oceanlove

  Rare look at animals in the ocean twilight zone The ocean is so vast that it can be hard for scientists to find the species they want to study. That’s why two ocean robots are better than one for capturing these rarely-seen glimpses of twilight zone animals! During an October 2023 Nautilus Live expedition to the Geologist Seamounts – about 60 miles (100 km) southwest of Hawai’i’s Big Island – researchers used the University of New Hampshire’s uncrewed surface vessel DriX to find the best place to deploy WHOI’s hybrid remotely operated vehicle (HROV) Mesobot – right into dense patches of marine life! Because these animals migrate between surface waters at night and deeper regions during the day, they captured this footage at the relatively shallow depth of 328 feet (100 meters).   It’s all part of a co-robotics experiment aboard the Ocean Exploration Trust’s E/V Nautilus, funded by NOAA Ocean Exploration via the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute (OECI) to advance th...

  Antarctic sea-ice at 'mind-blowing' low alarms experts By Georgina Rannard, Becky Dale and Erwan Rivault BBC News Climate & Science and Data Journalism Team   The sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is well below any previous recorded winter level, satellite data shows, a worrying new benchmark for a region that once seemed resistant to global warming.   "It's so far outside anything we've seen, it's almost mind-blowing," says Walter Meier, who monitors sea-ice with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.   An unstable Antarctica could have far-reaching consequences, polar experts warn.   Antarctica's huge ice expanse regulates the planet's temperature, as the white surface reflects the Sun's energy back into the atmosphere and also cools the water beneath and near it.   Without its ice cooling the planet, Antarctica could transform from Earth's refrigerator to a radiator, experts say.   The ice that floats on the An...

  By Sundip R. Desai, Lockheed Martin Associate Fellow and Guidance, Navigation, and Controls Engineer at Lockheed Martin Space     The use of data-driven modeling to represent complex systems has become prevalent due to the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which we primarily attribute to the advancements in hardware acceleration, better end-to-end software pipelining, and open-sourced architectures. With these advancements in mind, engineers and scientists can now take massive amounts of data collected from a physical device and create a somewhat usable digital twin in a day. We say “somewhat” because the model is not complete, just a mere reflection of the data organizations provided. Data-driven modeling, or ‘surrogate’ modeling, only captures the structural artifacts of the data that organizations present. The model does not contain innate knowledge, reasoning capability, or perception of the world.     A “World Model” ...