Sea Knowledge Not Very Deep

[Dover]

Sea Knowledge Not Very Deep


By Stephen Leahy | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 1

02:00 AM Nov. 29, 2004 PT

A newly created marine science web portal containing 5.2 million records revealed for the first time that 95 percent of all observations of ocean life happen near the surface.

Though still under construction, the $9.5 million Ocean Biographic Information System, or OBIS, shows fewer than 0.1 percent of these records are from the deep sea. These results will be presented at a meeting of marine experts in Hamburg, Germany, on Nov. 29.

"Humans have explored less than 5 percent of the world's oceans," said Frederick Grassle of The Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, who directs the OBIS portal in New Jersey.

And much of the data collected from those explorations wasn't widely available until OBIS was created in 2000 by the Census of Marine Life. The Census is a 10-year, $1 billion international research effort to assess the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the oceans.

OBIS is an ambitious effort to standardize existing information in databases around the world and make it freely available through its web portal. Anyone can find out what's living along his or her coastlines or track the distribution of a favorite fish species...cont'd

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OBIS - http://www.iobis.org/