Ocean of things

A 10,000-strong fleet of drifting, networked sensors will blanket the Gulf of Mexico in the second phase of a DARPA-funded testbed to develop future ocean sensing platforms. As marine environments become instrumented with high-saturation deployments of low-power sensor nets, our ability to sense and act on what's happening in oceans will begin to approach what's already possible on land.

This points towards a future where littoral zones are well-instrumented at low cost providing a rich and real-time stream of data that can be exploited to improve how cities manage land use, water management, and public health.