Tagged turtles are helping scientists predict cyclones
In the southeast Indian Ocean, turtle-borne sensors are filling in the gaps researchers need to forecast storms.
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For the past few decades, scientists have been using satellite-tagged animals to collect ocean data. For instance, in the Southern Ocean off Antarctica—a famously hostile area for humans, ships, and robot explorers—southern elephant seals have gathered most of the basic data we have on the water’s temperature and salinity.
The southwest Indian Ocean, though, didn’t have any seals Bousquet could enlist. At first, Bousquet tried seabirds, like tropicbirds and puffins, but they were too lightweight for the sensors. So he turned to sturdier helpers: loggerhead and olive ridley sea turtles.
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Sea turtles are excellent candidates for another reason. The energy that powers a tropical cyclone comes mostly from the water. To predict if a storm will intensify, you need to know what’s going on in the ocean just below the surface, from about 25 to 200 meters depth. Sea turtles spend most of their time in exactly this layer, so their intel is perfect for tropical cyclone forecasting.
Beyond that, tagged turtles could help climate studies by giving scientists a way to calibrate ocean models and satellite data. Moreover, turtles spend a lot of time foraging in giant ocean eddies—an oceanographic feature scientists would love to learn more about. A dense network of turtle data, if collected over the long term, could help scientists see how the structure of the ocean is changing over time at a very high resolution, Bousquet says.
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