Need cold facts? Send in seals Bitter cold and floating sea ice long frustrated scientists seeking to study the ocean around Antarctica in winter. The solution: Send in the seals. The polar regions are expected to be especially sensitive to climate change, but collecting data has been a problem, especially in the wind-whipped Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. So researchers decided to recruit help from residents of the area. They glued electronic data-collecting equipment to 58 elephant seals that lived in the region. The animals can dive more than a mile deep in search of food. The machines radioed back information on temperature, pressure, salinity and position whenever the seals surfaced. The result: nine times more data than had been available from buoys and ships, the researchers report in today's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....