It is truly remarkable how little we know about the deep oceans, and having the ability to constantly monitor and report, even if in only a few areas, would be an enormous step forward!
The piece below also talks about a permanently tethered ocean floor rover, but the possibility exists for a more flexible detached rover (or swimming robot) that could go out and collect data, returning “home” to recharge its batteries and download it’s data. Now that would be a cool project!
clipped from news.bbc.co.uk
This week, a team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) will lay 52km (32 miles) of electrical cable from a research station on shore to a shelf 900m (3,000ft) below the sea’s surface.
Much of the deep ocean is opaque to our senses; radio waves quickly attenuate. For this reason, we know more about the far side of the Moon than we do about much of the deep sea.
“We’re taking the enormous communications and power infrastructure we have on land and extending it to the deep ocean,” said Dr Jim Bellingham, director of engineering at MBARI.
And, obviously, I’m trying out clipmarks for the first time. I like the idea of it at some level – it certainly has the potential to make it much easier to blog random tidbits one runs across. Unfortunately it also encourages a certain kind of mindless copying of people’s work without any particular reflection or additional analysis.
Also, the damn thing won’t post to my blog automagically. I had to use the embed feature to get this, which wasn’t exactly wonderful. Not sure how much I’ll use this, if at all, but it was fun to try once. We’ll see…
I wonder if we’ll ever map the entire ocean and all of its inhabitants. I can see why people go into marine research etc. So many things to discover.
Thanks for trying out Clipmarks. Don’t mean to intrude… we’ve been checking the blog search engines to make sure everyone’s getting up and running OK and I came across your post.
If you’re up for it, there’s a workaround for self-hosted WordPress blogs that could get the auto-posting working… http://clipmarks.com/faq/clip-to-blog#not-working (it’s the last entry on the page). Feel free to contact us at support@clipmarks.com if that doesn’t work.
Cheers,
Adam
Thanks for the comment and suggestion. I looked at the link you provided, and I don’t think that’s my problem (everything looks fine on that front). I’m using an older version of WP (lazy) – could that be the problem?