Oceanography for Everyone – Page 2 – Southern Fried Science

Ocean Outreach in an Evolving Online Ecosystem: Exploration wants to be shared

August 11, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Blogging, Conservation, Oceanography for Everyone, Open Science

This is the transcript of the keynote I delivered at the Fourth International Marine Conservation Congress in St. John’s, Newfoundland. It has been lightly modified for flow.

Read Act II: Transforming the Narrative.

Now I want to shift gears and look towards the future, where we’re going, and what tools are available to help us get there. Because the future of ocean outreach, and really the future of ocean conservation, comes down to this one concept: “Exploration wants to be shared”.

The online ocean ecosystem is full of platforms–preexisting tools that allow us to produce, share, broadcast, enhance, and manage our outreach campaigns. Not just the obvious ones like Twitter and Facebook, but more niche tools like Slack, github, Ushahidi, medium, and yes, even PokemonGo, or if you want something a bit more serious, consider R as something that’s not just a statistics package, but a way to share your own software and data with the scientific community.

Fun Science FRIEDay – Open-Acess Science for the Masses

July 15, 2016 Kersey Sturdivant

Oceanography for Everyone, Open Science, Uncategorized

The oceans belong to all of us. With this simple statement in mind, the Oceanography for Everyone (OfE) project was launched with the goal of making ocean science more accessible. One of the biggest hurdles in conducting ocean science is instrumentation costs, and 4 years ago the OfE team began trying to make one of the most basic ocean science tools, the CTD (a water quality sensor that measures Conductivity-Temperature-Depth), cheaper… much, much cheaper!

Open source. Open science. Open Ocean. Oceanography for Everyone and the OpenCTD

June 24, 2016June 24, 2016 Andrew Thaler 2 Comments

Oceanography for Everyone

Nearly four years ago, Kersey Sturdivant and I launched a bold, ambitious, and, frankly, naive crowdfunding initiative to build the first low-cost, open-source CTD, a core scientific instrument that measures salinity, temperature, and depth in a water column. It was a dream born from the frustration of declining science funding, the expense of scientific equipment, … Read More “Open source. Open science. Open Ocean. Oceanography for Everyone and the OpenCTD” »

Dive the Wreck of the Steamship Tahoe with OpenROV!

June 6, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Education, Oceanography for Everyone

OpenROV One-hundred-fifty meters hardly seems like anything at all.

Standing in the parking lot of OpenROV, I pace out 150 meters. The small sign, hanging against the wall of the battered warehouse, pointing visitors towards the entrance, is clear.

One-hundred fifty meters is less than half a lap around a standard running track. It’s the height of Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, the tallest building in the world, 700 years ago. The fastest man in the world could cover 150 meters in 14 seconds.

On land, 150 meters is barely noteworthy. Plunge into the sea and 150 meters is the wine dark deep. It is the edge of the photic zone, a world of eternal twilight. It is three times deeper than most SCUBA divers will ever venture. At 150 meters, the water pushes down with the weight of 16 atmospheres.

And, if you climb high into the Sierra Mountains and descend into the frigid alpine waters of Lake Tahoe, just off the coast of Glenbrook, Nevada, lying on a steep glacial slope at 150 meters depth is the wreck of the Steamship Tahoe.

Oceanography for Everyone: Empowering researchers, educators, and citizen scientists through open-source hardware

October 19, 2015October 19, 2015 Andrew Thaler

Oceanography for Everyone

Three years ago, Kersey Sturdivant and myself launched an ambitious crowdfunding project–the OpenCTD–with the plan to produce a low-cost, open-source CTD for thousands of dollars less than the commercial alternative. That campaign fizzled, bringing in barely 60% of our target goal. After taxes and fees, that amounted to about $3500 available to us to play around with. The OpenCTD wasn’t dead, but it was on life support.

We had a vision: to make to tools of oceanography accessible to the widest range of people, not just ocean researchers, but citizen scientists, boat-owners, fishermen, surfers, swimmers, any one who enjoyed the ocean and wanted to better understand their local waterways. The OpenCTD was ambitious, not only in its scope, but also in our ignorance of the knowledge required to achieve that goal. In the three years since, I moved to California (and then moved back East) to meet with some of the best underwater engineers in the open-source movement. We added Russell Neches, an experienced hardware hacker to our team. We partnered with OpenROV to learn from their vast experience. And I’ve spent the time re-skilling: learning to code, design and fabricate 3D printable materials, build electronic components from the ground up, and manage an open-source project.