as a barnacle.
A method or device for detecting and locating objects by means of sound waves sent out to be reflected by the objects.

