Robot provides seafloor insight

A robot called the Benthic Rover spent most of July travelling across the muddy ocean bottom, about 40km (25 miles) off the California coast, providing scientists with an entirely new view of life on the deep-sea floor.

The Rover is the result of four years of work by a team of engineers and scientists led by Alana Sherman, a project engineer at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), and Ken Smith, a marine biologist.

About the size and weight of a small car, the Benthic Rover moves very slowly across the seafloor, taking photographs of the animals and sediment in its path.

The Benthic Rover carries two experimental chambers called 'benthic respirometers' that are inserted a few centimetres into the seafloor to measure how much oxygen is being consumed by the community of organisms within the sediment. This, in turn, allows scientists to calculate how much food the organisms are consuming. At the same time, optical sensors on the Rover scan the seafloor to measure how much food has arrived recently from the surface waters.