Mexico’s Guadalupe Island is seasonal home to dozens of adult great white sharks, but as far as anyone knows, none is as large as a monstrous female nicknamed Deep Blue.
The massive predator, measuring 20-plus feet and boasting the girth of a fat hippo, was featured last year by the Discovery network, which aired part of a tagging effort that involved local researcher Mauricio Hoyos Padilla.
The shark, perhaps 50 years old, was said to be one of the largest white sharks ever tagged and videotaped, and on Tuesday Hoyos posted newly released footage of the same shark on Facebook, under the title, “I give you the biggest white shark ever seen in front of the cages in Guadalupe Island… DEEP BLUE!!!”
The footage reveals how small the divers in the cage appear to be, compared to the seemingly pregnant shark, which can be seen investigating objects around and attached to the cage, but ignoring the divers in a roof-less submerged steel cage.
Hoyos, reached Tuesday via email, said he discovered the 50-second clip this week in his computer. He could not remember who was behind the camera, only that the footage was obtained about the same time as when the Discovery crew was on site, in the fall of 2013.
That’s prime time for shark sightings at Guadalupe, which is located 165 miles west of Ensenada, in Baja California.
Divers and shark enthusiasts travel from all over the world to view white sharks in the gin-clear water beyond the island, which boasts an elephant seal colony, which is attractive to the sharks.
The clip was viewed more than 800,000 times and shared more than 16,000 times in the first 20 hours since it was posted on Hoyos’ Facebook page.
Comments, mostly in Spanish, contained terms such as amazing, wow, and beautiful.
After all, who wouldn’t want to check out one of the largest white sharks ever videotaped, and the largest ever to grace curious cage divers at picturesque Guadalupe Island?
Benjamin Thompson is a surfer.
You would know it even if I hadn’t told you, and even if you hadn’t seen
the photo of Thompson where he’s barefoot on the sidewalk, holding a
surfboard.
You’d know it because he says stuff like this: “Most technology is
pretty rad, like it does this cool thing to make my life easier, but at
the end of the day, we’re just growing more and more disconnected from
nature and our birthright as engaged humans and animals in our
environment.”
So, yes, Thompson is a surfer, but what’s equally important to know
is that he’s also an engineer.
And now, Thompson is using this rare
combination of skills to build a new product that could radically expand
our understanding of the world’s oceans.
It’s called Smart Phin, and it’s the product of a partnership between
Thompson’s consulting startup, Board Formula, and a small environmental
non-profit called the Lost Bird Project.
Smart Phin is a surfboard fin
equipped with a special sensor that not only tracks a surfer’s location,
but also measures the temperature, salinity, and acidity of the water
to give researchers insight on the impact of climate change over time.
Watch University of California, San Diego mechanical engineering undergraduates give a tour of the surfboard they outfitted with a computer and sensors -- one step toward structural engineering Ph.D. student Benjamin Thompson's quest to develop the science of surfboards (2010)
Thompson has been developing the fin for about two years, and it’s
still very much in the testing phase, but this fall, he got a major vote
of confidence from the industry when he was selected as one of 18 teams
competing for the $2 million Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE.
Now,
Thompson must prove that the device can withstand the harshest—or dare
we say gnarliest—waves the world’s oceans have to offer and still
deliver accurate results.
If it works, Board Formula could help turn
surfers around the globe into a fleet of citizen scientists,
crowdsourcing information on what is, perhaps, Earth’s most opaque
natural resource.
In a world that grows more “Big Data”-obsessed by the day, the amount
of information we have on the world’s oceans remains curiously small.
In fact, according to the National Ocean Service, less than 5 percent of
the world’s oceans have been explored.
There’s good reason for that.
“You put anything in the ocean, and it gets pounded to death, critters
grow on them, the temperature changes, and ions corode the metal,” says
Paul Bunje, senior director of oceans at the XPRIZE Foundation.
“Stick
something in the ocean, and it wants to get destroyed very quickly.”
It’s particularly tough to collect information near the shore, where
waves are crashing.
An innovation like Smart Phin could change that.
“Surfers are going in the water everyday. They’re in the most critical,
hostile zone, and they’re doing it willingly, and they’re doing it for
free,” Thompson says.
“We’re chopping of a whole section of the cost of
research, and that could be a real paradigm shift in the way data is
collected.”
Thompson didn’t set out with this mission when he first founded Board
Formula back in 2010. Initially, he was simply trying to convince the
surfing industry that their boards could be greatly enhanced by a little
engineering.
But no one was buying it.
What Thompson needed, he
realized, was proof.
So he started designing a sensor that would monitor
how surfboards change shape in water.
“The intention was to collect as
much information as possible on surfboards, so I’d be able to say: ‘See?
You should pay me to engineer things,'” Thompson says.
A close-up of the smart chip
Instead, this novel sensor caught the attention of Andy Stern,
executive director of the Lost Bird Project.
Stern is all too familiar
with the challenges of tracking the changing oceans, particularly near
the shore, where waves are always crashing.
“I thought: ‘We could be
sticking these fins on boards all over the world,'” Stern says.
Since then, Lost Bird Project has been the sole backer of the Smart
Phin, and will have distribution rights once the product is complete.
But it could take some time to get to a commercial product.
In addition
to the rigorous testing being done through the XPRIZE Foundation, the
sensor is also being vetted by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
at UCSD.
Once it’s complete, Thompson says the plan is to sell the fins in
stores, but open source the data so that other developers can build
their own consumer apps on top of it.
Thompson, for one, is pretty
“stoked” about the possibilities.
“Ultimately, it comes down to making
surfers stakeholders, making them part of the process,” he explains.
“We’re saying: ‘Here’s the information. You’re part of collecting it,
and you have the capacity to make a difference in people’s relationship
to the ocean.'”
Links :
Good Mag : Smartboard Turns Any Surfer Into an Amateur Ocean Conservationist
Outside : This Smart, Data-Collecting, Wave-Predicting Surfboard Will Save Our Oceans
Wired : One surf scientist's quest for a better wave of boards
A team of international scientists, led by the Marine Institute, has
completed a transatlantic sea bed mapping exercise, which has revealed
previously uncharted seabed features including mountains and ridges
taller than Carrauntoohil.
The project is one of the first to be carried out by the Atlantic
Ocean Research Alliance, set up two years ago, on foot of the signing of
the Galway Statement on Atlantic Ocean Cooperation.
It aims to use the marine research resources of Europe, Canada and
the US to better understand the North Atlantic Ocean and promote
sustainable management of its resources, particularly in the face of
climate change.
Ocean life provides half of the world's oxygen and there is rising
concern about the impact that sea warming and acidification will have on
the marine ecosystem.
The Marine Institute vessel, the MV Celtic Explorer, departed Newfoundland in Canada bound for Galway on 1 June.
During the seven-day crossing it deployed its recently fitted
multi-beam sonar, which is capable of mapping the seabed to a width of
six times the water's depth.
Image of a 3D animation of a 3.7km high underwater mountain, which is more than 140km long, on the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Photograph: Marine Institute
Among the features uncovered by the team of scientists on board was a
235 square kilometre area of seabed that had been scarred by icebergs.
They also found ancient glacial moraines and buried channels of sediment on the Newfoundland and Labrador shelf.
The
survey also uncovered a 15km long down-slope channel, most likely
formed by melt water coming from a grounded ice cap during the ice age
20,000 years ago.
The team of international researchers were surprised to discover a
140km long asymmetric ridge, which peaked at 1,108m high, taller than
Ireland's highest mountain, Carrauntoohil.
They also charted in 3D a 3.7km high underwater mountain on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone.
An area of cold water coral and sponges was also imaged, as well as the OSPAR designated Marine Protected Area.
The area where the first transatlantic telecoms cable, which was laid in 1857, was also targeted.
The project will now move on to map other areas of the Atlantic, with
vessels from the US and Norway due to assist over the coming years.
peaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland earlier, Peter Heffernan, CEO of the
Marine Institute, said every time we breathe, one half of the oxygen we
consume has been produced by microscopic plants in the ocean and if we
want to help this life support system and address the risk of
acidification from climate change, then we must map, observe and
generate a fit for purpose ability to predict change that are occurring
here.
He said this expedition is an incredibly important first start in this process.
