The World’s Oceanographic Data, at Your Fingertips
Have you ever wondered what the water temperature off the Kamchatka Peninsula is? What about the wind speed in the Andaman Sea? Or maybe you’re losing sleep over the chlorophyll levels in the South Pacific. Fortunately, all of that information — and 450 million other data points collected from oceanographic instruments around the world — is freely and easily accessible thanks to the Marinexplore project.
These stats may seem esoteric, but when viewed in context and integrated with other measurements, they can help us learn more about how our water-dominated planet really works.
This is the belief behind Marinexplore, the brainchild of Rainer Sternfeld, a recent transplant to Silicon Valley who turned down a promising ascent of the corporate ladder in exchange for the start-up lifestyle. While Sternfeld was working at ABB, a Zurich-based multinational company with a portfolio similar to GE or Siemens, he took on a side project in oceanographic sensing. He helped deploy a profiling buoy in the Gulf of Finland, and eagerly awaited the data from the scientific team.
It didn’t come for three excruciating months; it took that long for the team to process the raw files. The episode got Sternfeld thinking about the difficulty of collecting and processing oceanographic data, and he resolved to make such information more accessible. If the barrier to entry for basic data was so high, he thought, then how could humanity be expected to address the fundamental challenges that involve our oceans?