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Images: Epiphany Among the Manta Rays

The www.divers4oceanography.org website has been newly established to allow scuba divers to become citizen-scientists by adding ocean temperature data from their dives to a worldwide database that scientists can use for research. (Logo design by Kimberly Ulmer)
Former MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Derya Akkaynack is establishing the www.divers4oceanography.org website to enlist divers around the world to become citizen scientists. By adding their ocean temperature data to the website, divers around the world can accumulate scientifically meaningful data that could be extracted and put to use by researchers who work in oceanography, marine biology, fisheries, climate change, and conservation. (Photob by Elron Yellin)
This graph shows how the average surface temperature of the world’s oceans has changed since 1880. This graph uses the 1971 to 2000 average as a baseline for depicting change. Choosing a different baseline period would not change the shape of the data over time. The shaded band shows the range of uncertainty in the data, based on the number of measurements collected and the precision of the methods used. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015)

Robert Granetz, a nuclear physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, submitted a notable dataset of ocean temperatures to the www.divers4oceanography.org website. Granetz ran a 12-year streak of diving every month in New England. He did many of these dives alone, because no other diver would go with him during the freezing winter months, when, upon exiting the water, his face would be covered with ice and his fingers would become so uncomfortably numb, he couldn’t unhook his gear.

www.divers4oceanography.org

(Photo courtesy of Robert Granetz, MIT)
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