|
Mega-Yachters to Monitor Seawater
In search of a way to engage yacht owners in activities that would benefit the marine environment, southern California boater and real estate developer Albert Gersten came upon an intriguing idea. It was to design a sophisticated but compact monitoring unit that could self-sufficiently gather a wide range of information about sea water, and install these in the engine rooms of large itinerant pleasure yachts. The data collected would be transmitted by Inmarsat satellite to shore stations, augmenting what scientists now receive from the existing but limited global network of fixed and drifting buoys. The boaters would cover large increments of the new program's cost.
Thus was born the International SeaKeepers Society, a nonprofit organization launched last summer at a cocktail party in Monaco aboard Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen's yacht Meduse. With Gersten as chairman and attorney Tom Houston as president, the Santa Monica-based society has already attracted 30 founding members contributing $50,000 or more apiece. Plans call for the membership to grow to 200 by mid-2000 and eventually to reach into the thousands. Owners of yachts 80 feet or more in length are especially welcome.
The University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, meanwhile, is spearheading the effort to design and test the research modules that the members' vessels will carry. These suitcase-sized units, the Rosenstiel School's Rod Zika told the Miami Herald, will eventually do work that required an entire ship and crew when he starting doing marine research 30 years ago. Zika is currently testing five prototype systems of varying complexity. Once the bugs are out, the units will operate autonomously with their sensors monitoring ten or more kinds of information about water quality and content. The first modules will be loaded aboard members' vessels this spring.
Currently, only two of the Society's members are Atlantic Coast-based. But even the data these vessels transmit will greatly enrich the information now being gathered from the region. Drifting buoys are not permitted close to the biologically important coastline, where the yachts will often be operating. While fixed buoys are not easy to moor and cannot sustain themselves for long because of their hunger for power, the yacht-based modules are mobile and will not strain shipboard generating capacity. Most buoys monitor no more than sea-water temperature and salinity. But since the Seakeeper modules will be able to test for the presence of toxins and nutrients as well, they will form a far more precise early warning system for harmful algal blooms and other forms of water pollution than is now available. The overall economic benefits to be derived from the SeaKeeper program, says Houston, are "huge." Tel. (310) 399-0850. URL: www.seakeepers.org |
