New Satellite Will See Water’s Big Picture
November 18th, 2022
Via Circle of Blue, a report on a new satellite that will fill global gaps in key water data:
By foot, horse, and canoe, European explorers centuries ago undertook years-long expeditions to document the length and breadth of major rivers.
Today, satellites make the first pass of discovery. Though rivers meander and melting glaciers birth new lakes annually, the world’s major drainages have largely been mapped.
Yet one fundamental dimension remains largely a mystery: the rise and fall of water bodies globally. Accurately measuring, at low-cost, the weekly changes in rivers, lakes, and wetlands would allow scientists to observe how much water moves through them. Land-based gauges do some of this work. But where gauges are scarce — Alaska, Africa, Asian headwaters — these numbers are inaccurate or unknown. The answer holds implications for flood prediction and drought response — even international diplomacy.
The vessel for this new knowledge is the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite, a joint venture between NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatial, with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency and the UK Space Agency. Planned for nearly two decades, the mission is scheduled to launch on December 12 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California.
“It’s going to be completely unprecedented,” said Tamlin Pavelsky, who is in charge of the mission’s water science team.
Satellites belong to a field of observational science called remote sensing. Having eyes in the sky, either on airplanes or spacecraft, is transforming environmental monitoring and management. Reporters used satellite images from companies like Maxar and Planet Labs to pinpoint water systems in Ukraine that were damaged by Russian airstrikes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is leading a coalition to develop a satellite-based program to detect toxin-producing algae in lakes. Instruments installed on the International Space Station are refining weather forecasts by measuring water vapor in the atmosphere and water held in clouds. Scientists are exploring satellite-based measurements of plant productivity as a way to anticipate quick-forming “flash” droughts.
Satellites, like traffic cameras, can catch people breaking the rules. California regulators police water use with an open-source program from OpenET. Incorporating satellite data, the program estimates water that plants “breathe” into the atmosphere and water that evaporates from farm fields. This information, coupled with a database of planted crops, indicates whether farmers are exceeding their allotment of irrigation water. On land, watchdog groups point satellites at natural gas fields to reveal production wells that leak methane. At sea, they track illegal fishing.
SWOT, which will measure ocean currents in addition to freshwater flows, will be the latest entrant into this hall of remote sensing champions.
Pavelsky, a professor in the department of earth, marine, and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is giddy about the mission and the knowledge it will generate. The drying of the American West, for instance, has revealed the precariousness of reservoirs.
“If you’re a water manager in a region, and you need to know how much water you have available, or how that’s changed over time, we’re going to be able to tell you that in ways that that we’ve never been able to do,” Pavelsky said.
For oceans, SWOT will track small-scale currents and eddies that transport nutrients, salt, and heat. This information will be useful for understanding the ocean’s role in a changing climate.
For rivers, instruments on the satellite will map how floods move across the entire watershed, which is helpful for modeling future inundations. It will also, for the first time, provide a relatively accurate estimate of the water flowing in the world’s major rivers.
“We think that’s absolutely critical,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of science at NASA. “The currency of the future is water, and it’s those types of spacecraft that are needed to understand and help utilize it the right way.”
The equipment is so sensitive that it will detect water level changes in the roughly 2 million lakes larger than 250 meters by 250 meters. That’s a surface area equal to a cluster of about 11 football fields. The hope is that the instruments can survey smaller lakes that are 100 meters by 100 meters. The number of lakes measured would then increase to 6 million. Rivers wider than a football field is long will be surveyed, too.
SWOT will pass over sites every week to 10 days. Due to the orbital path, locations closer to the poles will be monitored more frequently than those near the equator. This interval means that SWOT excels for large-scale watershed changes, like the historic floods earlier this year that submerged one-third of Pakistan. SWOT won’t detect changes in creeks or a flash flood that arises after an hour-long downpour. And it won’t transmit data every 15 minutes like a U.S. Geological Survey river gauge. But for large swathes of the world that are essentially a blank space for hydrological information, the mission will be a revolution.
A data revolution energizes scientists like Pavelsky. But data is also power. And data about water is occasionally guarded as a matter of national security. How SWOT will influence the political balance of power is a question that Faisal Hossain is tasked with understanding.
A University of Washington professor and hydrologist, Hossain leads the applications team investigating how people will use SWOT data.
Political sensitivities are an important consideration. Countries in the headwaters of major rivers might not share information with downstream neighbors about reservoir operations. Hoarding water is not a good look. Egypt has raised concerns about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia and how the dam will affect its access to water from the Nile. In the Mekong basin, Thailand filed a complaint with a regional consultative body in 2020 about China’s dams in the river’s upper reaches.
SWOT will pull back the veil of secrecy. Two research projects affiliated with the mission focus on the Nile and Mekong basins. Hossain said verified, publicly available data act like “an independent jury” and could put countries on more even footing.
“It’s kind of like the internet – it democratizes access to water information,” he said.
Hossain recently returned from a trip to Jordan, where he met with Iraqi officials to discuss water issues. The Iraqi officials, he said, were interested in how much water is being held in reservoirs in southeastern Turkey, on rivers that flow into Iraq. Satellite data that reveals seasonal storage changes in the reservoirs would “help them prepare better,” Hossain said. “But also in driving negotiations for water sharing.”
SWOT team members are excited about the upcoming launch because they’ve spent a large portion of their careers nurturing the project. Hossain joined the team in 2008. Pavelsky started even earlier, attending his first SWOT development meeting in 2004, when he was in graduate school.
Once the satellite is in orbit the work doesn’t stop. Data — terabytes per day — will be transmitted starting in March. But it won’t be usable until late summer 2023 at the earliest. First it must be verified for accuracy. Doing so is not a desk job. Pavelsky said that teams will fan out across the globe — the Rhine River, Willamette River, Sierra Nevada lakes, rivers in Alaska, French Guiana, and Madagascar — to measure lake levels and river flows on the ground and compare those results to the SWOT output.
Pavelsky, who recognizes the political sensitivity of the data, will monitor the Waimakariri River, a braided waterway in New Zealand.
“We need to get SWOT data to a place where people really trust it,” Pavelsky said. “And so I think the validation work that we’re going to do is going to be absolutely key.”
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Read More »Tiger Sharks Carry Cameras to Help Scientists Map Seagrass
November 4th, 2022
Via The Smithsonian, an interesting report on how sharks are being used to help expedite ocean research:
If a human diver tried to map underwater seagrass, it would be slow going. Limited to fairly shallow waters, the person would need to come up for air and take breaks from swimming. So, to better understand where these marine flowering plants grow, a team of scientists turned to some unusual allies: sharks.
In a new study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers mapped out what might be the world’s largest seagrass ecosystem using cameras and trackers attached to tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier).
They estimate the patch, located in the Bahamas, could be as large as 35,521 square miles—double the size of a seagrass ecosystem off the coast of Australia that was previously thought to be the world’s largest. The new find expands the known seagrass coverage globally by about 41 percent, per the study.
The massive meadow of seagrass, which is known to store carbon, is good news for the climate.
“This discovery should give us hope for the future of our oceans. It demonstrates how everything is connected,” lead author Austin Gallagher, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Beneath the Waves, tells Nick Kilvert of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). “The sharks led us to the seagrass ecosystem in the Bahamas, which we now know is likely the most significant blue carbon sink on the planet.”
Blue carbon is carbon captured and stored in marine and oceanic ecosystems. Per the World Wildlife Fund, seagrass captures carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests do. This means that on top of providing important habitat and food for marine creatures, including imperiled manatees and endangered green sea turtles, seagrass meadows could also help combat climate change.
“Our results indicate that seagrass in the Bahamas may contain 19.2 to 26.3 percent of all the carbon sequestered in seagrass meadows on Earth,” Wells Howe, a program manager on Beneath the Waves’ Blue Carbon project, tells Popular Science’s Laura Baisas.
To make their discovery, researchers attached cameras to the sharks with biodegradable cables and swivel connectors that were designed to corrode in seawater after 24 hours. Between 2016 and 2020, they affixed six sharks with front-facing cameras. A seventh shark toted the “first-ever deployment of a 360-degree camera borne by a marine animal,” write the authors. They also attached satellite tags to eight other sharks to record data on water temperature and swimming depth.
The animals were capable of “covering areas that were not logistically possible for human access,” traveling both deeper and farther than humans can, the authors write.
This isn’t the first time that researchers have used animals to find seagrass meadows, Professor Michael Rasheed, head of the Seagrass Ecology Lab at James Cook University, tells the ABC.
“There are some really neat stories of [satellite] tagged green turtles turning up in places where people think, ‘Why would they be out there?’” Rasheed tells the publication. “And when people have gone and had a look, they’ve found these magnificent seagrass meadows in the middle of the Indian Ocean.”
Rasheed, who did not participate in the research, questions whether this find is truly the largest seagrass meadow in the world. Some seagrass systems join together, so it’s not always easy to pinpoint where one meadow ends and another begins. Nevertheless, the new discovery is “certainly a large seagrass system,” he tells the ABC.
In the future, Beneath the Waves plans to embark on a multiyear journey to explore and document seagrass meadows with the environmental nonprofit SeaLegacy, writes Forbes’ Melissa Cristina Márquez.
“What this discovery shows us is that ocean exploration and research are essential for a healthy future,” Gallagher tells the publication. “The untapped potential of the ocean is limitless.”
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Read More »4,000 Robots Roam the Oceans, Climate in Their Crosshairs
June 20th, 2022
Via IEEE Spectrum, an article on the use of sensors to measure the tiny climate-change signals in the deep ocean:
In the puzzle of climate change, Earth’s oceans are an immense and crucial piece. The oceans act as an enormous reservoir of both heat and carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas. But gathering accurate and sufficient data about the oceans to feed climate and weather models has been a huge technical challenge.
Over the years, though, a basic picture of ocean heating patterns has emerged. The sun’s infrared, visible-light, and ultraviolet radiation warms the oceans, with the heat absorbed particularly in Earth’s lower latitudes and in the eastern areas of the vast ocean basins. Thanks to wind-driven currents and large-scale patterns of circulation, the heat is generally driven westward and toward the poles, being lost as it escapes to the atmosphere and space.
This heat loss comes mainly from a combination of evaporation and reradiation into space. This oceanic heat movement helps make Earth habitable by smoothing out local and seasonal temperature extremes. But the transport of heat in the oceans and its eventual loss upward are affected by many factors, such as the ability of the currents and wind to mix and churn, driving heat down into the ocean. The upshot is that no model of climate change can be accurate unless it accounts for these complicating processes in a detailed way. And that’s a fiendish challenge, not least because Earth’s five great oceans occupy 140 million square miles, or 71 percent of the planet’s surface.
Providing such detail is the purpose of the Argo program, run by an international consortium involving 30 nations. The group operates a global fleet of some 4,000 undersea robotic craft scattered throughout the world’s oceans. The vessels are called “floats,” though they spend nearly all of their time underwater, diving thousands of meters while making measurements of temperature and salinity. Drifting with ocean currents, the floats surface every 10 days or so to transmit their information to data centers in Brest, France, and Monterey, Calif. The data is then made available to researchers and weather forecasters all over the world.
The Argo system, which produces more than 100,000 salinity and temperature profiles per year, is a huge improvement over traditional methods, which depended on measurements made from ships or with buoys. The remarkable technology of these floats and the systems technology that was created to operate them as a network was recognized this past May with the IEEE Corporate Innovation Award, at the 2022 Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit. Now, as Argo unveils an ambitious proposal to increase the number of floats to 4,700 and increase their capabilities, IEEE Spectrum spoke with Susan Wijffels, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Mass., and cochair of the Argo steering committee.
Why do we need a vast network like Argo to help us understand how Earth’s climate is changing?
Susan Wijffels: Well, the reason is that the ocean is a key player in Earth’s climate system. So, we know that, for instance, our average climate is really, really dependent on the ocean. But actually, how the climate varies and changes, beyond about a two-to-three-week time scale, is highly controlled by the ocean. And so, in a way, you can think that the future of climate—the future of Earth—is going to be determined partly by what we do, but also by how the ocean responds.
Aren’t satellites already making these kind of measurements?
Wijffels: The satellite observing system, a wonderful constellation of satellites run by many nations, is very important. But they only measure the very, very top of the ocean. They penetrate a couple of meters at the most. Most are only really seeing what’s happening in the upper few millimeters of the ocean. And yet, the ocean itself is very deep, 5, 6 kilometers deep, around the world. And it’s what’s happening in the deep ocean that is critical, because things are changing in the ocean. It’s getting warmer, but not uniformly warm. There’s a rich structure to that warming, and that all matters for what’s going to happen in the future.
How was this sort of oceanographic data collected historically, before Argo?
Wijffels: Before Argo, the main way we had of getting subsurface information, particularly things like salinity, was to measure it from ships, which you can imagine is quite expensive. These are research vessels that are very expensive to operate, and you need to have teams of scientists aboard. They’re running very sensitive instrumentation. And they would simply prepare a package and lower it down the side into the ocean. And to do a 2,000-meter profile, it would maybe take a couple of hours. To go to the seafloor, it can take 6 hours or so.
The ships really are wonderful. We need them to measure all kinds of things. But to get the global coverage we’re talking about, it’s just prohibitive. In fact, there are not enough research vessels in the world to do this. And so, that’s why we needed to try and exploit robotics to solve this problem.
Pick a typical Argo float and tell us something about it, a day in the life of an Argo float or a week in the life. How deep is this float typically, and how often does it transmit data?
Wijffels: They spend 90 percent of their time at 1,000 meters below the surface of the ocean—an environment where it’s dark and it’s cold. A float will drift there for about nine and a half days. Then it will make itself a little bit smaller in volume, which increases its density relative to the seawater around it. That allows it to then sink down to 2,000 meters. Once there, it will halt its downward trajectory, and switch on its sensor package. Once it has collected the intended complement of data, it expands, lowering its density. As the then lighter-than-water automaton floats back up toward the surface, it takes a series of measurements in a single column. And then, once they reach the sea surface, they transmit that profile back to us via a satellite system. And we also get a location for that profile through the global positioning system satellite network. Most Argo floats at sea right now are measuring temperature and salinity at a pretty high accuracy level.
How big is a typical data transmission, and where does it go?
Wijffels: The data is not very big at all. It’s highly compressed. It’s only about 20 or 30 kilobytes, and it goes through the Iridium network now for most of the float array. That data then comes ashore from the satellite system to your national data centers. It gets encoded and checked, and then it gets sent out immediately. It gets logged onto the Internet at a global data assembly center, but it also gets sent immediately to all the operational forecasting centers in the world. So the data is shared freely, within 24 hours, with everyone that wants to get hold of it.
An animated gift of the globe with colored dots to represent the floats.This visualization shows some 3,800 of Argo’s floats scattered across the globe.ARGO PROGRAM
You have 4,000 of these floats now spread throughout the world. Is that enough to do what your scientists need to do?Wijffels: Currently, the 4,000 we have is a legacy of our first design of Argo, which was conceived in 1998. And at that time, our floats couldn’t operate in the sea-ice zones and couldn’t operate very well in enclosed seas. And so, originally, we designed the global array to be 3,000 floats; that was to kind of track what I think of as the slow background changes. These are changes happening across 1,000 kilometers in around three months—sort of the slow manifold of what’s happening to subsurface ocean temperature and salinity.
So, that’s what that design is for. But now, we have successfully piloted floats in the polar oceans and the seasonal sea-ice zones. So we know we can operate them there. And we also know now that there are some special areas like the equatorial oceans where we might need higher densities [of floats]. And so, we have a new design. And for that new design, we need to get about 4,700 operating floats into the water.
But we’re just starting now to really go to governments and ask them to provide the funds to expand the fleet. And part of the new design calls for floats to go deeper. Most of our floats in operation right now go only as deep as about 2,000 meters. But we now can build floats that can withstand the oceans’ rigors down to depths of 6,000 meters. And so, we want to build and sustain an array of about 1,200 deep-profiling floats, with an additional 1,000 of the newly built units capable of tracking the oceans by geochemistry. But this is new. These are big, new missions for the Argo infrastructure that we’re just starting to try and build up. We’ve done a lot of the piloting work; we’ve done a lot of the preparation. But now, we need to find sustained funding to implement that.
Equipment is seen inside a sphere which sits on a table.A new generation of deep-diving Argo floats can reach a depth of 6,000 meters. A spherical glass housing protects the electronics inside from the enormous pressure at that depth.MRV SYSTEMS/ARGO PROGRAM
What is the cost of a typical float?Wijffels: A typical cold float, which just measures temperature, salinity, and operates to 2,000 meters, depending on the country, costs between $20,000 and $30,000 U.S. dollars. But they each last five to seven years. And so, the cost per profile that we get, which is what really matters for us, is very low—particularly compared with other methods [of acquiring the same data].
What kind of insights can we get from tracking heat and salinity and how they’re changing across Earth’s oceans?
Wijffels: There are so many things I could talk about, so many amazing discoveries that have come from the Argo data stream. There’s more than a paper a day that comes out using Argo. And that’s probably a conservative view. But I mean, one of the most important things we need to measure is how the ocean is warming. So, as the Earth system warms, most of that extra heat is actually being trapped in the ocean. Now, it’s a good thing that that heat is taken up and sequestered by the ocean, because it makes the rate of surface temperature change slower. But as it takes up that heat, the ocean expands. So, that’s actually driving sea-level rise. The ocean is pumping heat into the polar regions, which is causing both sea-ice and ice-sheet melt. And we know it’s starting to change regional weather patterns as well. With all that in mind, tracking where that heat is, and how the ocean circulation is moving it around, is really, really important for understanding both what’s happening now to our climate system and what’s going to happen to it in the future.
What has Argo’s data told us about how ocean temperatures have changed over the past 20 years? Are there certain oceans getting warmer? Are there certain parts of oceans getting warmer and others getting colder?
Wijffels: The signal in the deep ocean is very small. It’s a fraction, a hundredth of a degree, really. But we have very high precision instruments on Argo. The warming signal came out very quickly in the Argo data sets when averaged across the global ocean. If you measure in a specific place, say a time series at a site, there’s a lot of noise there because the ocean circulation is turbulent, and it can move heat around from place to place. So, any given year, the ocean can be warm, and then it can be cool…that’s just a kind of a lateral shifting of the signal.
“We have discovered through Argo new current systems that we knew nothing about….There’s just been a revolution in our ability to make discoveries and understand how the ocean works.”
—Susan WijffelsBut when you measure globally and monitor the global average over time, the warming signal becomes very, very apparent. And so, as we’ve seen from past data—and Argo reinforces this—the oceans are warming faster at the surface than at their depths. And that’s because the ocean takes a while to draw the heat down. We see the Southern Hemisphere warming faster than the Northern Hemisphere. And there’s a lot of work that’s going on around that. The discrepancy is partly due to things like aerosol pollution in the Northern Hemisphere’s atmosphere, which actually has a cooling effect on our climate.
But some of it has to do with how the winds are changing. Which brings me to another really amazing thing about Argo: We’ve had a lot of discussion in our community about hiatuses or slowdowns of global warming. And that’s because of the surface temperature, which is the metric that a lot of people use. The oceans have a big effect on the global average surface temperature estimates because the oceans comprise the majority of Earth’s surface area. And we see that the surface temperature can peak when there’s a big El Niño–Southern Oscillation event. That’s because, in the Pacific, a whole bunch of heat from the subsurface [about 200 or 300 meters below the surface] suddenly becomes exposed to the surface. [Editor’s note: The El Niño–Southern Oscillation is a recurring, large-scale variation in sea-surface temperatures and wind patterns over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean.]
What we see is this kind of chaotic natural phenomena, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. It just transfers heat vertically in the ocean. And if you measure vertically through the El Niño or the tropical Pacific, that all cancels out. And so, the actual change in the amount of heat in the ocean doesn’t see those hiatuses that appear in surface measurements. It’s just a staircase. And we can see the clear impact of the greenhouse-gas effect in the ocean. When we measure from the surface all the way down, and we measure globally, it’s very clear.
Argo was obviously designed and established for research into climate change, but so many large scientific instruments turn out to be useful for scientific questions other than the ones they were designed for. Is that the case with Argo?
Wijffels: Absolutely. Climate change is just one of the questions Argo was designed to address. It’s really being used now to study nearly all aspects of the ocean, from ocean mixing to just mapping out what the deep circulation, the currents in the deep ocean, look like. We now have very detailed maps of the surface of the ocean from the satellites we talked about, but understanding what the currents are in the deep ocean is actually very, very difficult. This is particularly true of the slow currents, not the turbulence, which is everywhere in the ocean like it is in the atmosphere. But now, we can do that using Argo because Argo gives us a map of the sort of pressure field. And from the pressure field, we can infer the currents. We have discovered through Argo new current systems that we knew nothing about. People are using this knowledge to study the ocean eddy field and how it moves heat around the ocean.
People have also made lots of discoveries about salinity; how salinity affects ocean currents and how it is reflecting what’s happening in our atmosphere. There’s just been a revolution in our ability to make discoveries and understand how the ocean works.
As you pointed out earlier, the signal from the deep ocean is very subtle, and it’s a very small signal. So, naturally, that would prompt an engineer to ask, “How accurate are these measurements, and how do you know that they’re that accurate?”
Wijffels: So, at the inception of the program, we put a lot of resources into a really good data-management and quality-assurance system. That’s the Argo Data Management system, which broke new ground for oceanography. And so, part of that innovation is that we have, in every nation that deploys floats, expert teams that look at the data. When the data is about a year old, they look at that data, and they assess it in the context of nearby ship data, which is usually the gold standard in terms of accuracy. And so, when a float is deployed, we know the sensors are routinely calibrated. And so, if we compare a freshly calibrated float’s profile with an old one that might be six or seven years old, we can make important comparisons. What’s more, some of the satellites that Argo is designed to work with also give us ability to check whether the float sensors are working properly.
And through the history of Argo, we have had issues. But we’ve tackled them head on. We have had issues that originated in the factories producing the sensors. Sometimes, we’ve halted deployments for years while we waited for a particular problem to be fixed. Furthermore, we try and be as vigilant as we can and use whatever information we have around every float record to ensure that it makes sense. We want to make sure that there’s not a big bias, and that our measurements are accurate.
You mentioned earlier there’s a new generation of floats capable of diving to an astounding 6,000 meters. I imagine that as new technology becomes available, your scientists and engineers are looking at this and incorporating it. Tell us how advances in technology are improving your program.
Wijffels: [There are] three big, new things that we want to do with Argo and that we’ve proven we can do now through regional pilots. The first one, as you mentioned, is to go deep. And so that meant reengineering the float itself so that it could withstand and operate under really high pressure. And there are two strategies to that. One is to stay with an aluminum hull but make it thicker. Floats with that design can go to about 4,000 meters. The other strategy was to move to a glass housing. So the float goes from a metal cylinder to a glass sphere. And glass spheres have been used in ocean science for a long time because they’re extremely pressure resistant. So, glass floats can go to those really deep depths, right to the seafloor of most of the global ocean.
The game changer is a set of sensors that are sensitive and accurate enough to measure the tiny climate-change signals that we’re looking for in the deep ocean. And so that requires an extra level of care in building those sensors and a higher level of calibration. And so we’re working with sensor manufacturers to develop and prove calibration methods with tighter tolerances and ways of building these sensors with greater reliability. And as we prove that out, we go to sea on research vessels, we take the same sensors that were in our shipboard systems, and compare them with the ones that we’re deploying on the profiling floats. So, we have to go through a whole development cycle to prove that these work before we certify them for global implementation.
You mentioned batteries. Are batteries what is ultimately the limit on lifetime? I mean, I imagine you can’t recharge a battery that’s 2,000 meters down.
Wijffels: You’re absolutely right. Batteries are one of the key limitations for floats right now as regards their lifetime, and what they’re capable of. If there were a leap in battery technology, we could do a lot more with the floats. We could maybe collect data profiles faster. We could add many more extra sensors.
So, battery power and energy management Is a big, important aspect of what we do. And in fact, the way that we task the floats, it’s been a problem with particularly lithium batteries because the floats spend about 90 percent of their time sitting in the cold and not doing very much. During their drift phase, we sometimes turn them on to take some measurements. But still, they don’t do very much. They don’t use their buoyancy engines. This is the engine that changes the volume of the float.
And what we’ve learned is that these batteries can passivate. And so, we might think we’ve loaded a certain number of watts onto the float, but we never achieved the rated power level because of this passivation problem. But we’ve found different kinds of batteries that really sidestep that passivation problem. So, yes, batteries have been one thing that we’ve had to figure out so that energy is not a limiting factor in float operation.
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Read More »“Black Ships” and Space: Using Satellites To Combat Illegal Fishing
June 1st, 2022
Via The Interpreter, a report on the use of satellite technology to tackle China’s illegal fishing:
At the first in-person leaders’ summit of the Quad in Washington in September last year, the four member countries came forward with an ambitious space agenda. A working group was giving the task of advancing a number of key strategic areas, including the exchange of satellite data with the ambition to “protect the earth and its waters”.
Little progress on space matters was obvious in the public domain in the months following, until in the lead-up to the second in-person leaders’ summit in Tokyo this week the Financial Times reported that a new maritime initiative would emerge from the gathering. The initiative would look to curb illegal fishing in the Indo-Pacific by using satellite technology to connect existing systems in the region to create a comprehensive tracking system. A US official stated that “China was responsible for 95 per cent of illegal fishing in the region”.
The Quad Leaders’ Tokyo Summit Fact Sheet details this new Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), “a near-real-time, integrated, and cost-effective maritime domain awareness picture”. It will look to harness commercially available data using existing technologies such as radio-frequency technologies. The Fact Sheet notes that due to its commercial origin, data will be unclassified, allowing the Quad to provide it to a wide range of partners who wish to benefit.
It would support the region in pushing back against the grey-zone incursions into foreign waters and the bullying of local fishing vessels.
One aim will be to identify so-called “black ships”, those vessels that turn-off usual tracking transponders to engage in illicit activity such as illegal fishing, smuggling or piracy. Fishing fleets from China in particular have increasingly troubled countries in the Indo-Pacific and similarly plundered waters around the world. In March 2021, Chinese fishing vessels were found anchored in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and in one instance had rammed and sunk a Filipino fishing vessel. Sparking outrage from Ecuador, Chinese fleets have and been tracked to as far as the Galapagos and also stand accused of using “football stadium-style lighting” to plunder fisheries in shared waters between North Korea, Japan, and Russia.
The proliferation of earth observation and reconnaissance satellites make it now viable to track vessels that have turned off their transponders. As of 2022, there is an estimated to be about 5,700 operating satellites in space, with more are coming. In just the last year, more than 1,700 spacecraft and satellites went into orbit via 133 successful launches.
The IPMDA initiative would provide both environmental and security benefits to the region. Identifying China’s fleets would assist in levying faster attribution to their actions – it would support the region in pushing back against the grey-zone incursions into foreign waters and the bullying of local fishing vessels. Chinese ship have even been found not to be engaging in fishing, but instead encouraged financially to operate alongside Chinese law enforcement and military vessels to achieve political objectives in disputed waters.
The IPMDA should be strongly welcomed. It provides a substantive and a tangible action beyond the plethora of verbal commitments that emerge from other forums. It also builds on a bilateral agreements made by Quad member countries – it could also provide an avenue for integration with other countries interested in engaging with the Quad.
Another initiative announced at the Tokyo meeting was the opening of a “Quad Satellite Data Portal” that will look to aggregate links to respective national satellite data resources which can support efforts to build disaster resilience against the challenges posed by climate change.
However, the Quad can do more in the space realm. An opportunity exists to act on its commitment to “consult on norms and guidelines” for space and establish a Quad commitment to ban anti-satellite tests – as unilaterally announced by the United States in April this year. This kind of commitment would support discussions at a new UN Open Ended Working Group that seek to develop new norms for behaviour in space. Such a commitment by the Quad would show the value of “minilateral” mediums which are less constricted than larger groupings.
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Read More »With Technology, Animals-Turned-Oceanographers Are Helping Biologists Track Marine Lifeg
June 1st, 2022
Via Knowable Magazine, an article on the use of technology to turn animals into oceanographers:
There’s only one word for it: indescribable. “It’s one of those awesome experiences you can’t put into words,” says fish ecologist Simon Thorrold. Thorrold is trying to explain how it feels to dive into the ocean and attach a tag to a whale shark — the most stupendous fish in the sea. “Every single time I do it, I get this huge adrenaline rush,” he says. “That’s partly about the science and the mad race to get the tags fixed. But part of it is just being human and amazed by nature and huge animals.”
Whale sharks are one of a select group of large marine animals that scientists like Thorrold, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, have signed up as ocean-going research assistants. Fitted with electronic tags incorporating a suite of sensors, tracking devices and occasionally tiny cameras, they gather information where human researchers can’t. They have revealed remarkable journeys across entire oceans, and they have shown that diving deep is pretty much ubiquitous among large marine predators of all kinds.
Many regularly plunge hundreds and sometimes thousands of meters — to depths where the water can be dangerously cold and short of oxygen, there’s little or no light except for the flickers and flashes of bioluminescent organisms, and the pressure is immense, putting some animals at risk of fatal decompression sickness.
To function at such depths, deep-diving species have evolved an array of anatomical and physiological adaptations — thick, insulating blubber, for instance, or blood vessels transformed into heat-exchange systems, collapsible lungs and oxygen-storing muscles, and ultra-sensitive eyes, to name but a few. But what drove these great predators to acquire their remarkable diving skills?
For most biologists, the answer is a no-brainer: Food. Yet that’s been remarkably hard to prove. After decades of tagging studies, there’s enough circumstantial evidence to be confident that many top predators do dive deep in search of prey. But even now, only one species has been seen in action. The northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris) is now something of a superstar, thanks to a pioneering series of mini-movies featuring its own snout and whiskers and a supporting cast of deep-sea fish and squid.
Food, though, might not be the deep sea’s only attraction, says Thorrold, coauthor of an article that examines the motivation of diving predators in the 2022 Annual Review of Marine Science. Dives and diving behavior vary: Some animals dive many times an hour, others sporadically. Most stick to depths between 200 and 1,000 meters, a region officially named the mesopelagic but better known as the twilight zone; others plunge far deeper. The shapes of dives hint at more than one function, too. A quick downward plunge and equally steep ascent, for instance, suggests a different purpose from a long, slow, flat-bottomed dive. “If the same individual does different types of dive at different times,” says Thorrold, “then that’s good evidence they are for different purposes.”
There is no shortage of suggestions for what those purposes might be. Deep, dimly lit waters could provide refuge from other predators; somewhere to cool an overheating body; navigational cues for those able to detect them; even a long-distance communication channel. “All these ideas are in play,” says Thorrold. “The fact we can’t rule out any of them reflects how mysterious a lot of these large pelagic animals are to us.”
Welcome to the deep-sea diner
Diving deep has evolved in nearly every type of ocean-going vertebrate. Big bony fish, such as tuna and swordfish, do it. Cartilaginous sharks and rays do it. So, too, do air-breathing animals — penguins, sea turtles, toothed whales and seals, all of which reach extraordinary depths on a single breath.Most dive as far down as the twilight zone, where the dim light from above rapidly dwindles to nothing. Some go into the blackness of the midnight zone, the bathypelagic realm between 1,000 and 4,000 meters. The current record-holder is Cuvier’s beaked whale: In 2014, one tagged whale reached 2,992 meters off the coast of Southern California. The record for a fish is held by a whale shark that reached 1,928 meters in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Biologists of times past would never have dreamt that deep waters would have much to offer a top predator. In the 19th century, naturalists believed that little lived deeper than 500 meters or so — but in the 1940s, Navy sonar operators discovered the deep scattering layer, a zone where their sonar bounced off multitudes of mesopelagic organisms. This food-packed layer moved up and down as fish and tiny invertebrates migrated toward the surface to feed at night and retreated to the relative safety of deep water during the day.
The ocean’s twilight zone turned out to be an unexpectedly well-stocked larder, filled with weird and wonderful gelatinous creatures, muscular squid, the ubiquitous and highly nutritious lanternfish and the spiny-toothed bristlemouth, reckoned to be the world’s most abundant vertebrate. In 1980, fisheries scientists estimated the global biomass of mesopelagic fish at a billion metric tons, based on surveys with nets. In 2014, a study based on acoustic surveys put the figure seven to 10 times higher.
As yet, there is no global estimate of the life in the chill, black depths of the midnight zone, but a study in the waters over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge found an even greater mass of potential prey there. “Diving to forage makes sense if deep water is where the biomass is,” says Thorrold.
Until very recently, though, all the supporting evidence for foraging was circumstantial. Mesopelagic fish, squid and crustaceans turned up in the stomachs of tuna, swordfish and blue sharks, while sperm whale stomachs contained the indigestible beaks of deep-sea squid, including the giant squid Architeuthis. Tagging studies consistently put predator and prey in the same place at the same time. They’ve shown that large fish and mammals regularly and repeatedly dive into the deep scattering layer, and often dive deeper during the day when potential prey has migrated further into the gloom. Some tagged tuna and swordfish track precisely the daily migration of potential prey.
With the development of increasingly sophisticated tags, biologists are building an ever more detailed picture of what these animals are doing in the depths. Attached to fins and flippers, heads and jaws, they collect and store a wide range of data over many months. Tags that include sensors for pressure, temperature and light have enabled researchers to reconstruct movements through the water and the depth and profile of dives. The past few years have seen the emergence of innovative extras — accelerometers that log the twisting and turning of a head, sensors that detect the movement of jaws, sound-detecting hydrophones, even a smart video camera that shoots only moments worth recording.
Getting these tags onto top predators is hugely challenging. “Whale sharks are rare and elusive, but we’ve now gotten a good number of tags on them,” says Thorrold. Fearsome sharks like the great white are challenging for a different reason. Free diving is not an option, and if you want to tag the creature’s dorsal fin, you need a ship with a hydraulic platform to lift the shark aboard, where the operation can be carried out safely.
Swordfish are particularly tricky to tag. They are hard to find, unpredictable and dangerous, as Thorrold’s coauthor Peter Gaube, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, can testify. “When you do catch one, you have to hold it alongside the boat and try to fix the tags while it tries to whack you or bash a hole in the boat with that razor-sharp sword.”
The devil’s in the details
Some of the best evidence of foraging has come from unexpected quarters — such as the Chilean devil ray (Mobula tarapacana), a huge but mysterious fish with a “wingspan” of almost4 meters. Most sightings of Chilean devil rays come from surface waters, where they often seem to bask in the sun, a habit that led to the assumption that they prefer life nearer the surface.Curious to know more about them, Thorrold and colleagues made two tagging expeditions to the Azores, where large numbers of devil rays gather around the Princess Alice seamount for a few months each year. In 2011, the team tagged four rays; in 2012, they tagged 11 more. The tags logged the rays’ movements for up to five months before transmitting their data back to Woods Hole.
The results were staggering: Not only did the devil rays travel thousands of kilometers at a cracking pace, they frequently plunged 1,000 meters and more. The deepest recorded dive was 1,896 meters. The sun-soaking, surface-dwelling rays are anything but: They are among the deepest diving fish in the sea, and everything points to food as the attraction.
Most of the devil ray dives had an unusual stepwise profile. “They dive deep, then level for a bit, come up a bit and level again, and so on,” says Thorrold. “If you look at sonar, it seems they stop off where there are thin but dense layers of prey. We haven’t been able to see what they are doing, but this is strong evidence that they are foraging.”
That would explain why Chilean devil rays have a network of well-developed blood vessels in their brain cavity, much like that found in some deep-diving sharks, where it functions as a heat-exchange system to prevent the brain from growing too cold. Biologists had always wondered why a fish that lives in the sunlit upper waters of the ocean would need one. “This is more evidence that devil rays forage at depth and so need to keep their brain and sensory systems active in the cold,” says Thorrold.
As for basking in the sun — that, Thorrold suggests, is to warm up before and after deep dives.
Like devil rays, tag-toting sharks have been providing intriguing glimpses of behavior that lends more weight to the idea that they hunt in deep waters. Most of what we know of sharks comes from studies in coastal waters — yet many migrate vast distances across the open ocean. Away from the seal-studded coasts, prey becomes patchy and thinly spread. So how do big sharks get enough to eat?
Recent research suggests that some sharks have a smart strategy to gain access to the ocean’s biggest buffet. Data from two great white sharks and 15 blue sharks as they traveled the North Atlantic showed that they take advantage of eddies, swirling masses of water that break away from the Gulf Stream. Eddies that spin off the northern edge of the Gulf Stream trap warmer water from the south; eddies formed from the southern edge carry cool water southward. Both white and blue sharks showed a marked preference for warm-hearted eddies.
These warm eddies contain a higher density of mesopelagic prey, acoustic surveys have shown. And with anomalously warm water extending hundreds of meters, sharks can forage much deeper and for longer. “Warm eddies can provide sharks access to deeper food sources that would otherwise be inaccessible,” says Gaube, a coauthor of the research.
Sound and vision
The nearest thing to proof that marine predators evolved extreme diving skills to exploit a rich but otherwise inaccessible source of food is coming from animals wearing tags with extra bells and whistles.In the case of the short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus), that meant a sound recorder. Pilot whales emit a series of clicks while they hunt, listening for echoes bouncing off prey. As they close in on a target, the clicks come so thick and fast they merge to a buzz. Natacha Aguilar de Soto, a marine biologist at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands, decided to eavesdrop on local pilot whales during their dives and fitted 23 of them with sound-recording tags.
The tagged whales dived deep, reaching a maximum of 1,019 meters, clicking as they went. Just before the deepest point of a dive, the clicks turned to buzzes — a sign that a whale was about to launch its attack. On the occasions when a whale dived very deep, it made a final, high-speed dash before it buzzed, which Aguilar de Soto interprets as an extra push in pursuit of fleeing prey, something large enough to be worth drawing on a rapidly dwindling oxygen supply, such as a Grimaldi scaled squid (a meter long plus tentacles) or even perhaps a giant squid.
Hearing the sound of the hunt is convincing, but it’s still not proof. “We need to see what these predators are doing,” says Thorrold. For now, biologists must content themselves with the short snippets of film shot by the northern elephant seal.
Female northern elephant seals make good research assistants, especially those belonging to the colony in Año Nuevo State Park, just north of Santa Cruz. Biologists from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), have been running a research program there for more than half a century. The Año Nuevo elephant seals have the advantage of being accessible: Like others of their kind, they haul out on land in the winter to pup and mate, and again in the spring or summer to molt.
In between, the males remain in coastal waters, but the females migrate thousands of kilometers across the Pacific and back again, diving continuously as they travel. It’s a lot simpler to fit tags and retrieve them later than it is for, say, a great white shark, and there are expert elephant seal wranglers on hand to help. “It can be dangerous, though,” says Japanese biologist Taiki Adachi, who has worked with the seals for more than a decade and is currently based at UCSC. “They are very big and aggressive, and are especially scary in the breeding season, when the mothers have to protect their pups and males are defending their harem.”
Adachi recently reported that migrating female elephant seals dive almost continuously for 20 or more hours each day. “They mostly dive to 400 to 600 meters, the depth where small fish — especially oil-rich lanternfish — are very abundant,” he says. Sometimes they go far deeper, consistently diving 800 meters or more: The maximum recorded for this species is 1,735 meters.
At Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research, Adachi’s colleague Yasuhiko Naito developed an ingenious jaw-motion recorder that logs a seal’s attempts to snatch prey from the water. Fitted to the seal’s lower jaw, the device logged 1,000 to 2,000 attempts a day. The clincher, though, came from another of Naito’s innovations: a smart video tag that is attached to the seal’s jaw or head. The camera and lights are triggered by a combination of depth and the movements characteristic of a strike, a system that makes the most of the tag’s limited battery power.
The first elephant seal selfies, taken by one individual seal and published in 2017, showed it trying to catch fish some 800 meters down. The 21 fuzzy images showed parts of what were later identified as large, deep-sea ragfish. With the help of more camera-carrying seals, the team eventually had 48 hours of footage from 240 meters to more than 1,000 meters deep and capturing almost 700 attacks. The quality was good enough to identify not just the type of prey but in some cases the species. They included the little lanternfish, ragfish and a type of hake, plus half a dozen different squid, including cockeyed squid and glass squid.
A place of greater safety
Aside from diving for food, there is evidence that dives, especially more extreme ones, serve other purposes. Escaping from more formidable predators is a definite contender.Take yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), which spend most of their time in the ocean’s upper 200 meters. In 2020, fisheries biologist Tim Lam, from the University of Massachusetts Boston, reported that six of 17 tuna he tagged in the waters off Hawaii appeared to have had a run-in with a predator. Four dived deep — three of them to around 1,000 meters — and then lost their tags, possibly during frantic maneuvers as they tried to escape, Lam suggests. A fifth tuna plunged suddenly from 134 meters to 1,592 meters — a dash interpreted as a possible attempt to outrun an enemy. When it returned to the surface, it appeared to have the jitters, spending the whole day near the surface before resuming normal activity.
And, then there was the one that didn’t get away: Data from its tag showed that it reached a depth of 326 meters and then everything went dark and the temperature rose, probably because it was inside the stomach of a false killer whale or short-finned pilot whale.
Elephant seals also seem to take advantage of the dimly lit depths to avoid their enemies. The commonest cause of death for these seals is thought to be predation by sharks or killer whales while at sea, says physiological ecologist Roxanne Beltran, who works on the Año Nuevo elephant seal program. “But we see lots of seals come to shore with fresh or healing shark bites, so clearly it’s possible to evade their predators.”
Biologists studying the northern elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park in California fit and retrieve tags when the animals haul out on land after their long-distance migrations. Here, they are looking for a tagged female that has just returned.
One way is to head downward. An early hint that the seals do just that came from a test run of a novel tag more than a decade ago. As part of research on the impacts of underwater noise, bioacoustician Selene Fregosi of Oregon State University fitted young elephant seals at Año Nuevo with a prototype tag that played back recorded sounds. The idea was to expose seals to short bursts of various noises and see how they react. The playlist included echolocating clicks and whistles of killer whales and sperm whales; both sent elephant seals into steep dives. If a seal was already diving, it accelerated; if it was on its return to the surface, it turned tail and dived deeper, in one case almost doubling its original depth.
Last year, Beltran and colleagues reported that elephant seals don’t just flee into the darkness, they also rest there. Elephant seals are more likely to be killed in the brightly lit upper ocean, where sharks and killer whales are common. They have time only for short breaks from foraging, drifting effortlessly for 10 to 20 minutes at a time. Their preference, Beltran discovered, is to rest several hundred meters below the surface. And the fatter and fitter they become, the deeper they go in search of greater safety.
What, then, of other suggested reasons for diving into the deep?
Navigation looks highly likely. Almost all large marine predators migrate long distances at some point in their lives. Some — including sharks and turtles — are known to be capable of detecting cues provided by Earth’s magnetic field, sensing gradients in magnetic intensity and anomalies created by geological features such as seamounts. “Animals that can sense these cues might dive deep, where the signals are stronger,” says Thorrold. Leatherback turtles make extreme dives only during long migrations, suggesting they might be checking they are on the right route. Hammerhead sharks in the Gulf of California are thought to find their way to and from seamounts by sensing the local magnetic “landscape.”
There’s a single example of a species that appears to dive to cool off. Atlantic bluefin tuna spend months each year in cold temperate waters and have evolved a highly effective way to maintain their body heat — but they spawn in the subtropical Gulf of Mexico, where that’s a handicap. In an apparent strategy to avoid overheating, the tuna dive below 500 meters as they enter and leave the Gulf and stay below 200 meters while they spawn.
That leaves the possibility that the deep sea is a good place to talk. There’s a zone that stretches from a depth of a few hundred meters to more than a thousand, where sound travels further, making it ideal for long-distance communication. When blue and fin whales are in the zone, they can be heard an estimated 1,700 kilometers away, though no one knows if they go there for that specific purpose.
“There’s so much we don’t know, even with the technology that’s become available in the past 20 years,” says Thorrold. The future tech wish list is long. Thorrold and his colleagues are testing a prototype tag that can locate an animal’s position in the water column with much greater accuracy. They’d love to have tags that send back only relevant data from the vast quantities recorded over many months at sea.
Top of the list, though, are small, smart cameras. If elephant seals can make such great movies, why couldn’t other top predators? “We need better fish-cams that are small enough to mount on tuna, sharks and swordfish,” says Thorrold. “They need to be miniaturized but high-resolution, able to operate in low light levels and log data during the long periods they are traveling the open ocean.”
In short, seeing is believing. Besides, who wouldn’t want to watch a great white shark’s home movies?
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Read More »Unearthing A World Under The Waves
May 22nd, 2022
Courtesy of National Geographic, an article on the application of space exploration technology to marine systems in an effort to expose life on Earth – and help protect it:
National Geographic Explorer Ved Chirayath has contemplated life outside of Earth since he can remember. By five years old, he was determined to work for NASA. His steps were carefully plotted: study astrophysics, continue his education in Russia, and earn a graduate degree from Stanford University. And though he was just a boy when he first ideated the ambitious plans, he has managed to achieve it all.
Now, with a trail of astronomy achievements under his belt, Chirayath, a researcher, photographer, and inventor, is putting a spin on his childhood dreams by redirecting his focus from the skies to Earth’s ocean.
“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at space, and there’s just nothing that compares to the beauty and the wonder that is under the sea,” Chirayath says, adding that of the new worlds he’s hoped to find “ours is the coolest one I can see to the edge of our solar system.”
While collective human interest seems to have largely favored the stars, Chirayath sees the urgency in exploring planet Earth.“We have the ability to see and even redirect a potential asteroid collision,” he goes on, “but there’s a separate cataclysmic, extinction-level event happening now, and that’s climate change.”
Nature’s ability to survive under extreme conditions is evident, Chirayath points out. “I think the question that’s now coming in front of our species is ‘will humans be part of the future of life on Earth?’”
His conviction to protect the planet came after years spent in search of life elsewhere. Library texts and astronomy club peers helped him engineer his own telescopes, which, through various trials, grew larger in size. By the time he was 16, Chirayath had discovered a planet, intentionally using only amateur equipment available to the average stargazer–a consumer digital camera, which he modified with the correct sensitivity, strapped to a telescope.
By tracking changes in the brightness of a star that the planet orbited, Chirayath would prove he had indeed detected something new outside the atmosphere, roughly one-and-a-half times the size of Jupiter and traveling fast. This discovery landed Chirayath a scholarship for the next phase of living out his childhood ambitions, continuing his studies in Russia.
While earning his undergraduate degree in particle physics in Moscow, he worked as a fashion photographer for Vogue. It was a way “to do something different and help pay the bills,” Chirayath laughs, and since, his photography has splashed the pages of the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Elle.
He went on to pursue his graduate studies in aeronautics and astronautics, during which he built an instrument capable of flying on electric fields, inspired by aircrafts seen on “Star Trek.”
Blending his interest in photography and space technology, Chirayath directed his lens to the cosmos, and eventually, the ocean floor.
“I got into astronomy imaging, and that was incredibly rewarding for me because it’s like getting the chance to look into the sea, but without all of the challenges of the water,” he explains.
Through a decade-long career at NASA, Chirayath has directed the Laboratory for Advanced Sensing (LAS) at the space research giant’s Ames Center in California’s Silicon Valley. His focus has been on designing the next generation of sensing technologies to better understand this world and explore the universe beyond. This led to two major inventions: an instrument called a FluidCam, capable of seeing through ocean waves clearly in a process called fluid lensing and its more powerful successor, which Chirayath named MiDAR.
He is currently the director of the Aircraft Center for Earth Studies at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science where they use next-generation scientific platforms to explore the Earth’s atmosphere as well as ocean systems.
Since 2012, Chirayath has transitioned from searching for life elsewhere in the universe to uncovering and protecting marine ecosystems on Earth. The shift, he says, he owes in part to meeting sea exploration pioneer and fellow National Geographic Explorer, Sylvia Earle.
“She pulled me aside in the way that she does and she said, ‘you can take all of your talents and devote them to space. You can also devote them to protecting Earth, and here’s why you should do it,’” Chirayath remembers.
“I still feel like I’m doing the same science. You’re looking at dark objects and it just happens to be the telescope is no longer pointing up, it’s pointing down,” he laughs.
But the experience is dramatically different. Moving away from “doing astronomy on a cold mountaintop alone to being surrounded by life in the water” solidified Chirayath’s decision to shift gears.
Rather than look for potential life in space, he recognized the abundance of it right in front of him–begging to be stewarded.
He’s currently using drones capable of seeing through waves, applying sensing technologies he designated for space, to map and photograph shallow marine systems in hopes of inspiring appreciation for seldom-seen lifeforms and an urgency to protect them.
Using the FluidCam, Chirayath has been able to map and photograph the ocean up to 45 feet deep. With around a dozen surveying missions conducted using the technology, Chirayath estimates he’s mapped around 200 square kilometers of shallow ocean ecosystems and has high hopes for MiDAR to go deeper and further in the future.
These ocean missions also inform NeMO-Net, a video game he created in which players help NASA classify coral reefs and other shallow marine environments all over the world. He’s interested in using his technology to quantify the amount of microplastics in the ocean, identify where they’re concentrated, and help put a stop to their flow.
“It’s not entirely hopeless,” he says, marveling at nature’s resilience.
Through his expeditions, Chirayath has found everything from a diver’s rope to lost cell phones. “Anything you can imagine,” he says, can end up at the bottom of the ocean. But one of his fondest memories took place closer to the surface.
While diving in Samoa’s seas he recalls repeat visits by a baby octopus. “Every day it would kind of play hide and seek and follow me around and you could just see its intelligence,” he remembers.
“It would come say hello, then sit and go and watch for a while, then move a little bit and play a game with me. I just thought that feeling, that sense of connection with another life form, that only exists on Earth,” he says.
Appreciation for the planet and its inhabitants, Chirayath explains, is key in inspiring care for it.
“I wish everyone had the chance to go to space so you can see how dependent you are on oxygen, water, the fruit that miraculously grows on trees. The minute you get to another planet, you see this is what it could be like if you don’t preserve things,” he urges.
Ultimately, he’s invested in looking at life, in all of its forms whether on Earth or beyond. And though life may be lurking in outer space, he admits it could be very far and very rare. While exploration across the universe continues, he says there are plenty of wonders at humans’ feet.
“To better understand other life on Earth makes the whole universe seem a little bit smaller, more tangible, and connected.”
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