What does the word “acoustics” mean to you? Some things that may come to mind are acoustic guitars or the acoustics of a room. Acoustics is the branch of physics that deals with the properties of sound, whether it is in a room, in a guitar, for medical use in the body, or in the ocean.
The Acoustical Society of America is planning a special session on April 21, 2010 during it’s meeting in Baltimore, MD, entitled “Listen up and get involved,” which will introduce the science and applications of acoustics to local Girl Scouts by highlighting the work of female scientists in various branches of acoustics.
We are two female scientists who are interested in how sound travels in the deep ocean and how we can use acoustics to study the ocean (check out our bio pages!). Collecting deep-water acoustic data for our research is no small task. Just getting the instruments positioned to take data can take weeks of work at sea! In fact, we will be on a ship in the Philippine Sea doing just that at the time of the Baltimore meeting. We obviously won’t be able to attend the special session in person, but we thought that keeping a blog of our day-to-day experiences at sea would be a great way to introduce the Girl Scouts (and anybody else who is interested!) to what is involved in an ocean acoustics experiment.
About us
- Able Sea Chicks
- The Able Sea Chicks are two scientists involved in the PhilSea10 experiment. Lora Van Uffelen is an oceanographer, and Kathleen Wage is an electrical engineer. How did we name our blog? During the PhilSea09 experiment a friend jokingly referred to us as "able seaman" (a rank of merchant marine). Lora replied, "No way! We're able sea chicks!"