Scientific Coring

Chapter 8.  Scientific Coring – Hows and Whys

      Geologists can study the earth with a number of different techniques.  In the 1800s when “geologists” evolved from a broader group known as “naturalists” they could simply climb over mountains and along river beds taking rock samples with a small pick.  The approach must be different with marine geology, which is dedicated to studying the ¾ of the earth covered by the oceans.  Under shallow or deep water a major and very widely used technique is seismic profiling or seismic surveying.  This is echo sounding,  generally using sound sources and geophone receivers near the sea surface.  The sounds travel a good distance into the subsea floor and return echoes that give a picture of the subterranean geology.  The images below are examples of 2-D seismic profiles typically used by DSDP and IODP for previewing sites that are candidates for drilling.  The sea floor and sub-layers can be seen.  The ocean surface would be miles away above.

     The offshore oil industry has improved the technology of seismics to include 3-D tomography from which truly amazing 3-dimensional images of sub-terranean geologic structure can be displayed on computer screens with stunning results.  Most large offshore oil and gas fields are confirmed by these techniques long before 100s of millions of dollars are invested in drilling and recovering the new reserves.  It is a point of irony that the actual oil or gas (or any other specific substance, say, coal or valuable minerals) cannot be seen and identified as such by the seismic imaging.  The presence of the oil or gas must be inferred when the physical structure of the terrain matches formations where similar valuable resources have been found in the past.  This is a highly evolved science in its own right within the oil and gas industry as well as among research geologists.

     There is a lot of educated guesswork involved in the interpretation of seismic images, especially when using the 2-D variety.  All those reflected dark and light pieces represent something, but what specifically?  Answering that question is where drilling comes in.  Whether on land or under the ocean, when a borehole is drilled the result is, well, a hole in the ground.  The hole itself has value as an access passage into which instruments can be lowered.  These “logging tools” can measure an astounding variety of geologic and geochemical properties in rocks and soils surrounding the actual borehole.

     But the real value of drilling for research is to bring back samples.  And the best way to do that is by coring, which is drilling a hole without destroying the innermost section – the core.  The drawing at right shows one of many types of core bits; this one being a specialized roller cone core bit used today by IODP from the JOIDES Resolution drillship.  The bit is rotated by turning the entire drillstring with a rotary drive mechanism located on the drillship.  (Much oil and gas drilling is done with downhole motors that turn only the bit but that is not compatible with wireline coring used in science research drilling.)  Note that the roller cones that cut the hole as the bit rotates preserve the inner core section as it passes the bit and enters a “core barrel” housed a few inches inside the drillstring just above the face of the bit.  The general dimensions here are bits with an outside diameter of 10-12 inches and cores with diameters about the same as a beer can.  Cores are cut in 30-ft lengths or at least that is the goal, not always successfully achieved.

     With skill and some luck a drill crew operating on a floating drilling vessel can retrieve cores of rock and soils from thousands of meters below the seafloor, operating from the surface of the ocean in waters 5000m deep or more.  The photo below shows some lovely hard rock cores that have been split lengthwise and laid out in the onboard core lab for inspection.  Note that many sections of the rock core have been captured relatively intact, many are broken into smaller pieces, and some sections appear to have been ground into virtual gravel.  Or --- were the gravel sections in that condition as they existed downhole? – one more thing for the geologists to ponder.

     Coring while drilling does not have to be continuous but most often it is when conducting science research drilling.  “Continuous coring” means every foot of depth in the hole that is penetrated is cored, striving for 100% core recovery – a foot of captured core for every foot the hole is made deeper.  Continuous coring is made possible by using “wireline core barrels”.  These clever devices lock into place inside the lower end of the drillstring immediately above the core bit and capture the incoming core inside a clear, tough plastic liner within a steel core barrel mechanism.  When the core barrel is deemed to be full drilling/coring is stopped and the core barrel is released from its position and retrieved through the hollow drillstring to the ship using a wire rope (wireline) on a high speed winch.  The core is prevented from falling back out the bottom of the core barrel by one-way “core catchers”.  The bit and drillstring remain in place in the hole while the full core barrel is retrieved and an empty core barrel is sent down to replace it.  Then the process repeats.

     Some core barrels are “passive” and do nothing more than provide a receptacle for the incoming core.  Some core barrels help cut or trim the core, others are “active” in projecting ahead of the drill bit and cutting the core with a core bit or “cutting shoe”. 
The picture here shows a nearly perfect core section cut by the diamond cutting shoe depicted.  The core barrel in this case is known as the extended core barrel (XCB) because the 4-inch cutting shoe and the lower end of the core barrel extend ahead of the main 12-inch bit and precuts the core before the main bit comes along to drill the main hole. 
     In soft sediments the best way to core is with the “hydraulic piston corer”, or APC, depicted here.  This tool shoots its core-capturing section 30-ft ahead of the stationary main core bit and cuts the core with a sharp-nosed, non-rotating cutting shoe.  This coring technique can be repeated as the hole is deepened until sediments become too stiff for penetration by the sharp cutting shoe - in some cases to depths of 700-800 feet below the seafloor.  In the diagram the yellow section is the bottom of the drillstring assembly.  It appears truncated but would actually extend all the way to the rig floor of the drillship. The technique is close to perfect with 100% core recovery generally expected.  It is also the best means to avoid disturbance of the sediments.  The comparison core section picture below shows identical sections at the same depth in the same sediments captured using a standard rotary core barrel (RCB) versus an APC core barrel. 

     In the upper image the RCB core has been "scrambled" by the rotary coring process - the sediment was not sufficiently rigid to remain undisturbed as the drill bit passed over it.  In the lower image the lines of undisturbed differing sediments in the APC core can be seen in the picture just as they were deposited on the seafloor 5, 10 or 20 million years ago.  The improved quality and quantity of the APC-type cores retrieved for scientific research drilling literally revolutionized the science of marine sedimentology and enabled scientists to make great strides in the interpretation of the earth’s climate history.

    Because APC-type coring does not involve rotation during the actual cutting of the core (which takes about 2-5 seconds for 30-ft) the cores can also be oriented – which is to say the north side of the core can be identified and labeled even after the core has been extracted and laid down on deck.  This orientation capability is vital to paleomagnetists who study the reversals of the earth’s magnetic field over time.  Entire science careers have been spent doing exactly those types of climate and magnetic field research using deep sea cores.

     On a typical IODP expedition 1000s of meters of cores are retrieved, cut into 1.5m long sections, then split and examined, all within a few hours of being extracted from miles below the surface of the sea.  In almost all cases the cores remain inside the clear plastic core liners.  The liners, also split lengthwise with the cores, become the permanent display and storage vessels for the cores.  The two split halves of any given core section are designated as “working” or “archive”.  Archive sections are immediately stored away in shipboard reefers maintained at about 40-45 deg F.  The working sections go to the onboard core lab to photographed, visually examined, and subjected to dozens of measurements depending on the type of core material and the specific science objectives.  The working sections are also subjected to sampling by the onboard scientists who take hundreds or thousands of small carefully labeled samples back to their university labs for later exhaustive examination.  The working sections are then boxed and stored away in the shipboard reefers alongside the untouched archive sections.

     At the end of a voyage the chilled core sections are boxed and sent by refrigerated trucks to one of three major core repository facilities, located in Texas, Germany and Japan.  The picture here shows a rack of the cores in their final cold storage room at one of the repositories.  Those repository core collections are considered national scientific treasures and both the measured data and the actual cores are available for further research by qualified earth scientists.  

 

 

 

Anecdote -- “Pine Wine and Vodka”

 
    Two months at sea as part of a research expedition on a scientific drillship is a LONG time.  You are away from family and friends, out of your normal comfort zone, and denied many of the comforts of modern living.  It is not iron men in wooden ships, certainly, but there is no TV, no telephone (or at least not in the past, things are better now), no sofa to take nap on, no fridge to grab a snack from, no mall to go shopping, very little recreation beyond movies in the crew lounge and maybe a game of chess, darts or cribbage.  And it is boring for much of the time.  Add all of these little anti-comfort details to the fact that both the Glomar Challenger and JOIDES Resolution were declared “dry” ships (no alcohol) and the results are obvious – smuggling, bootlegging and home brew.  The dry ship policy is a serious safety measure.  All U.S. Navy ships adhere to the same policy as well as most offshore drill rigs (although I was onboard a French drillship that offered beer and wine in the mess – but maybe that was only when the ship was in port as it was during my visit).  The safety issue is legitimate -- an alcohol-impaired roughneck or driller on the rig floor of a drillship is roughly equivalent to a drunk driver on the freeways – somebody stands a chance of getting killed.
     So did this serious anti-alcohol program work for the scientific drillships on their long expeditions?  Well, no.  Enforcement was a problem.  On more than one voyage alcohol ban enforcement was actually my thankless job.  What that mostly meant was that I, virtually alone, did not get invited to the secret drinking parties held quietly in selected staterooms and out-of-the-way labs corners.  It was pretty much understood (though officially denied, of course) that the enforcement policy was don’t ask-don’t tell, keep it under control, don’t get a rig floor hand drunk right before his time on duty, don’t be blatant, (and don’t invite the enforcer individual to any parties).
     Alcohol showed up on board by one of two means – contraband smuggled onboard in private luggage, or home brew.  The private luggage option is obvious and probably 50% of the invited scientists for any voyage brought a bottle or two of liquor or wine with them.  For them it was a long-standing tradition to drink a little at sea because most of their seagoing time was on research vessels that were not drillships, and thus not dry because they were not as inherently dangerous to life and limb as a ship with a full scale drilling rig.  The scientists tended to share their alcohol with a few old colleagues or new friends in the privacy of their staterooms after hours and no harm was ever done along these lines that I ever heard about.
     The home brew option was a lot more interesting and fun.  The Glomar Challenger crew included a veteran marine technician named Pine who was famous for routinely brewing up a batch of Pine Wine, ready for consumption by the brave and foolhardy near the end of each voyage.  Pine brewed his concoction secretly in a locked closet near the chemistry lab, although the secret was in name only because by about the 5^th or 6^th week of any voyage the secret was out when the atmosphere in the lab became heady enough to get a mild buzz – like visiting a winery in the Napa Valley.  He used grape juice, sugar, and who knows what other ingredients purloined from the galley, took a good long time to allow proper fermentation (about 6 weeks) and never failed to make enough for everybody to have a good shot at a “secret” end-of-cruise party held a night or two before arrival at the final port.  Picture the moonshine drinking scene with Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape”.  We always said Pine’s latest batch of wine was a “good year” – because it tasted like an old tire.  But that is not a fair assessment, really – it was worse than that.
     But Pine Wine was not the most ambitious home brew experiment I was ever aware of.  On one DSDP expedition the scientific contingent included a veteran scientist from Russia named Boris.  Boris was well known and well liked, onboard as well as ashore at the end of a cruise when he was always the life of the drinking parties at the pub nearest the dock.  Given that he loved his brew and he was Russian it was perhaps inevitable that he was asked if he thought the clandestine drinking enthusiasts on one voyage could produce some home brew vodka.  Would we be likely to have the proper ingredients at hand?  Boris answered in classis Russian fashion, “In Russia we have old saying – you can make vodka from old shoe!”  Figuring they could do better than an old shoe they pressed Boris for more useful information until he proceeded to detail how to use potatoes, cook them, ferment the mash, then heat it up and distill off the good stuff.  Sounded easy enough for a bunch of chemistry grads with a full lab at their disposal, albeit done secretly and requiring some sugar and potatoes “liberated” from the galley or food storage holds.  Needless to say, the vodka distillers stayed busy in their off hours making the best hooch they could devise.  On the appointed evening near the end of the voyage, deep in a locked storeroom, the conspirators gathered and ceremoniously presented Boris with their first glass of experimental vodka for his expert critique and appraisal.  Boris took one sip, made a deathly face, barely swallowed, and declared, “You should have used the shoe!”

Alvin Sub and Hot Seafloor Vents

Chapter 7.  The Alvin Research Submersible and Seafloor Hydrothermal Vents

     The Alvin-Atlantis cruise on which I participated in August of 2009 was focused on visiting the subsea geothermal vent region along the 300 mile Juan de Fuca Ridge, located offshore Washington and Oregon and British Columbia, Canada.  For details of why I was there and the basic background of the research submersible, Alvin, see Chapter 6 of this blog.  Half of the expedition was to be devoted to CORK observatory servicing; the other half involved marine biologists intent on studying unique biological communities around the hydrothermal vents, in particular for this group of scientists, the sulfide worms.  Both groups used Alvin as their undersea access vehicle, allowing 3-person teams to dive to about 8500 feet water depth to conduct their specific research.

     A little about my first experience diving in Alvin.  When you board Atlantis as an Alvin dive participant designee one of the first things that happens is one of the Alvin pilots finds you and schedules you for an Alvin dive refresher course (if you have been in Alvin previously), or for a basic Alvin dive prep course (for us rookies).  The prep course takes place in the Alvin hangar on the fantail of Atlantis.  The quick course includes two parts; an outside tour intro and inspection followed by inside how-to instruction.

Alvin submersible in its hangar
onboard Atlantis

    The outside inspection tour is fascinating for an engineer, like me.  Everything outside the 8-ft diameter titanium personnel pressure sphere is allowed to feel full hydrostatic seawater pressure.  So there are no bulky pressure cases with sealed openings designed especially for drive motors/thrusters , batteries, electronics/electrical boxes, buoyancy modules, cameras, manipulator arm mechanisms, etc.  There may be a one or two small external pressure cases that I didn’t notice but essentially the only significant pressure housing is where the people go.  It is rated to 4500m (14,760 ft) depth, or about 6600 psi external pressure.  Virtually all of the external hardware and systems are flooded in advance with non-conductive (and virtually incompressible) hydraulic fluid, which is automatically pressure compensated to match the ambient seawater pressure at any depth.  (This non-intuitive and clever design approach to high ocean pressure management impressed me enough that I used the same technique in designing a novel undersea release tool a couple years later.  It included a small conventional DC motor that the manufacturer said could certainly not be used that way – simply because they had never heard of such a thing and no one had told them the marine science community was already doing it).

     But the most important part of the pre-dive course was on the inside – beginning with how to get in and out of the sub.  The only access is through the top hatch located in the sail. 

The hatch into Alvin - tighter than it looks

This is made easy by a small balcony in the hangar that takes you to the hatch.  It is tougher to negotiate with Alvin on deck ready to launch.  Once through the rather tight hatch (rotund people have to pass through a bit like toothpaste leaving the tube) you carefully feel with your toes for a lightweight aluminum ladder that helps you get down the ~7 feet to the padded “deck” very near the bottom of the sphere.  They pull the ladder out when everybody is inside because even its space is needed.  Inside the sphere you find where you will sit as an “observer”, behind and left or right of the pilot who sits middle/forward where he can work the controls and see out the center viewport.  It is fun to picture the pilot sitting in a starship command chair, but in actuality he gets a little swiveling stool that the Alvin dive group constructed themselves.  It is hollow and everybody’s sack lunch for the day goes in it.  Some artist’s conceptions of Alvin’s interior show the pilot in an easy chair and the two observer’s laying prone and facing forward like the Wright brothers on their first flight at Kitty Hawk, but actually the two observers have no option but to sit with their backs to the sphere facing each other and their legs bargaining for the small bit of space between.  You get immediately friendly with your dive partner.  I drew Dr. Jim Cowen from the University of Hawaii, an Alvin dive veteran and extremely nice and patient man.  That is him demonstrating how to crawl through the top hatch.



Alvin, being lauanched from
Atlantis with A-frame

     Inside the sub almost all the space is consumed by equipment.  Controls panels, communications gear, recording decks for the outside video images, pilots controls, computers, etc, etc.  They don’t even try to indoctrinate the new dive participants on all of it.  You do, however, get a thought-provoking primer on the survival necessities:  how to contact the surface with the underwater comm gear if the pilot were to pass out, say.  Where to find the CO2 rechargers and how to change out canisters.  Where to find the sleeping bags plus emergency water and rations that could be used for up to three days if the sub got stuck on the bottom for some reason and you had to wait for rescue from the surface.  I was told that none of that gear has ever been used in an emergency situation.  Still, though, it makes you think.  And then there is the legendary emergency release “T-handle”.  In the hypothetical case where Alvin gets stuck on the bottom and the crew has no other recourse to get back to the surface to save their lives the last alternative is to pull the T-handle located under the floor plates and release the titanium personnel sphere for a free (and no doubt thrilling) ride straight to the surface.  This feature has also never been used except in testing.  People have asked me a number of times, “wouldn’t coming up that fast give everybody the bends?”  No, the inside of the sphere is atmospheric pressure; there is no change of interior pressure as the sub dives or ascends. 

     You get a few other pointers – what to wear (somethng warm and comfortable but no polyester – too flammable), how to pee, how to operate your designated video camera, what a typical dive schedule can be, and so on.  If you haven’t had a change of heart about the whole adventure by then you are checked off as ready for a dive.



Alvin, getting ready to go down

     The night before the dive the necessary experimental equipment is tested one last time and loaded in the work basket mounted on the front of the sub and the dive plan is verbally worked out with the dive master and the selected Alvin pilot for the next day.  On dive day everybody is busy from daybreak until dusk.  The sub goes in the water about 8 am and plans to return around 5 pm in order to assure both launch and recovery are conducted in daylight.  Time is money in this expensive business and dives are scheduled for as much bottom time as possible so one long day of diving in a single dive is vastly preferable to multiple short trips.  Dive and recovery is assisted by swimmers – everybody on the Atlantis crew is eligible for this swim/assist duty and many of them love it – never mind the frigid water temperatures sometimes involved. 



The first creature I saw on the
bottom.  I have no idea what it is.

     Our dive to one of the CORKs was to a depth of about 8500 feet.  Descent took around 45 minutes.  Below 100 feet or so it was completely black outside the sub except for some phosphorescent creatures briefly sighted along the way.  The sub does not power itself to the bottom, it just overloads with ballast water and slowly sinks; less use of precious battery power that way.  We navigated by a sophisticated sonar system housed on both the sub and the mother ship.  When we reached bottom and turned on the outside lights we were right near the first target – a set of instruments on a buoyed line we had tossed carefully over the side the night before that were destined for insertion into the CORK.  We towed the instrument string over to the CORK we were going to service and spent the day working on inserting that gear into one of the feed-through ports, then conducted some water chemistry experiments using a special pump and chemistry monitoring system brought along by Jim Cowen. 



Jellyfish just drifting by --
at 8500 ft below the sea

     Voice communication is essentially constant (and perfect) with Atlantis during a dive but I think our dive experience was fairly typical in that you get an explorer’s isolation mentality very quickly once 
you are on the bottom – hence, a lot of chatter with topside seems unnecessary and even a bit intrusive.  The crew up on the mother ship understands and don’t pester the sub crew any more than necessary.  On my dive and on several others the sub crew for the day was asked to talk briefly over a complex sonar-satellite-telephone multiple comm link to some junior high school kids in California, as part of an educational outreach experiment.  The most memorable question the kids asked was, what is the biggest fish you have ever seen?



The region was home
to lots of purple optopi

     In the process of getting to the CORKs and working on the bottom we got to see some pretty weird and interesting local wildlife.  Some of our pictures are included here.  Notice the vivid colors of the jelly fish that happened to drift by and the fish, octopi and other strange looking creatures.  This seemed downright strange to me since no light had ever reached these depths in millions of years (until we brought our artificial lights along).  What possible reason could there be for these creatures to exhibit such striking coloration?  And I am sure I saw eyes on some of them.  Why would they have eyes?



     Hot vents and sulfide worms.  We did not explore over to the hydrothermal vent region on our dive because those areas were a handful of miles away from our CORK installations.  However, I did get to review all of the dive logs and photos from the other dives on the vent regions.  As I mentioned earlier the main purpose for those dives during our cruise was so the biologists could perform research on sulfide worms.  The photo in the anecdote at bottom is borrowed from another online source but shows the sulfide worm colonies as I remember seeing pictures of them – they are not known for their striking beauty, although I have since read that some versions have fancy plumage, as compared to these that look a bit like discarded cigarette butts.  There were also some of the classic “black smokers” in the area.  The bright red line in the adjacent photo is from the sub – a parallel pair of such laser rays is used to provide scale in the photos later.



A black smoker active vent

     On my dive we performed our planned tasks successfully (well, the pilot and Jim did, I mostly gawked and said, Wow), ate our lunch, tried not to get too cramped, and when our allowed time on bottom ran out we dropped some expendable ballast weights and headed for home, i.e., the surface.  On the way up we killed the time filling out our individual dive logs, taking pictures of ourselves in the sub and telling each other our abbreviated life stories.  As a successful first time dive participant I had one more obligation when we got the sub back on deck and emerged to the cheering crowds (okay, they were politely watching and waiting).  The picture at below shows the traditional greeting for a first timer – the seawater in those orange buckets had been left in the freezer all day in preparation for the ceremony.

   Oh yeah, after the freezing-water-in-the-face initiation I had one more duty – emptying the pee bottles from the sub.  I had used them more than the other two guys so figured I could handle the whole job.

    

References:

[1]   For an excellent primer on creatures associated with hot vents, see

“Hydrothermal Vent Communities”, by Carolyn Scearce

http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/vent/review.pdf

[2]  A little more about the hydrothermal regions of the Juan de Fuca Ridge

http://www.marine-conservation.org/media/shining_sea/place_epacific_juandefuca.htm

Anecdote:  “Spiritual Metaphysics of Sulfide Worms”

     During our expedition aboard Atlantis to use Alvin to dive on the subsea hot vent regions of the Juan de Fuca Ridge I was involved directly only in the inspection and servicing of the CORK seafloor observatories.  However, I paid some attention to the other half of the science crew who were employing Alvin to dive near the actual vents themselves to conduct zoological research on the unique organisms who made that area their habitat.  In particular, this group of scientists was there to investigate the sulfide worm colonies and learn some basics about these newly-discovered critters.  For them this was the equivalent of discovering living creatures on another planet – absolutely nothing was known about the worms for the purposes of characterization in a marine biology textbook.  They were intent on using their limited dive and lab time to conduct every experiment possible on live worms to discover their temperature and chemical tolerances, biochemistry, eating habits, means of locomotion, you name it.  I don’t think they were able to study reproductive methods but maybe I missed that tidbit.

The little white things are
sulfide worms (I think)

    So how does a marine biologist actually perform such studies?  Well, if you think about it, the options are limited and many approaches are quite straightforward.  One technique I learned about was how they studied temperature tolerance.  They knew going in that these little animals lived in hot, sulfur-rich seawater, at high seawater hydrostatic pressure and temperatures up to 200-300 deg C.  But what was their range of acceptable living condition temperatures?  One of their tools taken down in the Alvin work basket became known as the “worm wok”.  The idea was to gently pick up a few worms from the seafloor, drop them in the wok while still at the full depth, then seal the wok and apply heat slowly.  They then observed the worms through a clear lid.  When the worms seemed to die that was the recorded maximum tolerance temperature.  Sounds a bit gruesome, doesn’t it. 

     I didn’t pry into their techniques for examining the worms that were captured and brought back to Atlantis for study in the labs.  But I know the biology group came prepared with some well-made pieces of experimental apparatus intended to subject the worms to a wide variety of conditions in order to determine their responses and, hence, begin the process of scientifically characterizing the creatures.  A picture of some of their custom experimental worm experimentation equipment is shown here; but no casual observer would ever guess what it was for.  Whatever the specifics were, I am pretty sure of one thing -- none of the worms were gently interviewed and then sent home intact or unharmed.

Lab apparatus for examining sulfide worms

     So, I began to look at the picture from the point of view of the worms.  It is a bit profound if you consider it from their perspective; a life or death issue for them.  Imagine Mr. and Mrs. Sulfide Worm sitting one evening on their hot, stinky sulfide-infused rock on the seafloor 8000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.  (Actually “evening” would mean nothing to them because at that depth no light has ever penetrated in the history of the sun or the oceans.)  There they were in their perfect environment; warm, comfortable, surrounded by relatives, with lots of food (whatever they eat), apparently not threatened by their benthic neighbors since the worms are found fully exposed and unmolested on the seafloor outcroppings.     At some point you can additionally imagine that one of them waxes philosophic and points out what a secure and wonderful life they lead.  They are, after all, living in the absolute safest place on the face of the planet.  In an isolated spot with rare sulfurous hot water vents nearby.  Thousands of feet below the sea, fully isolated by local conditions from the rest of the ocean bottoms, in perpetual darkness and near silence, their existence completely unknown by any other beings on the planet except for the occasional fish swimming by who can’t bother them because they can’t penetrate into the small heated water zone where the worms thrive.   How can it get any more idyllic and secure than that?

     And then one day it all changes.  A huge, ship appears overhead with LIGHTS and horrible mechanical arms making an ungodly racket.  (Picture the alien spacecraft in Close Encounters of the Third Kind except even more out of place and not as photogenic.)  This is going to turn out to be a close encounter of the worst kind for the worms.  Soon word spreads in the worm colony – they are capturing some of our relatives and taking them into the ship thing!  And then, after a few hours of this terror, the alien ship leaves as mysteriously as it arrived.

     But what has become of our missing relatives, the worms ask themselves?  Here is where the metaphysical part comes in because you just KNOW that the argument among the worms must have broken down into the two inevitable camps.

     Worm Camp 1:  Those were angels from some higher realm.  And they have taken our friends to a better, more wonderful, heavenly place.

     Worm Camp 2:  Don’t believe it.  Those were aliens from another world.  They came to capture our relatives so they could take them away for torture, horrible experiments and death!

     And, of course, the lucky surviving worms would never learn the truth.  But we humans know the answer here.  We don’t have to guess which camp had it right.