An international group of marine scientists met at the weekend to ask for $3 billion. This money, says the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans, could establish an ocean monitoring network featuring data-gathering buoys, research vessels, animal tracking and robots (press release pdf). It would also, they didn’t say, keep them in research grants for years.
Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and chair of the POGO Executive Committee, thinks the money is a good investment: “A continuous, integrated ocean observing system will return the investment many times over in safer maritime operations, storm damage mitigation, and conservation of living marine resources, as well as collecting the vital signs of the ocean that are needed to monitor climate change.”
The BBC picks up on Haymet’s claims that such a system could help prevent catastrophes like the recent tsunami that hit South East Asia. Although the international community has said it will construct a monitoring system, Pogo doesn’t think it’s happening fast enough. The group is going to make the case for more investment at a meeting of the international Group on Earth Observations in Cape Town, South Africa.
Spending more money on oceanography strikes me as a great idea. The seas are, as the Reuters’ coverage of this funding request notes, “as little understood as the Moon”. And they produce brilliant pictures like the one illustrating this article. However the key question here is the opportunity cost – what else could we spend this money on? Discussion of this sort is often missing when requests of this sort are made.
Image: a tiny octopus courtesy of Matt Wilson/Jay Clark, NOAA NMFS AFSC