Keeping An Eye On The Oceans

[Frankie]

ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2009) — In the last ten years, scientists have set up a global observing system to monitor the world's oceans. The observation system works by combining satellite observations with data from in-water recording devices such as buoys, tide gauges and an array of more than 3000 Argo robots.
Now the initial system is up and running, scientists are meeting next week at OceanObs’09 in Venice (21-25 September) to see how they can expand the system and, perhaps most importantly, secure it for the long term.
OceanObs ‘09 is organized by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA) and will be attended by EUMETSAT and over 580 participants from 36 countries.
EUMETSAT's role in ocean observations is to establish, maintain and use European systems of operational meteorological satellites, contribute to the operational monitoring of the climate and the oceans - for instance monitoring sea level rise with the Jason 2 altimetry satellite - and establish new ocean-monitoring missions, such as Jason 3.
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Keeping An Eye On The Oceans

[Jeremy0322]

This is all really interesting stuff, we were just talking in oceanography today about the Aquarius Spacecraft, it will use microwaves to measure the salinity of the surface water in the ocean from about 400 miles above the surface.

[Frankie]

I did not know that Jeremy. Thanks for the info!

[Jeremy0322]

Originally Posted by Frankie

I did not know that Jeremy. Thanks for the info!

See what this new education is doing for me lol Here is some more info on it if you would like

NASA: Aquarius Mission Web Site - Overview

Measuring Ocean Salinity

[rbursek]

I respect all off you, and what scientest tell us, but they have only had these devices and info for the last 50 years or so, so what is happened all the years before that? I am not saying that "man" has not screwed up the inviroment, but the oceans are huge, and cover 3/5 of this planaet, I think. I think they will fix themselves.

[Jeremy0322]

Well yea, this is true alot of the time, but adaptation is a slow process alot of the time. It takes generation and generations to filter out the attributes that are no longer needed for survival and replace them with the ones that are. There have been these problems in the past before, but it happened over the course of extended periods of time, and when you would see some catastrophic event it would result in a mass extinction alot of the times.

Its just a matter of if there was enough time. When life started in the ocean there was no oxygen, and the ozone layer didnt fully form in the way we look at it today until about 600 million years ago, and even then the oxygen percentage in the atmosphere wasnt half of what it is today. You are looking at over 3 billion years that things had available to evolve to better suit the, at that time, HORRIBLE oxygen filled environment.

Fast forward to today, we are making changed that, although not that big, are happening in a much more accelerated time scale. Im not saying the problem is nearly as bad as people are making it out to be, and I am sure that as a whole the oceans would survive just fine, but the life in the ocean would change drastically, and even though some would debate that it is not our place to intervene and stop this cycle of extinctions and new species if we have the knowledge and technology to monitor and stop all of that loss I dont see a "logical" argument against it really. Thats just how I look at it though.