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(Dr Susan Wijffels) CSIRO is Australia’s
national science research and development agency.
We investigate everything from the oceans to fish,
coal, wheat crops
and even how to make the best ice cream.
I’m Susan Wijffels and I’m an oceanographer at the CSIRO.
There are lots of different types of oceanographers.
I’m trying to understand how the oceans move around the world,
so I study big powerful currents like the East Australia Current.
So the thing I like about my job is I get to figure out how the oceans work,
why some parts are hot and others are cold,
why some parts are salty and others are fresh.
I do research on the Southern Surveyor.
This is the marine national facility
and that means any Australian scientist can ask to use it for research
and CSIRO takes care of it.
The ship is capable of dredging up rocks
from the seafloor kilometres down,
and this helps us to learn about the history of the planet.
Other scientists use the ship
to collect fish samples from the deep dark waters
at the bottom of the ocean.
I go out on the ship put in
some of the most advanced equipment on the Earth.
This float is actually a clever robot.
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When you pop it over the side in the ocean
it will dive to one kilometre, drift for a while,
and then dive to two kilometre’s depth
and then start measuring things all the way up to the surface.
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Once it’s popped up to the surface
it will send all of its data back to me at my desk
via satellites
it’s very clever and it can do this for eight years.
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Another way I do research in the deep ocean
is by putting a giant float out in the middle of the ocean
which has a lot of neat sensors in it.
And to make sure it doesn’t float away
we tie it to heavy things like old train wheels
or massive blocks of concrete and we leave it there for 18 months,
and then we go back and pick it up.
Then my team and I can look at the information it’s been collecting,
like how fast the currents are moving
and what temperature the seawater was and how salty it’s been.
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The other piece of equipment I use
looks a bit like scuba diving tanks strapped to a drum.
The cylinders actually collect lots of water from really deep in the ocean
where it is impossible for people to go.
By having a lot of data collected in different ways,
so with the robots,
the floats and the cylinders,
we can understand more about our oceans.
That’s important because our oceans make our rain and oxygen,
and ultimately they make our world liveable.
We rely on computers to run our sensors and help us look at our data.
This is the ops room and you can see there are lots of computers.
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I use these computers to analyse the water samples
and all of the data that the ship has collected,
and then we can make a map to show where the currents have travelled,
and then there’s the hard bit, we need to then work out why.
On top of the ship there’s a lot of communications equipment
and this allows me to send the data
that we collect on the Southern Surveyor
to my colleagues in Australia and all around the world,
and it also allows me to keep in touch with my family.
I love how mysterious the ocean is.
We know so little about it and yet it makes up two thirds of our planet.
The work I do with my team aboard the Southern Surveyor
is helping us to better understand what’s happening in the deep oceans.
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