Biologists studying microbes in seawater are calling for citizen scientists worldwide to help them on June 21 by measuring ocean temperatures and the murkiness of the sea.
Every drop of ocean water contains millions of micro-organisms.
The biologists will be out on boats round the globe, scooping up bottles of water and analysing the DNA they find in it. They hope passengers on cruise boats and others at sea will chip in with extra data.
"The goal is to create the biggest data set in marine research that has ever been taken on one single day, like a huge snapshot of the world's oceans," said EU Research Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn in Brussels.
"The EU-funded researchers from Bremen in Germany will lead a worldwide effort to give our oceans a health check by sampling waters around the world.
"It will bring together around 100 science teams around the world."
Volunteer researchers who want to help on the big day can record the state of the sea wherever they are and report this with a smartphone app.
Amateurs on boats can lower household thermometers overboard on a string, or check out phytoplankton levels by lowering a homemade, white, 30cm disk into the water and recording how deep it is when it is no longer visible.
Even on coasts, people can help, for example by measuring air temperature, or scooping a bucket of seawater and measuring nitrates and nitrite using cheap tests sold in aquarium shops.
Ocean Sampling Day organisers say it's optional what the citizen scientists measure, but time, longitude, latitude and your name or nickname are mandatory with reports sent in via the app.
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