All Entries in the "Technology" Category
Rutgers Glider Successfully Crosses Atlantic
The “Scarlet Knight,” a Rutgers-Slocum autonomous underwater glider, has successfully completed its crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.
New Robots Will Help Fill in Gaps and Enhance Ocean Knowledge
Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have been awarded a total of nearly $2.5 million to develop a new breed of ocean-probing instruments and design and develop the systems necessary to control the movement of those autonomous underwater explorers (AUEs). These “Miniature Robotic Ocean Explorers” are intended to plug gaps of knowledge about key ocean processes and trace fine details of fundamental oceanographic mechanisms that are vital to tiny marine inhabitants.
NASA’s Flights Over Antarctic Continent Bridge Satellite Gap
NASA is currently conducting Operation Ice Bridge, a six-year campaign of annual flights to each of Earth’s polar regions designed to help scientists bridge the gap between NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) — which is operating the last of its three lasers — and ICESat-II, scheduled to launch in 2014 by providing the needed data collected by researchers on board the DC-8, a 157-foot-long airborne laboratory and the largest aircraft in NASA’s airborne science fleet that accommodates many instruments.
Sea Turtles: Pilot Study Hopes to Help Reduce Bycatch
Researchers are using modern technology to learn more about turtle behavior in commercial fishing areas and to develop new ways to avoid catching turtles in fishing gear, namely a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and satellite-linked data loggers.
More Trouble in Australia’s Waters: West Atlas Oil Rig Now on Fire
Australia’s PTTEP Australasia keeps adding problems to the West Atlas oil rig’s adverse situation: after over two months of oil spill and four failed attempts to plug the leak, a massive fire erupted on the rig today.
Turning the North Pacific Gyre Plastic into Useful Materials
Mary Crowley, co-funder of Project Kasei and one of the members of the team that studies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and sailed along the SEAPLEX expedition – see our report about the expedition – last August, is dreaming of converting the little pieces of plastic, that are being ingested by marine life, into fuel or building materials while cleaning the ocean.
Timor Oil Spill: Second Failure to Plug the Leak
It has been nearly 2 months since the West Atlas oil rig in the Timor Sea started leaking oil as reported in our earlier article. Now, a second attempt by PTTEP Australasia to plug the leak has failed.
Is the Predatory Jumbo Squid Migrating North?
The Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Project announced in late September that two dozen jumbo, or Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) were recently tagged off Grays Harbor, WA. Stanford, NOAA and WDFW colleagues acoustically tagged these immense squid for the first time ever.
New Robot To Determine The Impact Of Climate Change On Deep-Sea Ecosystems
A new MBARI robot spent most of July traveling across the muddy ocean bottom, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) off the California coast. The Benthic Rover has been providing scientists with an entirely new view of life on the deep seafloor and is meant to give scientists a way to document the effects of climate change on the deep sea.
Combined Swedish-U.S. Expertise to Study the Amundsen Sea
A team of international scientists will work together on a new study of the open water and ice-covered regions of the Amundsen Sea to understand the physical, chemical, and biological interactions that make this region the most biologically productive of any waters adjacent to the Antarctic continent and how the system might change in the face of future increases in regional temperature and in the rate of Antarctic glacier melting.
