Data that reveals the changes occurring in remote oceans surrounding Antarctica has been made available to the public for the first time ever -- and all of it has been recorded by an army of sensor-wearing seals.
Since 2004, biologists from the Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole (MEOP) consortium have been gathering detailed information from some of the iciest and most remote oceans on the planet, many of which are almost impossible for humans alone to monitor.
MEOP teamed up with experts at the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews, who designed and created a range of highly sophisticated, waterproof sensors, capable of capturing data even when submerged thousands of feet under the water.
For more than a decade, the seals sent into mission with their sensor headgear have collected nearly 400,000 environmental profiles of the polar oceans, resulting in one of the biggest databases of its kind so far created. The goldmine of information has given experts a clearer picture of exactly how things like climate change is affecting the polar regions -- and how native creatures such as seals are adapting.
The seal sensors, or "tags", are the only devices of their kind that can be attached to animals, and don't cause the seals any harm; they simply fall off when the mammals moult once a year. The tags can record everything from ocean temperature to salinity, even when the seals dive up to 6,000ft deep. When the seals reach the surface, the information is then sent periodically back to researchers in short messages using satellites.
This data was then decoded by the team at St Andrews and shared with MEOP, which has harnessed data from eleven countries, including Australia, Brazil, the US and Norway. Lars Boehme, a lecturer at St Andrews, commented: "The information sent back to us gives us details about the seal's immediate physical environment. It's like tweeting."
Compiling information about the Antarctic ocean is of particular interest to oceanographers due to accelerating climate change, which is resulting in melting ice caps and changes to marine life. This makes human expeditions to polar regions increasingly difficult, not to mention expensive -- an obstacle that the intrepid seal army has managed to overcome.
Mike Fedak, a professor of biology at the University of St Andrews, said: "The fact that animals have collected the data is an interesting innovation in ocean observation. But perhaps of more general importance is that data from these remote and inaccessible places now gives us a much clearer picture of the state of the world's oceans."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
