Watching our water world

A group of international scientists called on world leaders Sunday to invest billions in a complex array of satellites, undersea robots and other high-tech devices to monitor the oceans and better understand an environment they say is crucial to predicting natural disasters.

The consortium will issue its appeal for funding this week at a meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, where it will stress the need for a system that could measure the vital signs of the globe’s oceans, providing warnings of tsunamis, droughts and other potential crises linked to climate change.

"There are more people living in harm’s way and we have more environmental threats and disasters looming with global warming," Jim Baker, an oceanographer and member of the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans, or POGO, said from Philadelphia before Wednesday’s meeting.

"So, the risk (of not doing this) is that we don’t have the warnings that we need to protect society."

The ambitious system the group wants to develop includes a variety of robotic submarines, fixed stations taking measurements from the sea floor, cables the length of highways gathering data on ocean conditions and satellites tracking the movement of plankton from space.

They estimate it would cost up to $3 billion to develop the system within the next 10 years, and will ask officials at the 72-member Group on Earth Observations meeting to ante up the funds.

Baker said the price tag might seem steep, but much more is put into atmospheric monitoring systems while the ocean, which covers 71 per cent of the planet, is at times ignored.

More from The Chronicle Herald Canada