Dr Emma Flukes: Seafloor Antarctica: exploring the hidden seafloor of the Southern Ocean

When: Thursday 6th August.

Time: 7:15pm for a 7:30 start.

Place: UTAS Sandy Bay Campus – Law Building Seminar Room (Room 132).

About: Antarctica’s marine environment is vast, remote, and one of the last great frontiers of marine science. Difficult to reach and even harder to study, the Southern Ocean is home to extraordinary seafloor landscapes, ancient and irreplaceable communities, and hidden ecosystems that challenge our assumptions about where life can thrive. As climate change, fishing, tourism, and international interest place increasing pressure on this remote wilderness, understanding what exists – and how much we have yet to discover – has never been more important.

This talk will introduce Seamap Antarctica, a public mapping and discovery platform that brings together Antarctic environmental data into a single, centralised visualisation space. Through maps, seafloor imagery and stories of scientific discovery, it reveals features such as seal-borne sensors data mapping deep-sea canyons, unexpected biological communities in places thought to be barren and lifeless, and giant icebergs whose lonely journeys through the Southern Ocean can be traced across decades.

Antarctica is protected and managed through international cooperation, yet much of the scientific evidence is scattered across institutions and countries, making it difficult to build a complete picture of this hidden environment. We cannot protect what we do not know exists. Seamap Antarctica reminds us that Antarctica is so much more than a frozen continent at the edge of the Earth: its oceans, ice, climate, and wildlife are deeply connected to systems that affect the whole planet.

Speaker:

Dr Emma Flukes is a Data Solutions Architect at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies). She is a marine ecologist with a Phd in environmental science, with early research focussed on temperate kelp ecosystems. Her work has since shifted towards marine research data infrastructure, including contribution to the IMA Major Open Data Collection project 2014 and ongoing involvement with Seamap Australia since 2016. Read more: https://discover.utas.edu.au/Emma.Flukes

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