Deep Sea News

Did you know the Cousteau Society recently “Saved the Calypso?” The group is still active. This classic video clip features salps, Venus Girdle jellies, and more from “Nauru: The Island Planet (1992)”. I found it while “flying” over the Pacific in Google Ocean, and dig the crazy soundtrack.

Through the nifty little Google Earth plugin you can now be the helmsman of your ships. This ship simulation program is a trip and I expect to be wasting hours of my precious time in the near future.  I love firing off the ship’s horn.  Maybe this is the way that all the unemployed captains and crew of the cargo ships can waste away the idle hours.

One of the largest fleets of ships ever gathered idles just off Singapore, marooned by the receding tide of global trade…So many ships have congregated here — 735, according to AIS Live ship tracking service of Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay in Redhill, Britain — that shipping lines are becoming concerned about near misses and collisions in one of the world’s most congested waterways, the straits that separate Malaysia and Singapore from Indonesia

A sense of place. It’s essential to deep-sea exploration. We’re far from land, on a flat horizon, hovering over echosounder output from the seafloor below. We watch a map drawn line by line by line. It takes hours for small features, days for large ones. In time, different things are revealed to different people. Geological history unfolds in the minds of the geologists, habitats unfold for biologists. Then we dive to check our assumptions.

When we get home, the first decision is what to show you- the map, or the video. This is one reason I like Google Earth so much. It lets me do both. To be fair, Google Earth is not the only game in town for multimedia maps. Microsoft is offering a similar visualization platform through their Live Search Maps using NavTeq data in a BBC News story on Dam Construction in Ethiopia. Check it out. It flies!

Given, there’s no evidence of seafloor topography like you find in GE 5.0, but the interface is smooth. Zooming and panning are a breeze. The text and video are clear. The Ethiopian dam story makes me fear for the natural ecosystem, but there’s no denying that Live Maps could be a good platform for constrained area representation, visualizing expeditions on a regional scale, so long as seafloor topography’s not mission critical. If it is, you put it in a pop-up window. Sometimes we just don’t need the whole planet to tell our stories.

What do readers think? Google Earth vs Microsoft Virtual Earth. What works, what doesn’t?

[googlemap lat="36.820278951308744" lng="-121.99493408203125" width="500px" height="300px" zoom="9" type="G_SATELLITE_MAP"]Monterey Canyon, Invertebrate Cliff[/googlemap]
Another of the new features on this website will be Google Maps. For future posts with georeferencing we will now include a Google Map. To highlight this new feature, I have picked one of my study sites. Invertebrate Cliff is an off-axis canyon in the Monterey Canyon complex. The base of cliff is around 1km.

Having ignored the myriad blog postings about people using Google Earth’s new ocean layer to discover Atlantis, and tracking about 20 different ridiculous stories, I finally had to ask, “What is it with these people?” Don’t they know Atlantis is in the Bahamas? Even Matt Damon knows that.

As IF there’s only one Atlantis. Is, like, every city Philadelphia? There’s totally more than one! There’s a New Atlantis off the coast of Japan, and a Little Atlantis here in the Gulf of Mexico. The one here in the Gulf is a buried pyramid on the West Florida shelf, really hard to get to because the weather kicks up whenever you get within its temporal vortex.

So, a story surfaced today that’s actually worth reading, because it uses new data (shiptracks) provided by the bathymasters themselves- Walter Smith and David Sandwell. These are two of the guys partially responsible for carving their initials in compiling Google Ocean’s new blended product of satellite altimetry and multibeam echosounder data.

Ian Paul reveals their secret of Atlantis in a PCWorld story called “Google’s Atlantis Discovery Explained.” Finally, someone’s making sense!

Adelita the Loggerhead migration with Google Ocean from Wallace J. Nichols on Vimeo

Adelita was the first loggerhead turtle tracked from Baja California Sur by J Nichols and Seaturtle.org, and the first satellite tracked animal to swim across an entire ocean…a paradigm shifting event.

Now, Adelita’s the first turtle to swim through Google’s Ocean, quickly becoming one of the most famous sea turtles in the world, joining the ranks of Flipper the Dolphin, Keiko the whale, and Stephanie Colburtle in megavertebrate stardom.

We’ve seen over the last week that the new ocean layer in Google Earth 5.0 is a useful tool for visualization and presentation. DSN readers have commented that GE could also be useful for research, if one were to geo-reference scientific literature, for example. This updated REPOST from July 2008  gives an example of one small application for GE, mapping 19th Century Voyages.

I am currently studying deep sea-fans, or gorgonians, in the West Atlantic mesophotic or “twilight zone” between 50-150 m. Many of these gorgonians have their first description in the reports by Wright and Studer (1889) of the HMS Challenger Expedition 1873-1876. The main difference between then and now is that 19th century biologists studied dead and broken colonies dredged or trawled from the abyss, while modern scientists use submersibles and ROVs to study the organisms in their natural habitat, in all their living splendor.

Certain features of my animals are well illustrated, but the descriptions are dry, with no in situ photographs. We have no idea what these gorgonian colonies looked like when they were alive. This is necessary so we can identify them in-situ. So, I’m seeking historical background to put the HMS Challenger observations in context. Like a modern guy, I quickly turn to Amazon for background material (books) and Google Earth for a visualization (maps).

As a deep-sea biologist, the first thing I need to know is “where did the HMS Challenger collect their samples, exactly”? This is a simple map based function. The chances I will find the Challenger Expedition on Google Earth are good thanks to “Hill” a “Master Guide” at Google Earth, and a professed Google Earth “addict”. He’s uploaded and georeferenced the maps to this website so I can tell at a glance where the Challenger has been, and where they’ve not.

In a way, the Challenger Expedition could come alive again in a “Google Ocean” environment. An online expedition today could incorporate georeferenced text, photos, audio, and live video, plus graphics and animation to help illustrate these bizarre and fascinating benthic habitats. This is what you’ll see when you explore the new ocean layer in GE 5.0. If you’re interested in learning more about the Challenger Expedition, search the H.M.S. Challenger Library at 19th Century Science.

I see lots of room for improvement to this unique format and presentation, but it makes me wonder, how can I see more of this kind of thing on Google Earth? Where will it develop and grow? And, when was the last time we sent a ship around the world collecting deep-sea samples for such a broadly interdisciplinary group of scientists?

Now that you’ve toyed with the new Ocean layer in Google Earth 5.0, and learned to dive below sea level, you’re asking yourself, … what’s next? Where can I go? What can I do? You’ve got the fever, and the only prescription is …. more cowbell !

- REPOST FROM OCTOBER 8, 2008

There’s been a lot of anticipation surrounding the Google Ocean project, but so far, we’re all still waiting. Meanwhile, applications are bubbling up through the blogosphere like methane though a cold seep. Ogle Earth and Just Magic have great summaries of available data.

Here, I list the top 5 ways to Pimp your Google Ocean so you can make your digital cyber-globe the deepest ride on the block in a snap.

Five hot new deep-sea interfaces are available in Google Earth (GE) format (a .kml or .kmz file) to pimp your ride in Google’s oceans, including shipwrecks, Alvin submersible dives, and seafloor images. Two other cool web-based applications are also ripe for assimilation, but not yet ready for prime time. Many scientific institutions haven’t made the transition to GE. But those that have are making a beautiful difference.

Google Sightseeing is reporting on some strange phenomena people are seeing in Google Ocean’s database. Check it out. Trawl scars? Lost city of Atlantis? Low resolution bathymetry? You be the judge!

BBC Planet Earth placard from the new Ocean layer in Google Earth 5.0

Ever since yesterday’s release of Google Earth 5.0, I have been trying to convince myself that playing with the new Ocean layer is part of my job. It seems to be working. I’m a graduate student who occasionally gives talks to high schools about deep-sea corals.

I’ve tried before to use Google Earth as a presentation platform. When the projection was right, I could spin the globe the Gulf of Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico effortlessly. We would go island hopping on the digital globe, jumping back and forth between the Powerpoint, the DVD player, and Google Earth. Now, I won’t have to. It’s all there together.

The best example of the new multimedia interface is the Explore the Ocean series hosted by Sylvia Earle. Get to these features by clicking on the icon in the “Layers” sidebar. GE zooms to point on the globe and a placard pops up. Thoughtful, original geo-referenced videos are there in the Explore the Ocean series.

The bulk of the media content, however, is from traditional broadcast media. Videos, images, and articles are re-purposed in the new medium. This is what amazes me, what brings all this technology together into continuity. The same organizations that have been bringing oceans to life for fifty years are now showing up as icons on my globe. National Geographic, BBC Earth, and Cousteau’s Ocean World all contributed substantially the new Google Earth environment. It’s like broadcast media’s command performance.

Lest ye forget, National Geographic has two explorers-in-residence that plumb the ocean depths with state of the art equipment and technology. Dr. Earle is clearly the shepherd for this project, but Dr. Bob Ballard also makes a significant contribution. His videos of the Mud Vulcanoes in the Gulf of Mexico are terrific. His enthusiasm, inspirational. Dr. Ballard’s most famous discovery is the Titanic, of course, off the coast of Newfoundland. If I knew how to email coordinate locations from Google Earth, I would.

BBC Earth also makes a very stunning contribution. The “global tour” is biologically rich, with the beautiful images people expect from the oceans. Some are from Planet Earth, featuring  whale sharks in the Carribbean and deep sea hydrothermal vents in the Galapagos (see image). That wins big points around here. Clicking on the BBC icon in the Oceans layer zooms to a placard with image, text, some advertising, and an arrow bar that takes you, in turn, to the next placard, half a globe a way.

Altogether,  the new Google Earth 5.0 is a very handy presentation tool. I see a budding job market for .kml designers, and a new emerging definition for the term “globe trotter”. Next time I’ll focus on some of the tricks I’ve learned in Google Earth (exaggerate your seamounts) and introduce some of the other, less obvious contributions from people I may or may not know.

Could be somebody by the name of K. Alluicious Zelnio had a little something to do with … Ah, I’ll let him tell you about it!