Seals Help Oceanographers Explore Underwater

Data collected by elephant seals in Antarctic waters provide a closer look at the processes driving ocean circulation.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 4 min read

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OMMAGERD, YOU’RE A SCIENTIST!: In Prydz Bay, Antarctica, a male southern elephant seal sports a state-of-the-art miniaturized conductivity-temperature-depth sensor that links to a data-collecting satellite.PHOTO BY CLIVE R. McMAHON

In the winter of 1999, Guy Williams took a trip to the Antarctic. A PhD student in oceanography at the University of Tasmania, he had become fascinated with the role polynyas—unfrozen expanses of water surrounded by ice—play in the cooling of large water masses at the Earth’s poles. Joining a research expedition, he travelled south from Tasmania by ship through the ice to the Mertz Glacier polynya in East Antarctica. The goal: to take measurements that would help model ocean circulation.

The survey was successful, but the voyage itself was something of an eye-opener. “I was very excited about going to Antarctica,” Williams recalls, “but I soon realized that Antarctica in wintertime is another kettle of fish. I got a real insight into how difficult ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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