Underwater Robots could help Investigate Deep-Sea Operations
Researchers are increasingly turning to robots to perform deep-sea operations to learn more about coral reefs and other underwater ecosystems.
Image Credit: Shutterstock/cdelacy
The world’s coral reefs provide a habitat for a wide range of aquatic species, ensuring that the oceans are beautiful and diverse ecosystems. However, the increasing warming of the oceans due to climate changes and other stressors such as increasing levels of pollution are causing bleaching events at increasingly short intervals, thus rapidly depleting corals.
Projects are currently underway to save coral reefs, but any rescue attempt for these living ecosystems requires knowledge, as do models of how rapidly coral reefs are shrinking. And collecting information about organisms that exist beneath the waves isn’t always easy. This is especially true when human divers and human-manned vehicles struggle to squeeze into the tight spaces found