These underwater robots will create detailed map of marine microbes

Mumbai, July 30: Science has brought another invention which brings news that soon we will be able to collect data on the microbes that live in, and move through, the ocean through a fleet of autonomous vehicles.

 

Oceanographers and engineers from the University of Hawaii Mānoa and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) deployed three long-range autonomous underwater vehicles (LRAUVs) in the waters off Hawaii.

These vehicles will be able to autonomously travel and gather data for more than 966 km (600 mi) before scientists will need to recover them.

Each LRAUV is designed with sensors to collect data like water temperature, chemistry, and chlorophyll content as it moves through the ocean, targeting large oceanographic features like eddies (swirling masses of water) and blooms of phytoplankton.

These robots can capture and archive samples of seawater in an Environmental Sample Processor (ESP) as they travel. The organisms in those samples will give researchers an idea of which kinds of microbes exist in different places in the ocean, and provide insight into the structure of the eddies in which some live, or which kinds of microbes live through algal blooms.

The ocean has long remained an under-studied area of the planet. But vehicles like these are changing that — robots are mapping the seafloor while floating sensors continuously gather information about the conditions in the ocean in general.