The Eye in the Sea. Credit: MBARI.
The Eye in the Sea is one of the coolest, gee-whiz scientific projects you'll see. It's part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's so-called MARS project (that stands for Monterey Accelerated Research System). MARS is an undersea laboratory, set up deep on the sea floor about 30 miles offshore from Monterey.
The Eye in the Sea is one of the first research projects to be hooked up to MARS. It uses a small amount of red light to view what’s happening on the ocean floor, about 3,000 feet below the surface. The images travel through 32 miles of cable and go back to the control center on land, where researchers view real-time video of life at the "benthic" level – that is, a voyage to the bottom of the sea.
And you're going to be able to take that voyage, too.
Schoolchildren, teachers and eventually the general public will be able to see the spindly-legged crabs calle spiny kings, or the eel-like hagfish, or the giant, dark, blob-like Pacific sleeper shark.
