Mayo secondary students help deep-ocean researchers

Students from St. Muredach's College, Ballina, are supporting one of the boldest deep-ocean research projects ever to be undertaken in Europe.

The SEA-SEIS project, led by Dr. Sergei Lebedev from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) was launched this week from Cobh, County Cork.

The project team will explore the farthest depths of the Atlantic Ocean, using 18 state-of-the-art ocean bottom seismometers to measure movement at the ocean floor, hundreds of kilometres off the coast of Ireland.

In the leadup to the launch, secondary schools from across the country were invited to put forward names for the each of the seismometers, which had, up until then, just been numbered 1-18.

Each seismometer is now named and will be labelled before they reach the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, where they will remain in place for the next two years. The network will cover the entire Irish offshore area, with several sensors also being placed in UK and Icelandic waters.

The winning entry from Ballina was Charles, after Charles Richter, creator of the Richter magnitude scale that quantifies the size of earthquakes and Charles Darwin, the naturalist and marine biologist.