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Ocean technologies take us back to the future
How can you be a museum with a focus on contemporary ocean science and technology without a comparative collection? The answer is: you can’t. A recent donation from the CSIRO has filled some gaps in the National Maritime Collection and will benefit both exhibitions and national marine science education, writes Emily Jateff.
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01 The CSIRO’s research vessel RV Investigator has a wide range of onboard scientific laboratories, including a Conductivity Temperature and Depth (CTD) instrument of the type recently donated to the museum. This advanced, high-accuracy electronic system measures the conductivity, temperature and depth of sea water. All images courtesy CSIRO unless otherwise stated
02 The mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) uses a liquid-in-metal thermometer to register temperature and a Bourdon tube sensor to measure pressure. It is restricted to 300 metres water depth and was largely replaced by the expendable bathythermograph (XBT) in the 1960s. 02
WHEN I STARTED as the inaugural Curator of Ocean Science and Technology at the Australian National Maritime Museum three years ago, we had a wonderful collection of 20,000-plus objects, many of which were related to ‘marine technology’ or ‘the environment’. But very few of those referred to technologies developed and used to collect marine scientific data over the past 100 years and into the future. We didn’t have anything that related to the contemporary stories we wanted to tell in the museum. So it was pretty obvious that collecting in this space was to be a major focus of my new position. Luckily, the marine science and technology community agreed that having a comparative contemporary science and technology collection in the national maritime museum was a no-brainer. Not only is it incredibly useful for exhibitions, it is of benefit to national marine science education to have these objects available for public access via the museum’s website. This allows for public research into how the marine community develops and uses technologies to collect data. That then helps inform our understanding of biogeochemical processes and what these processes mean for the future of our ocean. For example – do you know how the salinity and temperature of the ocean at different depths are measured? Water sampling techniques have ranged from the Nansen bottles developed by Fritjof Nansen in 1894 and used throughout the early to mid-20th century to a home-made water sampler cobbled together from dunny plungers and sewerage pipe by CSIRO oceanographer Herb Jitts. By the 1990s, however, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and other leading international institutes had adopted the use of the CTD instrument,
01 MUFTI-2 prepares for deployment in the mid-2000s. Image courtesy Matthew Sherlock, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere 02 Deep-tow camera image of orange roughy (at right) and oreos.
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02 The museum has recently acquired from the CSIRO numerous objects used by Australian researchers for measuring ocean systems over the past 100 years
an advanced, high-accuracy electronic system to measure Conductivity, Temperature and Depth. Data from the instrument is continuously transmitted to the scientists on board ship, thus transforming their ability to study the ocean in real time compared to earlier techniques. How does it work? Seawater is collected in an array of 24 cylinders, called Niskin bottles, attached to a frame called a rosette. Sensors attached to the rosette relay information in real time, with conductivity being used to calculate the water’s salinity. As the CSIRO puts it: ‘Think of the oceans as the world’s lungs, and the currents are the veins moving nutrients around, and the CTD is the way we are able to monitor its blood pressure’.1 The museum has recently acquired from the CSIRO the central sensor section of a CTD rosette for the National Maritime Collection, along with 25 additional objects used by Australian researchers to measure ocean systems over the past 100 years. These include an early mechanical bathythermograph and its successor, the expendable bathythermograph (or XBT), a series of water-sampling devices, reversing thermometers (used to measure the temperature of seawater at specific depths), an MRV SOLO II Array for Real-Time Geostrophic Oceanography (or ARGO) float, and a MUFTI-2 acoustic towed body. The MUFTI-2 is one of my favourite new acquisitions. Not only is it a beautiful giant goldfish-shaped object, it has a fascinating and important history. Two of Australia’s major fisheries stock, blue grenadier and orange roughy, are both deep-water species, found at depths below 300 metres and 700 metres respectively. The fish schools cannot be adequately detected with hull-mounted transducers in some weather conditions and single fish can’t be detected at all. The CSIRO designed and developed this towed acoustic body to finally enable researchers to deploy instrumentation to accurately measure stocks at the required depth. This leads to better species discrimination and more accurate assessment of the stock of target species, in turn leading to improved fisheries management for vulnerable species. Many of these objects will go on display in our upcoming exhibition One Ocean – Our Future, which opens in August. A rotating selection of objects will also be available for research purposes via the museum’s website. The museum is grateful to the CSIRO for donating these objects to the National Maritime Collection and for supporting increased public awareness of the importance of marine technological development for accurate measurement of Australia’s oceans and its inhabitants. To my delight, our acquisition in this area continues, with new objects coming in all the time. So stay tuned for more stories of the burgeoning ocean science and technology collection at the Australian National Maritime Museum.
1 CSIRO blog, 2 October 2013 blog.csiro.au/the-pieces-to-the-ctdscientific-equipment-puzzle-fall-into-place/
Emily Jateff is the museum’s Curator of Ocean Science and Technology.
