Summary: | A SMALL army of elephant seals fitted with satellite transmitters are helping the worlds climate scientists get a better understanding of the oceans in one of the disciplines most important regions, the Antarctic.Researchers from Australia, France, Sweden and Britain published their Southern Indian Ocean hydrographic profiles temperature and salinity data collected by 207 instrumented elephant seals in the journal Scientific Data, affiliated with Nature, this week.Scientists have tagged the seals with transmitters since 2004 to learn more about how the environment affected their foraging and reproductive behaviours but realised quickly the animals were, by sheer virtue of their ability to roam where man-made objects cannot, collecting extraordinarily valuable data.
|