Site of the Week
NURP photolibrary http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/lb_images/nurp/index.html
Some great acronyms for this week’s edition of SOTW: - from the vast website of the NOAA comes the brilliant photo galleries of NURP - complete with pictures of AUVs, ROVs, and, more importantly, lots of wildlife.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) includes the National Undersea Research Program (NURP), which, as the name suggests, deals with scientific research of an undersea nature. This is a collection of their photos, taken by divers and underwater robots - ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) and AUVs(Autonomous Underwater Vehicles).
And after all the letters and words… there are some astoundingly good photographs in here, arranged into subsections with content ranging from jellyfish and marine mammals to deep sea vents and the hi-tech submersibles themselves.
The invertebrates section is definitely worth heading for - if only to see this http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/lb_images/nurp/images/nur01013.jpg brilliant red Sputnik-like creature, which looks like it’s drifting in deep space rather than the deep sea.
The photos are large and good quality, but you can download even larger and higher quality versions, if you want to wait the extra minutes. All are backed up with information to keep you in the picture about what it is you’re looking at.
Richard Northover
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