Scientists (and the public service) love a good acronym. That’s why I was intrigued by the prospect of seeing one of the “SEAFOX” marine science instruments. It turns out however, that you don’t spell it that way and it looks nothing like a fox. Shame.
The “SeapHOx” is an autonomous package of sensors that measure the temperature, salinity, pH and dissolved oxygen content of seawater. All of that information is incredibly useful in determining what physical and biological changes are occurring in the water.
The Antarctic Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment (antFOCE) experiment team managed to acquire two of these units thanks to our collaborators from the Ocean Carbon Team at CSIRO. The units were deployed around the study site at O’Brien Bay (Site 1) so that local changes of seawater properties, in and outside of the study site, could be assessed.
The units themselves are not commercially available and were designed and developed by Todd Martz from Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Nick Roden — Carbonate Chemist