14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past few years, the government of Australia has realized the importance of assessing the health of the currents moving past two of the country's main borders, and has commissioned the construction of a deep-ocean, remote-controlled robotic submarine to take on the job. Recently, the first tour of duty for the machine has been successfully completed, and the researchers in charge of operating it have retrieved it undamaged from the designated meeting point.
The submarine was a result of a joint collaboration between the CSIRO Wealth from Oceans National Research Flagship and the Integrated Marine Observation System (IMOS), and was launched to sea in February. It moved across more than 1,500 kilometers of sea, and took scientific readings at great depths. In charge of the supplying stage of the project was IMOS' Australian National Facility for Ocean Gliders, at the University of Western Australia.
“Ocean currents around Australia are critical to so many aspects of nature and human activity. With the East Australian and Leeuwin Currents, we need to understand how they change from season to season and year to year, and the extent of their influence on local coastal conditions, as this affects climate, weather, fisheries, shipping and more. Increasingly, these autonomous gliders are being used by northern hemisphere marine research groups,” Ken Ridgway, who is a senior researcher at CSIRO Wealth from Oceans Flagship, explained.
“Australia is just beginning to use these deep-ocean systems, although shallow water gliders have been deployed off Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales in recent months. The Tasman Sea deployment was the first deployment of a deep-ocean glider in the southern hemisphere,” the expert also said.
He added that data from these instruments would be combined with other readings, obtained from direct surveys, sample analyses, satellite and GPS observations, as well as scientific expeditions to areas of great interest. “In a lot of ways, this first deployment is as much learning how to pilot the glider and guide it through and around the eddies of the East Australian Current as it is getting about the data we want,” Ridgway pinpointed.