Sea Floor Robot Could Be Looking For Radiation -- Purportedly Working On Climate Change

stock here: First I heard of this robot that crawls the ocean floor.   Taking pictures and sample of "marine snow", which are dead animals and plants that fall to the ocean floor.

This thing travels by itself with no tether, for up to a year.

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One significant finding from the rover's deployments over the past few years was the detection of several large pulses of marine snow that rapidly sank to the seafloor. Several of these brief pulses, which lasted two to four weeks, would dump nearly an entire year's worth of nutrient-rich debris on the seafloor. The pulses could be related to stronger winds along the shore, which drive the upwelling of nutrients in coastal waters. (stock here, but those so called pulses could certainly not be related to the death of the radiation magnets which are Krill)


According to MBARI, the pulse events would have gone undetected without the Benthic Rover's long-term presence in Station M.

 "In documenting such events, the Rover helped solve an important piece of Earth's carbon-cycle puzzle — showing that a much larger percentage of carbon than previously expected can sink rapidly from the surface into deeper water," according to an MBARI statement. "These periodic events can now be factored into global climate change models."

http://www.mbari.org/a-seafloor-robot-breaks-a-world-record-and-reveals-new-data-for-climate-change-modeling/