IIT Kharagpur, Deccan College Pune Develop Technique to Recover Sea Surface Temperature Data

New Delhi: IIT Kharagpur and Deccan College PGRI Pune researchers have developed a new technique to recover sea surface temperature data. 
 

The new technique developed by the team of researchers of IIT Kharagpur and Deccan College can precisely retrieve data about the past seasonal change in sea surface temperature from calcium carbonate continuously secreted by biological organisms such as fish.

These carbonates are concentrated in fish ear bones, known as otoliths.

According to the statement by IITKGP, the Infosys Foundation has funded the study, which has been published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry. 

The statement revealed that the method has vast potential in climate studies, and can be used in any kind of biological organisms and has vast potential in climate studies.

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The instrumental climate record is not available at every place. Hence, if anyone intends to know how the temperature has changed over week to monthly scale during the last several decades in deep tiger-infested creeks of Sundarban delta, then they can go catch a live fish that recorded the past climate in otoliths, the IIT KGP statement said.

The primary problem in modelling past climate is lack of seasonality data, principally due to the fact that the geological or archaeological records do not provide that kind of resolution.

Speaking about the development, Lead Investigator Prof Anindya Sarkar, Department of Geology & Geophysics, IIT-KGP said that the institute has employed a novel technique where few millimetre size otoliths are analysed by a CO2 laser at few micron scale intervals to measure their oxygen isotopic compositions.

Further, the isotopes of oxygen in these otoliths rely on the water's temperature in which the fish grew and therefore record continuous snapshots of past temperature during its lifetime of a few years, Sarkar said. 

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Collaborating with IIT-KGP in this research development, Dr Arati Deshpande Mukherjee of Deccan College, Pune stated that they are currently studying the 5,000-year-old fish otoliths from Indus Valley sites to assess how the seasonality through time affected the growth and collapse of their spectacular civilization.

Earlier, IIT Kharagpur developed methods to use drones for mineral exploration. The project has been initiated jointly with the National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC).

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