A REAL-LIFE version of a medical scanner used in Star Trek could help in the fight against climate change, according to scientists.

The Blue Climate Initiative, a global collaborative which strives to enable innovation and research to build a sustainable planet, recently published a major report on the future of the oceans and how important they are in mitigating climate change.

Professor Marcel Jaspars, from Aberdeen University’s School of Natural and Computing Sciences, was part of a team which looked specifically at the potential damage that will be caused by deep sea mining and the huge value to humans of marine biotechnology.

The report made a range of proposals on how to better explore the oceans in a bid to discover all species that exist.

One of the proposals the team came up with is to build an “ocean tricorder” – similar to the prop used in Star Trek. The Ocean Tricorder has three functions: performing sensor environment scans, data recording and data analysis.

Jaspars says that preserving biodiversity is “essential” and should include all lifeforms, from tiny microbial organisms all the way up to animals we are more familiar with seeing.

The Ocean Tricorder would allow scientists to understand what life forms exist, how they function on the ecosystem and would speed up the process by cutting down on transporting samples.