Sea elephants become Arctic explorers

American scientists have found a new way to study difficult areas in the Pacific. They attached sensors to measure the temperature, salinity, and chemical composition of water under the skin of animals living in the western hemisphere. Thanks to these assistants, they discovered many new things about the Arctic.

The Arctic region of the Pacific is the place where researchers are the hardest to encounter fierce storms, gigantic glaciers and extremely low temperatures. But it is the Arctic region that is meaningful to the science of the world economy. When La Nina flows through, the output of seafood increases significantly. To know when this ocean current appears to be proactive, the Arctic must be studied.

In addition, life requires attention to a number of phenomena that occur on the Arctic Ocean, such as the melting of icy continents, submerging nearby islands, huge icebergs that are washed away. drifting on the sea, threatening the boats to travel . All of these things need to be taken to the North Pole to consider.

Sea elephants are becoming active collaborators to help scientists explore the Arctic.

American scientist Daniel Costa, University of Santa Cruz, proposed to use mammals living on the South American coast (seals, sea lions, statues .) to work in areas where people are hard to reach. . For decades, he has studied them and understood very well that every year they migrate to the North Pole to earn a living there, there are many crowded fish and invertebrates.

The sea elephant (Mirounga leonina) is Costa's "gut" collaborator. They have the largest stature, up to 6.5 meters long, weighs 3.5 tons. Males have a 10 cm long nose, like an elephant. When he was angry, the blood rushing to this nose made the nose big and red like the nose of a drunkard.

Sea elephants live in small flocks consisting of a male head, several females and children. Most of the time they just lie on the beach to rest or fight to fight for territory. Occasionally dive into the hunting water. On the shore, it was heavy and slow but in the water, they were exceptionally clever and flexible. They eat fish, crustaceans (crabs, shrimps .), mollusks but prefer the ink. Sea elephants can swim at speeds of 30 km / h and 300-400 m deep diving.

It is in the search for squid, the sea elephants stir the summer in the Arctic. From there, Daniel Costa decided to provide huge 'scientific collaborators' with electronic sensors that measure the salinity, pressure, temperature, chemical composition of water . That information is sent directly to scientists' computers via Argos satellite system .

In 2005, Costa and oceanographer Laura Padmen put this device into 57 sea elephants. During the five years they tracked the movement of these paddle-shaped 'oceanographers' thanks to the line of defense, the parameters were loaded into the database storage. As a result, they discovered the depth of the seabed in dozens of meters larger than the figures on the map.

Thanks to them, it is also possible to determine the 'route' of the underground currents flowing through the frozen regions of the southern continent. Scientists understand that the ocean currents themselves, not the so-called "global warming", have a bad reputation in melting icebergs. Thanks to them, it was explained that ocean currents are extremely powerful vortex streams, which can cause ice to burst from within.

And finally, the 'scientific collaborators' that carry the measuring device on their backs can tell scientists about how they have experienced frozen winters. Previously, researchers often assumed that in the winter sea elephants migrated to certain tropical seas to avoid cold, but in fact they did not swim anywhere far from South America, only to rely on warm currents. In the South Pacific, lie on rocky islands or around coral reefs.

Thus, today to study the ocean, people do not have to go to extremely difficult places to collect data on their own but thanks to the inhabitants of the ocean, providing reliable data and bringing about New understanding, sometimes very unexpected and interesting.