More Marine

Continuing in a marine theme, our source in the Marine Institute has tipped us off to the following excellent links….

First – Here’s the singing humpbacks of West Cork. The YouTube clip below has been edited – the whale sounds aren’t live. Via the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) and recorded by Eugene McKeown of Biospherics Engineering, ‘this is the first recording of “singing” humpbacks in Irish waters and is without precedent in any inshore European waters. This is an important discovery as conventional wisdom is that only the male humpbacks sing, and only when in tropical breeding grounds, when they use these vocalisations to attract females.’

More here: http://www.iwdg.ie/article.asp?id=2167

And from the EC Europe’s Aquariums, here’s AquaRing:  an ‘innovative semantic demonstration portal for digital content on the aquatic world.’

‘Its content is provided by Europe’s aquariums, natural history museums and science centres. The goal of this online resource, co-funded by the European Commission, is to allow access to a wealth of multimedia digital material and documents, with a particular focus on sustainable use of the world’s oceans. The portal makes use of innovative, multilingual semantic web technology to facilitate intuitive access.’

Meanwhile Europe’s Atlas of the Sea Research Programme has made a significant contribution to a new Google tool that allows Internet users to explore the underwater world:

‘The European Commission provided material from its own ocean mapping efforts to Google Ocean, which charts the world’s seas. The data on European coastal and sea regions, which can be seen on Google Ocean, comes from the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODN), a project that maps ocean floors in European waters.

Google Ocean is a tool which is in line with our own objectives of making marine knowledge more accessible to the interested or concerned citizen as well as other stakeholders,” said Joe Borg, the commissioner for maritime affairs and fisheries, at Google Ocean’s launch on 2 February. “All of us will be able to understand and appreciate more the wonderful yet fragile marine world that surrounds us.” ‘

Google Ocean will show over 8,200 video clips about marine life, as well as providing scientific data on ocean temperatures and chlorophyll levels in the water.

A copy of the Atlas (~7Mb) can be downloaded from:

http://ec.europa.eu/maritimeaffairs/atlas-seas-oceans_en.html Link no longer active!

Further to Martin’s comment below have had a look and can’t find the atlas – will look again and if we can find it will put the correct link up – if anyone else can find same please leave link in comments…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 6:55 pm. It is filed under About Marine and tagged with archaeological consultants ireland, dolphins, environmental consultants ireland, European Atlas of the Sea, IWDG, Marine consultants, marine environment, whales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.