My thought are that the sand held everything together making the bands not so relevant to the condition of the bills, or the time frame. based on the control test of 7 years, and nothing happening, I'm guessing this test will give positive results.
what people forget is this is not paper, so it will take time to break down.
If the money was in the Columbia, the bands would probably been intact, or in decent condition. it would of only been about 3 years underwater, and possibly wrapped tight in the bag (speculation) 1971 was basically over...it could of been a time capsule.
I think you could bury a handful of those bands at some depth and get results that have some degree of validity, as to what happens to bands... this is why I sent you and Meyer an idea for a control in this test.
We know there is a six month clock on these bands, more-or-less. What we dont know is the exact processes involved. That imho was poorly defined. Likewise, I think the description of the bands when Ingram found the money has been *very poorly stated and *very poorly defined, to date (the descriptions given to date suffer from conflicting testimony).
Key to the breakdown of those bands are *temperature and *UV exposure and *exposure to oxygen. Given those three ingredients you can see how different environments should produce different degradation results over time, at different rates, if everything else is equal. For example, I would expect bands located at the bottom of the Columbia in a cold stable environment with little oxygen to degrade at a slower rate than bands near the surface buried in sand on Tina Bar. Likewise, bands buried at 3 feet deep in sand at Tina Bar would degrade at another rate. The rate of degradation should be environment specific according to *temperature, *UV exposure, and *oxygen level.
If the money and bands spent parts of eight years in different environments, then the bands could reflect degradation accumulated in multiple environments?
All of this is why Tom was trying to conduct tests in different environments; to get a comparison between gross environments.
Fortunately there is a control already in place, supplied by the maker of the bands. The maker conducted a number of tests on these bands prior to any involvement with the Cooper case, testing shelf life and other parameters of their different bands visi-a-vis the chemistry of their bands. On top of that others have tested rubber band chemistry and rubber band degradation, clear down to the molecular level - so there is a supporting literature on that. The life cycle options of this class of rubber bands is pretty well understood and serves as a comparison to anyone conducting tests, of whatever nature. I believe what the Ingram's found and described fits well with the scientific literature available on the subject. I probably should pass some of that literature to both you and Meyer so you have that resource at your disposal.
Poll