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…
No tag for this post.