Among all the wonders below the waves, a deep-water basin off the island of St. Croix may hold an exception stash of the greatest of them all. And researchers at a couple of the nation's top scientific laboratories might be interested in setting up shop here to study the tiny but mighty interesting particles.
According to University of the Virgin Islands professor Roy Watlington, a geological basin at the bottom of the ocean just off of St. Croix is a repository for the sub-atomic particles from outer space.
They're called neutrinos – a name familiar to kids who watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons a few years back. Those "Neutrinos" (with a capital N) were three playful, squeaky-voiced aliens from Dimension X who joined the turtles in fending off the forces of evil.
The real neutrinos "are small, uncharged particles that go ripping through the atmosphere and go ripping through the ocean," Watlington said.
These are among the fundamental particles that make up the universe, and since they are not charged electically, they do not encounter the resistance of electrons, for example. Some researchers theorize that they change their identities as they travel through time and space.
The subject of neutrinos came up in a discussion of the latest expedition of the Anegada Climatic Tracers Study, a three-and-a-half year exploration of the intermingling of waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. UVI students, faculty and staff have been involved from the start in the study, which is designed to identify characteristics of the sea at varying depths.
The latest expedition got under way in late June on board the research vessel Seward Johnson, which is working its way up from Barbados to the Virgin Islands. Watlington will be the principal researcher for the third and final phase of the trip, a two-day sampling of the waters in the Virgin Islands basin.
He said it will take weeks for researchers to analyze the measurements taken during the trip and to check for any surprising details within the data sample. But at this phase of the study, he said, scientists who are not directly involved in the study are expressing interest in some of the information being collected.
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the University of California and the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., both of which are operated for the U.S. Department of Energy, have reportedly designed a Neutrino Burst Experiment study. Watlington says the St. Croix basin is considered an ideal site in which to carry it out.
One of the characteristics of the deep water basin, he explained, is its natural ability to shelter and preserve the things that land in it.
"By putting a detector at the bottom of the Virgin Islands basin – that's at a depth of some 2.8 miles – they're able to measure the neutrinos' signal indirectly without the interference of all the other signals if they measured it without the filter of all that water," he said.
The designers of the experiment have reportedly indicated a willingness to set up a land-based research station on St. Croix which Watlington said could bring economic as well as academic benefits to the big island.
In addition, he said, scientists from Sweden and Denmark have expressed interest in the mysteries of the St. Croix basin. In fact, an increasing number of international scientists are joining the ranks of deep-ocean explorers headed this way, he said, and that could result in a wealth of educational opportunities for UVI and its students.
For an easy-to-understand introduction to neutrinos, visit this web site: /www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/neutrino.html.
