Citizen oceanographers wanted to monitor high seas

Researchers yesterday urged sailors to become ‘citizen oceanographers’ and help scientists better understand some of the world’s wildest seas where ships and even planes disappear without trace.

An Australian-led study said that despite technology such as GPS navigation and advanced research vessels with modern capabilities, much of the world’s oceans remains under- explored, with cost a key impediment to knowing more.

“Notwithstanding satellite constellations, autonomous vehicles, and more than 300 research vessels worldwide, we lack fundamental data relating to our oceans,” said the study published in the journal PLoS Biology.

“These missing data hamper our ability to make basic predictions about ocean weather, narrow the trajectories of f loating objects, or estimate the impact of ocean acidification and other physical, biological, and chemical characteristics of the world’s oceans.”

The lack of knowledge has been evident most recently in the fruitless hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which is believed to have crashed in the largely unmapped southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia six months ago.

“Even a modern jetliner can disappear in the ocean with little or no trace, and the current costs and uncertainty associated with search and rescue make the prospects of finding an object in the middle of the ocean daunting,” it said.

Federico Lauro, a University of New South Wales microbiologist and national sailing champion who led the study, said cost was a key factor in better understanding oceans.

But there was a large pool of sailors who could contribute cheaply, using small instruments fitted to yachts at a fraction of the cost of running specialised research vessels. — AFP