“It blows my mind that 70% of information about the surface temperature of water in Antarctica is collected by elephant seals and not by weather balloons, not by buoys, not by ships. So we have animals monitoring across the world, collecting environmental information in some of the hardest places to reach for humans.”
Click Here · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026
Context
Asked what it would cost to gather the same Antarctic data with research vessels or people, ecologist Diego Ellis Soto says the data comes from sensors elephant seals carry as they dive under the ice.
Transcript
I don't know if that's possible. Like, like elephant seals swim below ice sheets, and I do not even know how many ice creams are. Breaker ships different countries have, let alone the operational cost.
But the elephant seals don't need icebreakers. They just do what elephant seals do. And the amount of information they're collecting surprised even Diego.
It blows my mind the fact that 70% of information about the surface of the temperature of water in Antarctica is collected by elephant seals and not by weather balloons, not by buoys, not by ships. So we have animals monitoring across the world, collecting environmental information in some of the hardest places to reach for humans in our instruments on Earth.
The elephant seals made me wonder what else we might be missing. So would you say that elephant seals in Antarctica are the place in the world where weather and climate data are currently the worst, where animals are helping? Or is there an even better example?
It depends. It depends. And I'm going to talk about the.
You say that a lot.
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