How OCEARCH’s expeditions are helping us understand our planet’s oceans
If you know anything about Boxed Water, you know we love our planet. And we also love our partners and other organizations who love our planet. One of the innovative groups we’ve been inspired by recently is OCEARCH, known for their groundbreaking work tracking and studying key marine species (like great white sharks and tiger sharks).
They’re most known for their research expeditions aboard the M/V OCEARCH, a floating laboratory that houses a multi-disciplined research team. The ship features a 75,000-pound-capacity hydraulic platform to safely lift mature sharks out of the water so the team can conduct 12 different studies within 15 minutes.
Their website homepage features a near-real-time global marine animal tracker, which follows sharks, sea turtles, whales, seals and dolphins across the world. You can see how far they swam and when they last surfaced (turtle tracking and chill, anyone?). OCEARCH’s work enables marine scientists to pioneer research that currently doesn’t exist but is critical to global conservation and public safety efforts.
“The data is shared in an open source environment with collaborating institutions who utilize it to conduct studies that are eventually published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal,” OCEARCH explains on their website. “The papers, which can take 2-5 years to publish, are utilized to assist in policy decisions.”
It’s organizations like OCEARCH who are helping us understand the vital role oceans play in our ecosystems, and why issues like plastic pollution are so detrimental to the health of our planet.
That’s why we’re teaming up with organizations like Ocean Blue Project to clean 3,000 miles of beaches – and why we offer a sustainable alternative to plastic water bottles to reduce plastic from our waste stream.