Watching Nemo

According to an article on 20 new ideas in science, it has been identified that: "covering 70 per cent of the planet, with an average depth of 4km, the ocean is the largest habitat on earth, and it is largely virgin territory. Whenever researchers go into the deep, they almost always discover new species. The oceans are also throwing up new geology, and surprising us about the conditions under which life can thrive, redefining what we think of as habitable zones". Monitoring the oceans has become an obsession for many in the Earthquake and environmental monitoring communities. Being able to detect changes in how the Earth vibrates, underwater, and linking this to the behaviour of fish and other marine animals provides important clues about potential sciesmic activity, and how our oceans change over time. In her thesis, Gayathari Nadarajan (Edinburgh University) and her supervisor Dr Jessica-Chen Burger automatically analyse video feeds from the Eco-Grid project in Taiwan. Gayathri indicates that "such data is valuable for long term monitoring and research especially for marine biologists. Studies on fish behaviour, suitable underwater conditions for marine life presence and activity, and population of particular species at a given time provide valuable information to scientists". In the Eco-Grid project, data is acquired using geographically distributed sensors in various protected sites such as Fu-Shan forest, Yuan-Yang lake, Ken-Ting national park and Nan-Jen-Shan site. Gayathri uses automated workflow construction (using planning techniques) to analyse video feeds and determine frames of interest to a marine biologist, or to count fish, level of algae etc.

Whereas the Eco-Grid uses underwater cameras with video feeds that can be externally recorded, NASA, US Navy and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography have demonstrated robotic underwater vehicle to be powered entirely by natural, renewable, ocean thermal energy -- as part of the SOLO-TREC project. "Most of Earth is covered by ocean, yet we know less about the ocean than we do about the surface of some planets," said Yi Chao, a JPL principal scientist and SOLO-TREC principal investigator. "This technology to harvest energy from the ocean will have huge implications for how we can measure and monitor the ocean and its influence on climate." Additionally, the multi-million dollar Cyberinfrastructure Ocean Observatories project at the Scripps Institute provides a collection of messaging middleware for supporting data capture, recording and storage of ocean data.

Perhaps, it is useful to better understand how such ocean monitoring projects -- which themselves embed sensors (fixed or mobile) into the ocean perturb the ocean themselves (and the associated marine life). An interesting anecdote was that the heat generated around cameras that monitor the ocean lead to new marine ecosystems around the observation site -- thereby leading to new behaviour not known before.