Underwater robot to help answer key questions about the ocean and global climate changes
Scientists at the Coastal Ocean Observation Laboratory (COOL) in Rutgers’ Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences have launched an underwater robot glider off the coast of Antarctica. The “flight” is part of the International Polar Year, a multinational effort to study the Polar Regions.
The Rutgers glider is equipped with sensors that measure the salinity, temperature, turbidity, and optical qualities of the waters off the Antarctic Peninsula. It is gathering data in support of the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research project, which monitors changes taking place in key ecosystems around the world.
“The Earth is warming; the Antarctic is warming faster than other parts of the Earth,” said Oscar Schofield, associate professor of marine science and a member of the glider team. The Antarctic Peninsula, a mountainous finger of land that reaches toward South America from Antarctica, appears to be warming the fastest, he said. “A lot of the perennial ice sheet has receded, and we want to know as much as we can about what’s going on in the ocean in the midst of all this change.”
The Slocum electric glider, built by Massachusetts-based Webb Research Corp., is on a two- to three-week submarine mission. Shaped like a jet airplane, the glider moves by changing its buoyancy – sucking water into the nose to descend, forcing the water out to ascend, using its wings to turn vertical motion into forward motion.
It travels through the water like a very slow roller-coaster – no more than about one knot. Researchers program the glider’s on-board computer with a destination, or “way point,” a maximum depth, and how often it should surface. Once the glider surfaces, it literally “phones home,” using a satellite phone and antenna mounted in its tail that sends data back to the scientists at COOL, who then tell it where to go next.
The COOL team processes satellite data with software designed to break the ocean into 25-square-kilometer boxes and estimate the ice cover for each box. That allows researchers to steer it around ice-covered patches of water.
Robert M. Goodman, executive dean of the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, the renamed Cook College, said that the oceans cover roughly 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and have been the subject of human fascination for millennia and the challenge of human navigation for centuries. Yet today, he said, “many of the mysteries of life on Earth are shrouded in what we do not yet know about the oceans. This is a true frontier of human discovery, and the Rutgers fleet of robot gliders is paving the way to a new level of understanding with enormous implications for our understanding of our planet.”
Learn about underwater robots and see the video