The Atlantic is being ringed with tiny sensors in an ambitious effort to track climate change

Viana do Castelo, Portugal— One wrong move, and the sea-battered granite boulders lining North Beach here can break an ankle. But this summer, marine biologist Fernando Lima hopped among the algae-covered rocks like a child playing hopscotch. He eventually settled next to a suitcase-size boulder that held what he sought: an electronic sensor, just 3 centimeters wide and shaped like a hockey puck, that he and his research team had embedded in the rock the year before. Lima, who works with the Biopolis Association and the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources at the University of Porto, aimed to download data from the sensor. First he had to pry off an interloper: a limpet, a coin-size, hat-shaped snail that normally clings tenaciously to tidal zone rocks but had taken up residence on the gray epoxy seal protecting the sensor. Limpet evicted, Lima took out an iPhone and began to download data, including hourly temperature measurements recorded over the past year. The July fieldwork was just a small part of an ambitious and unprecedented effort to deploy legions of the small sensors—which Lima’s team has helped perfect—all along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. The goal: to fill a big gap in understanding of how climate change and other factors are affecting the notoriously harsh and highly dynamic intertidal zone, where powerful waves and rising and falling tides can create a complex mosaic of microhabitats with dramatically d...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research