Hundreds of seals have helped researchers gather valuable ocean data while diving into the deep seas and navigating the Southern Ocean.

The data has been gathered over the past decade through sophisticated sensors fitted to the animals which transmits information back to scientists via satellite when they emerge from the water.

Professor Rob Harcourt, a marine biologist with Macquarie University in Sydney, said it was a bit like Twitter for seals.

"As they're diving, they are collecting information on the environment," he said.

"When they come to the surface, they have an antenna on the head that flicks up just a compressed piece of information to satellites, which are then relayed back to us.

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"That gives us a profile of the Southern Ocean in particular for us. That's why it's like tweeting, because it's a lot of information that's being compressed.

"Just like a tweet is only 140 characters but the information is high-quality oceanographic information, and it's changing how we actually view the Southern Ocean and its role in the world's global conveyor belt system."

Professor Harcourt said the method had transformed the understanding of what happens in the world's oceans as a whole.

Seals 'ideal candidates' for researching oceans

Australian researchers have been tagging seals in the Southern Ocean. ( Supplied: Clive McMahon )

Australian researchers have been tagging seals in the Southern Ocean but they will have access to a new international database called the Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole-to-pole Portal, which will include their observations and many more.

Dr Clive McMahon, the operations manager with the tracking program at Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System, said the seals were ideal candidates to gather information about the ocean.

"There are a couple of reasons. One is that the seals that we've been attaching instruments to are relatively reliable in that they will go back to similar regions in the ocean," he said.

"The other is that it's their natural environment in winter to be in the ice and around the ice.

"So, they're able to collect information at times when normally we wouldn't be able to collect information, and have that information transmitted almost in real time."

Seals help discover more on climate change

The seals gather details about water temperature and salinity, which can help understand more about weather and climate change.

"We're providing basic info on water temperature, how salty it is - salinity - and we're providing that data through the depths that the seals dive to, and that could be up to 2,000 metres," Dr McMahon said.

"That data is really important in defining how circulation patterns may form, especially in the Antarctic, and how heat is taken up in the ocean.

"The amount of heat that is in ocean dictates things like evaporation rates or how water expands as it's getting warmer, and what that might mean for sort of coastal erosion or inundation with water from sea level rise."

Professor Mark Hindell from there University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies said seals had been able to get to parts of the ocean unreachable before by more traditional data-collection methods.

"Information about, in particular, the temperature of the ocean is really fundamental in understanding climate," he said.

"That heat that's held in the oceans is really what dictates global temperature, and if the oceans warm up then the global temperatures change.

"The temperature from the water down in the Southern Ocean is one of the most important parts of the world to get these data, but they're really hard to get because, especially in the winter, it's dark, it's cold, it's all covered in ice.

"We can't get ships down there and we've been using seals to collect that information for us."