Crowd-sourcing Science on the High Seas
Oceanographers are interested in recruiting blue-water sailors to sample rarely traveled parts of the world's oceans.
The oceans are so big that even the world's fleet of oceanographic research vessels covers only a tiny fraction of the watery environment. Dr. Jay Cullen, a chemical oceanographer from the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, and his colleagues involved in the Indigo V Expeditions, hope to recruit the hardy population of blue-water sailors to fill in some of the gaps in the oceanographic record. In a recent expedition, they sailed a 60-foot sail-boat from South Africa to Thailand, to work out techniques for scientific sampling of the ocean that might be developed into a self-contained system that ordinary sailors could carry on while doing long-distance ocean crossings. These devices could look at water chemistry, micro-organisms, and many other important features of the ocean, and help to answer important questions about the oceans in a changing climate.
Related Links
- Paper in PLoS Biology
- Indigo V Expeditions
- University of Technology, Sydney release
- Globe and Mail story