Ocean Glider
So now for the obvious question. Why do so many marine creatures gather in this particular location?
To us it appeared something could be happening far below the surface that was causing this proliferation of life to seasonally occur.
To try to understand what was happening, we needed to go deep.
The SLOCUM deepsea glider is effectively a remotely controlled underwater aeroplane.
It has a variety of sensors that can detect what is in the water and where.
It was programmed to dive from the surface down to a depth of 1000 metres, every 12 hours for a period of 3 weeks.
Every day while it was "resting" on the surface, it uploaded what its sensors had recorded to a team at the University of Western Australia who then passed their interpretations of the data onto us.
The glider located two water depths that were of particular interest, one at 80 metres and another at 700.
At 80 metres there was a distinct band of organic material and near the seafloor at a water depth of 700 metres what appeared to be hydrocarbons.
This information was important as it gave an indication where we were likely to find the most amount of marinelife and thus where we should deploy Deepcam.
You can find a brief summary of the results from the gliders completed mission above.