Click here for a printable worksheet to use with this lesson.

Take a look at this series of photographs and attempt to determine what has happened based on the information available to you.

 Now run the video clip from which the still photographs were taken.

Does the story you deduced from the still photographs match that portrayed in the video?

Scientists face this dilemma all the time as they attempt to interpret events and processes that occur in the ocean based on the data available to them. Obviously, the more data that can be collected to fill in the unknown gaps, the more accurately scientists can interpret the hidden world of the ocean. It was this thinking that inspired a small group of scientists from Rutgers University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to create the Long-term Ecosystem Observatory (LEO) and usher in a new era of ocean exploration.