Weekly Article - Elephant Seals New Job As A Research Assistant

So if you read the post on Monday you would have heard about the excessive amounts of freshwater melting from the polar ice caps. To follow this on a article which has become available in Nature Communications has been using elephant seal behaviour to assess how the increased input of fresh  water is changing the salinity of the sea water which in turns disrupts the great ocean currents.

So how did Elephant seals help this study? Well they were fitted with sensors which would record critical information whilst the seal is diving (sometimes up to 500m) and then proceeds to upload this information to satellites. This method of collecting information is extremely helpful as it can provide a near constant stream of information as opposed to if it was manly collected it would be slower, expensive and extremely time consuming.

Check out Monday's post here!
http://littlechangestoday.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/fact-file-003-rivers-veins-of-world.html

Check out the seal article (summary) here!
http://phys.org/news/2016-08-antarctic-mystery.html 

Check out the original article here!
http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12577

Thanks for reading!

Check out this video from BBCWorldwide