SERPENT Royal Society day 3!

What a week! The SERPENT project has been very popular with a constant stream of visitors hugely enjoying our amazing Marine Simulation ROVsim™ Deep Seas Simulator. I suspect the comfy racing chair on the simulator helps - most visitors are really grateful to take the weight off after wandering around the upstairs exhibits and they really enjoy the cool of our downstairs exhibition area.

See the BBC News video (Dan enjoying the simulator - 4 secs into video)

Thanks to all our visitors who have asked some very interesting and thought-provoking questions about the project. The children have enjoyed having a go at Sea Urchin Basketball! Don't know what that is? Come visit us to find out! The show goes on until Saturday for the first time this year, so we expect to see plenty of families enjoying an exciting and educational day out at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. See you there! Rob.

SERPENT ready to go at Royal Society!

After a sweltering day setting up, SERPENT is finally ready to welcome visitors to the 2009 Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition!

We're lucky that where we are in the Mercer Room on the lower floors of the amazing and opulant Royal Society building, the temperature is cool and comfortable. So if you've had enough of the heat, come down the stairs and meet us, and have a bit of fun trying your hand at catching creatures with our Virtual Deep Sea Robot Simulator courtesy of Marine Simulation LLC!

Find out how to get there with Google Maps.

See you soon!

SERPENT at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition

Now's your chance to have a go at piloting the exciting SERPENT Deep Seas ROV Simulator!

Come visit the SERPENT team and try your hand at collecting creatures using the simulator at this year's Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition from Monday 30 June to Saturday 4 July.

Free SERPENT Annual Reports showing amazing images of all our work during 2008!

SERPENT Annual Report 2008

It's that time again! The brand-new SERPENT Annual Report for 2008 has just rolled off the virtual presses. Visit the website to get your copy now! You can also click on the image to read the E-Format Issuu version right now!

SERPENT at the Times Cheltenham Science Festival

Described as a "Mind-tingling feast of debate and entertainment", the Cheltenham Science Festival in the UK hosted the SERPENT project as part of the University of Southampton's "Oceans on Wheels" Roadshow. For three days at the beginning of June, SERPENT presented at the exciting and bustling Discovery Zone.

Patient queues of children (along with some adults!) were rewarded with an opportunity to pilot a deep sea ROV using the SERPENT ROVsim® simulator designed by Marine Simulation LLC™. SERPENT teams were able to discuss the project with adults and children alike who were amazed at the huge diversity of the creatures found in the deep ocean and fascinated by the research being undertaken by the SERPENT project.

SERPENT science makes the Economist.com!

The recent paper by Dr Daniel Jones and Mario Lebrato called "Mass deposition event of Pyrosoma atlanticum carcasses off Ivory Coast (West Africa)" which was recently featured in the prestigeous publication Limnology and Oceanography is the subject of an article in both the web and print editions of the Economist.

From the Economist article "IN 2006 Mario Lebrato and Daniel Jones of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England, were using a remotely operated deep-sea vehicle to study the sea floor near an oil pipeline off Côte d’Ivoire. What they found surprised them. It was a thaliacean graveyard. And its discovery throws into question the received wisdom about one important aspect of climate change, namely how much carbon from the atmosphere ends up at the bottom of the sea."

Read the Economist article.

Read more on the National Oceanography site.

See a video of a live pyrosome.

Latest SERPENT mission online

Just updated the site with the latest mission by Dan to the Akpo field offshore Nigeria. You can check out the Mission Minisite from the Missions page.

Lots of nice images, like this ethereal one of peniagone.