Like, geochemists, who examine the chemicals that Earth cycles between the land, water, and sky. Oceanographers , who study geological processes under the sea.Paleontologists, who dig up old dead stuff.
There are astrobiologists who, like me, are astronomers and are focusing on the planets and how do we find a planet with an environment conducive to life. There are also astrobiologists who are oceanographers and are thinking about ways that we could use our oceans as an analog environment to help us to determine whether life could exist on Jupiter's moon, Europa, because there is a liquid there.
But the notion of being able to take the trained mind, trained eye into the ocean, very important. Now if you're a chemist or physical oceanographer , which is my field, not so important. A chemist can't look at water and decide what it is.
OK, so I'm Colomban. I am not a sailor, but I am a Swiss oceanographer . And I was very lucky to meet, actually, Romain and also this person that Romain mentioned already, Eric Karsenti.
But he didn't. He did lose 45 kilos skiing to the South Pole, so pretty hardy expeditions, to say the least. But after coming back from these trips, he got charged by Jacques Cousteau, the oceanographer , to make sure that we had the sense to protect Antarctica after the year 2041.
On the other hand, we would have laughed. But it was a Russian flag and the person you see before you is Author Chilingarov, a very distinguished Russian oceanographer who was responsible for piloting the submersible that traveled many thousands of feet under the water and depositing the said flag.
it would go down to 1,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. That doesn't mean it would be as powerful here as it is here. But you would have an energy column that far down. Now, you know, how could 112-foot wave happen? Basically as I understand it. I'm not the oceanographer , but as it was explained to me -- these waves, they don't sort of follow tidy laws of physics. One wave might be -- you might have a 37-foot wave actually run over
And then I was at Scripps. And then I was just going around with big eyes and flapping ears, and trying to learn and catch up on all this stuff that these oceanographers knew, but somehow was not getting out into the world.
And yet, it's so interdisciplinary. That word "astrobiology," we have astronomers, biologists, and also geologists, oceanographers , glaciologists. So when we talk about life as we know it, we're talking about life as we're used
It's a little bit bigger than this-- it's about this size, actually, that gets stuck to the head of a seal. And it detects information about ocean temperature, salinity, that kind of thing-- not for ecologists, but for oceanographers who want to know what's going on in the world's oceans. And there's hundreds of these seals swimming around Antarctica.