Nautilus launches free Gibraltar Ocean Observatory

The Nautilus Project has launched a free online Gibraltar Ocean Observatory bringing together daily information on sea conditions around the Rock, with some records stretching back more than 40 years.

The website combines measurements collected by public science agencies and presents them in a single place, allowing users to track changes in Gibraltar’s marine environment without specialist software.

It currently holds around 10 million measurements, with the longest datasets dating back to 1982.

The Observatory draws together information including sea temperature and marine heatwaves, salinity, currents, waves and tides, oxygen and acidity, nutrients, plankton blooms, Saharan dust and air quality, sea level and apparent fishing activity identified through vessel tracking.

It also incorporates records collected by The Nautilus Project, including sightings submitted by the public through its NEMO citizen science platform and its marine strandings log.

Lewis Stagnetto, Marine Biologist at The Nautilus Project, said: “People ask me all the time whether the sea is warmer than it used to be, or why there are suddenly jellyfish everywhere, or what that glowing water was last week.”

“I could usually give an opinion. Now I can give an answer, and so can they, without going through me.”

The Observatory allows current readings to be compared with historical data for the same location and time of year.

The Nautilus Project said this meant, for example, that a sea temperature reading could be viewed alongside the long-term average for the same week rather than considered in isolation.

One section focuses on bioluminescent blooms, or “sea sparkle”, comparing sightings with conditions that preceded them, including sea temperature, upwelling and wind direction.

The organisation said the platform could be used by divers to examine likely water clarity, teachers looking for local marine data, fishermen monitoring upwellings and students seeking long-term datasets for research.

Mr Stagnetto said: “The measurements were public already. What was missing was somewhere to see them together, for free, without a science degree.”

“We also wanted a record that keeps going. In twenty years somebody will want to know what the sea was doing in 2026, and if nobody wrote it down in a usable form, the honest answer will be that we are not sure.”

According to The Nautilus Project, the Observatory draws on 52 public data feeds covering 80 separate measurements across the Bay of Gibraltar, the eastside, the Strait and the western Alborán Sea.

Its sources include the Copernicus Marine Service, NASA, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, NOAA, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission sea level network, EMODnet Physics and Global Fishing Watch. However, fishing activity shown on the platform comes from vessel tracking signals, meaning vessels without tracking equipment, or with it switched off, do not appear.

The Observatory updates automatically each day and is available through The Nautilus Project website at https://thenautilusproject.co/ocean-observatory.html.