After a decade of joint¹ work involving 2,700 researchers from 80 countries, the world's scientists – as well as the general public – can now access the Census² of Marine³ Life, which provides the first in-depth look at the more than 120,000 diverse（不同的，变化多的） species which inhabit（栖息） our oceans. The Census of Marine Life initiative, started in 2000, is the result of one of the largest scientific collaborations ever conducted , the result of more than 540 expeditions（探险，远征） and 9,000 days at sea, plus more than 2,600 academic papers published during that period.

The just-released census（调查，普查） paints an unprecedented⁵ picture of the diversity, distribution, and abundance of all kinds of marine life in the world's oceans, from microbes to whales, from the icy poles to the warm tropics, from tidal（潮汐的） shores to the deepest depths.

Moreover, the census will serve as a baseline to measure any changes during the 21st century, be it from global warming trends or man-made disasters such as the Gulf⁶ of Mexico oil spill that occurred earlier this year. A full press release describing the CoML initiative can be found here.

Participating in the global research was Karen Stocks, a biological oceanographer（海洋学家） and deep sea ecologist with the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. Stocks has been developing the SeamountsOnline data base since 2001, which supports the data analysis efforts for CenSeam, a project launched in 2005 to determine the role of seamounts（海底山） , or underwater mountains, in the biogeography, biodiversity, productivity, and evolution of marine organisms, and to evaluate the effects of human exploitation on seamounts. CenSeam joined the Census of Marine Life in early 2005.

By uniting the global seamount research community, CenSeam has been able to explore unknown regions, discovered new species, and document how humans are impacting these systems, " said Stocks, one of the co-leads of the CenSeam project, a collaborative effort between SDSC and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric⁷ Research (NIWA) in Wellington, New Zealand.

The overall goals of the CenSeam project are to:
coordinate⁸ existing and planned programs for maximum benefit through encouraging community networking
catalyze⁹（催化，刺激） new seamount sampling activities
offer mini-grants to expand the scope of surveys/data collection/analysis
align¹⁰ research approaches and data collection
ensure that opportunities for collaboration⁴ between programs are maximized
integrate and analyze¹¹ incoming information to create new knowledge, and
consolidate¹²（巩固，加强） and synthesize existing data e.g. historical data that to date has been functionally¹³ inaccessible¹⁴ to the scientific community

"It is this final goal where the expertise¹⁵ and resources of SDSC have been able to contribute most meaningfully to the recently completed Census of Marine Life project," said Stocks. "We could bring together, for the first time, data from seamounts all over the world into a single system to look at their global patterns, and understand how seamounts contribute to the patterns of life in the oceans in general."