September & October’s Spotlight of the Month: PaCOOS

Timewaster opps abound on the Interwebs, but there are plenty of ways to suck down an hour or two while getting your green on. This time, we shine our light on the PaCOOS West Coast Habitat Server, Oregon State University’s new map of its home state’s territorial sea, which at a glance might seem like nothing more than a pretty mug shot of some comely coastline but actually offers up a hundred ways to blast through an evening and walk away having had some knowledge dropped upon you.

The new interactive map can be found at http://pacoos.coas.oregonstate.edu. Click “launch” in the “map viewer” section and up pops a nifty looking patchwork of blue, green and brownish, plus a head-spinning table of contents off to the left.

No worries, mon! You don’t need to be an oceanographer to learn a bit more about Oregon’s territorial sea, which extends from shore out to three miles (the next 197 miles are owned by Uncle Sam, and after that it’s a free-for-all.) Children can play with this resource between World of Warcraft binges, and they might actually learn something from it.

Let us show you: draw a little square somewhere off the coast of Oregon with your left mouse button, which will zoom into that puzzle of colored blocks you could see from afar before you started messing around with things. If you don’t see colored blocks right now, don’t fret. We’ll get to that.

The closer peek reveals an image of the ocean floor that comes from a whopping 9,500 individual samples, which researchers yanked from the bottom by throwing a rope over the edge of a boat with a beeswax-coated ball on the other end. After measuring the water’s depth, the crews would pry loose whatever stuck to the beeswax to figure out what the surface of the ocean floor — also known as bathymetry — looked like. This work took place over the past 100 years.

Now that you’ve got an area highlighted, it’s a matter of clicking on whatever box floats your boat to get more info about that particular swatch of the sea floor. Click “geological data” and then “habitat maps,” for example, to learn more about the composition of the ground in whatever area you’ve selected. If you draw a new square with the right mouse button (or by holding down the control key on a Mac while you click,) a “spatial query” looms into view (but only if you disable pop-ups for a second) that is chock-full of interesting data about all the rock, mud and sand on the floor.

Click “NOAA habitat use database” and you get an idea of what kind of fish live there, from spotted ratfish, big skates, spiny dogfish and so on.

Scientists hope that the new map will help people identify good sites for marine reserves — swaths of the ocean declared off-limits to fishing and other impacts — but also inspire lawmakers and other holders of purse strings to cough up $6 or $7 million to do an ever better job mapping the territorial sea floor in Oregon and other places. The beeswax samples numbered nearly 10,000, but with new digital “multi-beam” mapping technology, mappers can use millions of “sample points,” making for a much higher-resolution picture and a much clearer view of the bottom of the sea.

Oceanographers like to gripe that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the bottom of our own ocean. Thing is, they’re right. But that may be about to change.

Spotlight written by Winston Ross.