[music]
Liz Hoadley Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for tonight's Ask an Explorer webinar. My name is Liz Hoadley and I work with the education team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, or NOAA Ocean Exploration, as we call ourselves for short. I'll be our host for tonight's event. And in just a few moments, I'll introduce you to some of the biggest challenges faced by ocean explorers to set the stage for the rest of the evening, where we'll hear from a variety of experts that are working on challenges, including exploring the deep ocean, collecting, analyzing and sharing ocean data and making ocean exploration accessible for each of these big
Liz Hoadley challenge themes, we'll have 1 to 2 experts that share their stories about real-world exploration challenges they face and the innovative solutions they're working on to overcome those challenges and to answer as many of your questions as we can get to in tonight's event. Many of you have submitted questions when you registered, and we have several of them queued up for our experts.
Liz Hoadley But you can also submit questions while you're watching tonight's event using the chat or comment box. And before we get too far, let's test that out and make sure our chat and comment functions are working. So if you're tuning in on a platform like YouTube or social media that has a comment or chat box, please tell us who you are, where you're joining from, and how many people are tuning in with you.
Liz Hoadley So again, in your chat box or comment box, please tell us who you are, where you're joining from, and how many people are tuning in with you. And I see them rolling in. I know we have over 1600 people registered tonight and can't wait to see where you're all joining in from. And while those answers roll in. Let's go ahead and dive in.
Liz Hoadley So as I mentioned at the start of the event, I work for NOAA Ocean Exploration. And our office is dedicated to exploring the unknown ocean. We lead expeditions on NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer and other research vessels, revealing the incredible life habitats and phenomena that lie beneath the water's surface. Exploration is key to increasing our understanding of the ocean so we can move effectively, manage, conserve, regulate and use ocean resources that are vital to all of our lives.
Liz Hoadley Even though the ocean covers over 70% of the Earth's surface and plays a critical role in supporting life on our planet, our understanding of the ocean remains limited, and most of it's still largely unexplored. Why is that? Well, it's difficult to explore the ocean. There are many challenges that must be overcome to study it. For starters, the ocean is huge.
Liz Hoadley Not only does it cover 70% of the Earth's surface, the ocean accounts for 90% of livable space on the planet. And that's because the ocean is three dimensional. It has volume. We can compare it to the forest. To study the forest. You can't just walk along the forest floor. You have to investigate life up in the trees. So while one major exploration challenge is mapping the seafloor to understand the features and life at the bottom, it's a whole other challenge to study the water column, which is all of the water, the ocean processes and the life between ocean surface and seafloor.
Liz Hoadley To date, less than 25% of the seafloor has been mapped to high resolution and an even smaller amount of the water column has been explored. Another major challenge to ocean exploration is depth. The average depth of the ocean is about 4000 meters or just over 13,000 feet deep. That is equivalent to approximately 350 school busses. And that's just the average depth.
Liz Hoadley The deepest part of the ocean or the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench is just under 11,000 meters or 36,000 feet deep. That is so deep that if you put Mount Everest in the trench, there would still be about 2000 meters of water on top of it, which is just crazy. Exploring in waters that deep introduces a lot of additional challenges, like crushing pressures, complete darkness and near freezing temperatures.
Liz Hoadley At the ocean surface, the atmospheric pressure is one atmosphere, meaning you feel the weight or the pressure of just one of the world's atmospheres right on, you right now. Not too bad, right? However, as you move deeper into the ocean, that pressure increases rapidly due to the weight of the water above you. If we dive to 6000 meters, which is how deep remotely operated vehicle Deep Discover is designed to go, the pressure is about 596 atmospheres or 596 times what you feel right now, which is the pressure that is equivalent to the weight of an elephant standing on a quarter.
Liz Hoadley You can see what the pressure does to a simple Styrofoam cup. And while there's many animals that have adaptations to withstand this pressure, any equipment or tools that operate there must be designed to withstand or not collapse under all of that pressure. Then there's the darkness. There's very little natural light below 200 meters in the ocean and below a thousand meters,
Liz Hoadley there's no sunlight at all. Animals that live in this zone have adaptations that help them survive in complete darkness. Many are able to produce their own light via my favorite deep-sea adaptation: bioluminescence. But to study the deep ocean, underwater vehicles must bring their lights with them in order for cameras to see what lives there. And the last challenge we'll mention are the freezing temperatures below 200 meters or 660 feet.
Liz Hoadley The average water temperature is just above freezing at four degrees Celsius or 39 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr.
Liz Hoadley This is a challenge because most of the materials that are on our underwater vehicle shrink in cold water and different materials shrink at different temperatures and at different rates, which can be a special challenge for tools that are built with different or mixed materials like ROVs, which have metal, plastic and foam elements. And yet, even with all of these challenges, ocean exploration isn't impossible. To overcome these challenges,
Liz Hoadley ocean exploration is an industry made up of people from various disciplines that work together, each bringing their individual expertize, excitement and curiosity to the table. Much like many of you in the audience that are working as a team to create an innovative solution for an ocean exploration challenge as part of a robotics competition this year. And now the exciting part for tonight's event, it's time to meet our explorers.
Liz Hoadley And as a reminder, this part is divided into three sections, with experts ready to answer questions related to each of those exploration challenge themes. We have several questions lined up to you are lined up that you submitted when you registered. However, at any point in tonight's event, using that same comment function where you submitted who you are and where you joined from,
Liz Hoadley you can also send in questions and I can see a lot of you have already been sending in really awesome questions. And with that, let's introduce our first group of experts that work on challenges associated with exploring deep waters. To answer your questions related to this topic, we're joined by Molly Curran and Anthony Tarantino, who both are engineers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and specialize in developing underwater vehicles that overcome the challenges of exploring in the deep.
Liz Hoadley Welcome, Molly and Anthony. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Yeah, happy to be here.
Anthony Tarantino Hi, everyone.
Liz Hoadley Awesome. Anthony, if you don't mind, let's start with you. You work on perhaps one of the most famous underwater vehicles of all time, the Alvin. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and a current problem you're working on?
Anthony Tarantino Absolutely. Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Anthony Tarantino and I'm a technical program manager and an Alvin pilot here at WHOI. Our organization is geared towards unlocking the secrets of the deep ocean, and we are made up of scientists and engineers. Me personally, I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and I was the son of Italian immigrants. And when I was a kid, well, I was obsessed with sports.
Anthony Tarantino And I always figured I'd be a professional baseball player when I grew up. But alas, I had to go and get an education and try and find a real job. So I was the first in my family to go to school and to go to college. And I graduated from Wentworth Institute of Technology with a with an electrical engineering degree.
Anthony Tarantino I also got to continue playing baseball there, which was great, but eventually I had to get a real job. So after I graduated, I had several different jobs, but eventually one took me to Woods Hole is an amazing trip to Hawaii, where I did my first scuba dove and did lots of snorkeling. Eventually, after that trip, I took a look at the Woods Hole website and found the Alvin posting and started working with the Alvin Group.
Anthony Tarantino I've been here in WHOI ever since and it's now been almost 25 years, so I've been pretty lucky to do what I do. So on to that. As a pilot here at Woods Hole, I get to dive Alvin and that's actually me in in the porthole looking forward. This is during some dives in the Pacific Rise. This is at about 2500 meters.
Anthony Tarantino So as a pilot, I operate the vehicle and I make sure that the folks inside are safe and we execute all sorts of experiments that that the scientists we work with put together for us. So that's been just an amazing thing to be able to do research that scientists have dreamt up for many years. I get to take people to the deepest parts of the ocean.
Anthony Tarantino And as another part of my job, I am also a technical program manager. So I get to drive some of the technical development that happens on the vehicle to improve and increase its capabilities. Just recently I was working with our team, which is a great group of women and men, and we we made modifications to the vehicle to increase its operational depth from 4500 meters to 6500 meters.
Anthony Tarantino And what that does is it unlocks a whole lot more of the ocean bottom. So at 4500 meters, you can access roughly 68% of the ocean bottom, and that's at 6500 meters, which is almost four miles down, you can access about 98% of the ocean bottom. So it's.
Liz Hoadley That's incredible. Anthony. Yeah. I want to make sure we save time for all of our experts tonight, but I know a lot of our I see some of the comments rolling in. And personally, it's a bucket list item for me to dive in Alvin one day. So I know there's a lot of us that are very jealous about what you do, but I want to make sure we have time to include Molly, too, because she's working on some really awesome vehicles also at Woods Hole.
Liz Hoadley Molly, can you tell us a little bit about your work? Yeah, absolutely. Hi, my name is Molly Curran, Mechanical Engineering Market Lab here, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. I actually grew up on a small a small farm in Pennsylvania. I grew up outdoors and hands on. But I also really love baby dolls and dressing up. My family, they were all engineers and we did something a little odd.
Molly Curran We actually raced jet skis, which was a lot of fun growing up, and I got to see how they put their engineering skills really to the test to make the jet skis faster for racing. So I think that's really what fueled my love for both the water and engineering. And then I went to college at the University of New Hampshire, and my junior year I began a minor in ocean engineering.
Molly Curran And this is really where I fell in love with the challenges that the ocean presented. And I did my senior project on a wave energy conversion buoy. The first time we deployed it, a bigger than expected wave came along and smashed it to pieces. And that actually was when I really decided I wanted to work in the ocean, realizing how harsh it was and how difficult it was.
Molly Curran And so after that day, we all went back to the drawing board and and made it more robust so that we could deploy it again. After college, I went to got my job at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And as a as an engineer here, I get to be a part of a bigger team who comes up with ideas to help
Molly Curran scientists explore the ocean. You can see in the image here, as engineers, we work with the scientists to come up with an idea or fix a problem. And then we make models and then we bring it to life and then we deployed in the ocean. So it's a really rewarding process that we get to go through. We're kind of involved in everything from assembly, fabrication, testing operations. And in the past two summers I've been lucky enough to go on expedition up to the Arctic, one of them deploying a vehicle in Arctic sea ice, and the other was deploying that same vehicle up against the glacial front.
Molly Curran And ice poses a lot of issues and is a really challenging place to work with these vehicles and with the ships. But it's really important. Has a big impact on on climate change and sea level rise. So it's really a place that we want to be exploring. We've had some issues of now it poses a lot of challenges.
Molly Curran Some of them the ice breaking off or the ice above the vehicle. You can't just come to the surface when things go wrong. Additionally, when the ice is melting, it's actually carrying a lot of sediment with it, and that sediment could fall on the vehicle and make it really heavy, which we we had happened to us. So after that we made a change.
Molly Curran You know, we, we then checked our buoyancy after every time we went to the seafloor. So here you can see our vehicle that we deployed under the ice. And this is a remotely operated vehicle. And we were able to work underneath the ice, as you can see there, and up against the glacial front. That's really cool, Molly. And I know I personally think it's I got to visit Woods Hole this summer and it was for my first time ever and it was just like an engineering Candyland.
Molly Curran That's the place. And I hope a lot of the people tuning into might get the opportunity at some point because it's really cool. But I know we have for the sake of time, a ton of questions that were submitted related to challenges exploring the deep that I want to get to on the key minute registration and some more rolling in life tonight.
Liz Hoadley / Molly Curran Molly, if you don't mind, I think the first one is perfect for you. And we have some young explorers that want to know what materials or technologies or design strategies make it possible to explore some of the deepest waters. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the major challenges is withstanding the deep pressure in the ocean. As you get deeper, you have more pressure.
Molly Curran And so we need to decide on the strength, the size, the shape of the components that are going down because certain shapes and certain materials are stronger than others. So being an engineer, we have to look at all the different factors. We also need to consider how to get there for example, oftentimes autonomous robots are actually shaped like fish.
Molly Curran / Liz Hoadley Why is that? Do you think? It's because it's an efficient, hydrodynamic shape and that helps us preserve energy. So thinking about all of these different factors when you're coming up with with a design to go to the deep ocean. That's awesome. And I think that leads us right into the next one perfectly. And Anthony, if you don't mind, I think this one's got for you what are the materials?
Liz Hoadley Are design strategies like specific materials that help protect against corrosion? Because I know that's another issue we have when we go into saltwater.
Anthony Tarantino Problem for for us in saltwater, much like rust is a problem for iron in an air. So when you put two different metals together and you put it in the saltwater, you get you get this problem where you have less noble materials kind of eating away at or causing causing an electric or a chemical reaction that that wears one down.
Anthony Tarantino So what we do is we're really careful about the types of materials we choose. For Alvin, we use a lot of titanium because that's very resistant to corrosion. But also you can coat materials in such a way that keeps the saltwater away from them or isolates them from from other materials. And that helps with their longevity and with their resistance to corrosion.
Liz Hoadley That's really cool. And I just notice you have your Alvin t-shirt on tonight, so way to represent that Alvin team. That's awesome. Molly, I've got another one that has come up several times in tonight's chat and submitted ahead of time. How to remotely operated vehicles get their electricity and what role did batteries play in deep sea exploration?
Molly Curran Yeah, that's a great question. For some, robots have batteries and some robots get their power from the ship. And so if they're getting that power from the ship, they need a big cable to go down. So that's kind of your conventional ROV has a big cable that goes from the ship to the ROV and is providing it almost infinite power.
Molly Curran Other vehicles have batteries on board, and so they have to be conscious of the power that you're using. So just like you have limited power and your cell phone or computer and you have to charge it at night, those robots, we can only put them down for a certain amount of time. Then we have to bring them back up on the ship and recharge them.
Liz Hoadley You guys have already covered so many big challenges related to exploring the deep. Some of our our viewers tonight really want to know, how do you test a deep sea vehicle without actually going into the ocean? How do you know it's ready for these high pressures at the deep depths?
Anthony Tarantino Yeah, that's a pretty complicated process, but it all starts at the sub system level. So there's a few things that we need to test. We need to test for functionality, and then we obviously need to make sure that whatever these components we build are capable of withstanding the pressure. So in some instances, we'll do the electrical test here in the lab, make sure it's ready to go into the water, and then we'll transfer it to a test tank that's very similar to to the ocean ocean salinity.
Anthony Tarantino And we'll test it there. And then if we want to check them for for pressure tolerance, we actually have a pressure test facility that can simulate the pressures at depths, the ambient pressures at depths, at any water depths. Additionally, once we've finally got a vehicle assembled, we can take it right out back because we happen to be conveniently located right on the water and we can actually put the entire vehicle into the saltwater right here in a very controlled condition and test it entirely in our test.
Liz Hoadley Well, that's really cool. And I'm going to ask a little follow up question to that, because I'm really intrigued by these pressure tanks that you said that can simulate deep sea pressure. They have to be pretty special, right. How many of those exist in the world?
Anthony Tarantino I guess I can take that one. They're fairly special. And what makes them special in some instances is their size. And how big of a component they can accommodate. So for some of the very largest ones, only one or two may exist in the world. The test facility that we used to test the Alvin personnel sphere was fairly large and there's only two in existence, one here in the United States, and the only other one that I know of in existence that would fit that large component is in Russia.
Anthony Tarantino So they're pretty special and they're obviously pretty valuable as well. They cost a lot of money to maintain and operate, so I think they're well taken care of.
Liz Hoadley / Molly Curran That's really cool. All right. I got another question for you, Molly. So some of our our viewers have definitely done their homework because the questions are getting more specific. And we have some viewers who want to know what are the advantages of a two body ROV system? Yeah, absolutely. So we know the ocean has a lot of weight and sometimes really bad weather.
Molly Curran And that doesn't just disappear when we're trying to launch our vehicles. And so oftentimes the ship will be moving quite a lot and obviously is at the mercy of those bigger waves and the weather. But you don't want to be moving around and getting pulled and tugged when you're on the seafloor with the ROV. So we use a two-bodied system to decouple all the motion of the ship from the motion of the ROV so the ROV can still be stable while the ship is moving with the waves also.
Liz Hoadley / Molly Curran And I think we've got an illustration of it here. So this is ROV Hercules that operates off of Nautilus. Yeah. And you can see the two bodies that intermediate the camera slide in the middle there, as you mentioned, kind of bobbing up and down with the ship. Yeah, right. And then the last thing with that is sometimes it also gives you another eye down looking at the ROV, which is always helpful. Definitely. And that must be how we get some of the videos of the reviews at the bottom, huh?
Liz Hoadley Yes, exactly. That's super cool. All right, Anthony, I've got another one about human occupied vehicles. And our viewers want to know how deep can human occupied vehicles safely dove with explorers on board?
Anthony Tarantino Earlier in your discussion, you talked about the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. Today, vehicles exist that can take explorers to the very bottom of that that trench. And the biggest thing that enables that is human factors engineering. So when we build and test vehicles that are made for human occupancy, we're concerned with a lot of things from where they sit to how they breathe and how comfortable they are when they're in the sub.
Anthony Tarantino So that means we do a lot of testing and we make sure that all of the life support systems required to keep people alive during these journeys to the bottom of the ocean are functional and and and applicable. So that coupled with the fact that we, we do a lot of testing on our components and our vehicles prior to putting people in them, ensures maximum reasonable assurance that people are going to be safe and come back from their dives.
Liz Hoadley That's awesome. And you guys have a great track record of that, too, for sure. Well, Molly, we had a question cued up about ice, but I think you did such a great job with your intro. If you're okay, we'll skip that one and jump around a lot for the sake of time, because we have had so many questions coming in about underwater vehicle communication.
Liz Hoadley So I'm actually going to kick this one back to you. So kind of following up on divers in human occupied vehicles going down, how do the different types of underwater vehicles, ROVs, AUVs, HOVs, all communicate with pilots and science crew up at a base station, either on land or on a ship above.
Anthony Tarantino Great question. So on up here on the surface, in air, we use radio waves to communicate with each other via cell phones or VHF radios underwater. It's a lot easier to communicate acoustically. So we use sound transmission. So typically there's a receiver. So for human occupied vehicles, there's typically a receiver transmitter unit on the ship and there's a same receiver transmitter unit in the sub and we're just modulating sound through the water and that works really well for us.
Anthony Tarantino And just as a point of reference, acoustics or sound through air travels at roughly 343 meters per second and sound through the water travels at 1481 meters per second. So it travels pretty efficiently and and it's a good mode of communication. Now, ROV is and AUVs use similar technology to navigate and communicate. But, I'll let Molly tell you a little bit about how they communicate from the surface with each other, because in some cases it can be a little different.
Molly Curran Yeah. So thanks, Anthony. Yeah, we can actually not just communicate from the ship down to the robot, but the robots themselves can communicate with each other and then back to the ship. So, for example, if we have one robot working on the seafloor and another robot kind of monitoring it up above on the surface, then that surface robot can then send messages from the surface through air over to the ship.
Molly Curran / Liz Hoadley So, you know, they're small messages and kind of like how you would you would text someone back and forth. That's kind of what the robots do to talk back and forth. That's that's really cool, guys. And thank you for kind of covering both aspects of that, both communication with the pilots onboard and with the robots themselves. I know that's definitely something that has come a long way in recent years and is rapidly advancing.
Liz Hoadley / Molly Curran Molly, before we turn it over to the next section, we have had several comments. People are dying to know what's on the whiteboard behind you. That's a great question. So in engineering, everything really starts with an idea. And from an idea you're usually scribbling on the whiteboard with a team of people. Being a mechanical engineer, I'm working with electrical engineers and software engineers and and data engineers, and it really takes a whole team to come up with a solution typically.
Molly Curran / Liz Hoadley But it usually starts with a piece of paper and a whiteboard. That's awesome, and I think that's such a relevant message. I know we have so many robotics teams joining us tonight for this event and they all have to work together in order to accomplish their challenge. So thank you to both of you for joining us tonight. Your answers have been awesome and I'm sure we will have many more questions at the end of tonight's event.
Liz Hoadley Yeah, thank you. With that, we're going to bring up our next two experts. So we have an expert from NOAA Ocean Exploration and from Ocean Exploration Trust. You're are here to talk about the challenges associated with deep ocean data, how to maximize the amount of data collected during each expedition. How are those massive volumes of data then analyzed, and how is that data used to communicate our findings?
Liz Hoadley So welcome, Philip and Jonathan. Thanks for joining us tonight. I'm sure you've seen the chat already. We have tons of excited viewers tonight and really excited to hear from you. Philip, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Philip Hoffman Yeah, sure. My name is Philip Hoffman. I'm the technology team lead for NOA Ocean Exploration. So I sit in the same federal office that Liz sits in, but not in the same location. Our folks are spread out literally all across the country on all three of the ocean basins that border the United States. And I got started in this business really when I was about eight or nine years old.
Philip Hoffman And there's sort of two things that drove me to come into the world of ocean science, ocean exploration, oceanography, whatever of the different scientific terms you want to use. The first is the Portuguese man of war, and there should be an image coming up that has that in it here momentarily. And the second is a guy named Jacques Cousteau.
Philip Hoffman And you can now see pictures of both of these people. And I actually use this slide when I'm talking to grad students and to people in college and to adults and various community functions. I blame these two guys explicitly. When I was a kid, on public broadcasting, which is now known by many people as PBS, there was a television show every week called The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau, and that's him there in the dark jumpsuit, kind of waving at his his aquanauts in the back.
Philip Hoffman And Cousteau started out in World War Two as a French Navy officer and ended up as one of the pioneers of ocean technology. And every week, PBS would bring this show to my house and my parents would let me watch it because it was educational television and it was valuable. Unlike all the drivel that was on ABC and CBS and NBC, which were the other three channels we had, if that tells you how old I am, and Cousteau and his folks would film their expeditions to the oceans of the world.
Philip Hoffman Just being able to film underwater at that time was a technological advancement. He designed and developed this saucer back there, which is a predecessor to the kinds of human occupied vehicles that Anthony was telling you about. And he built a whole host of other custom ocean technology solutions to the fact that humans can only do so much under the water.
Philip Hoffman Utterly fascinated. I watched that entire series. I don't know, three or four or five times. You can sometimes find DVD copies of it on eBay if you like to do that sort of thing. At the same time, we were visiting Saint Augustine, Florida, one summer. Some friends of my parents and of course, you take your kids and you go to the beach, right?
Philip Hoffman Because you have to wear your children out and they want to go and play at the beach. And offshore of the beach. There's this massive school of these Portuguese man of war. And if you don't know what these are, they're jellyfish. So they're invertebrates. They are entirely at the mercy of the wind and ocean surface currents for how they move around.
Philip Hoffman They cannot swim. And they freaked my parents out. And I was nine. And I decided that anything that freaked my parents out, I needed to understand better. And I've been doing it ever since.
Liz Hoadley Awesome. And Philip, I know we're going to hear a little bit more about what you do in a second with some of our questions that'll come out. We're going to pass it to Jonathan. Jonathan, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Jonathan Fiely Sure, guys. My name is Jonathan Fiely, and I'm a media producer for the Ocean Exploration Trust. And our website is Nautilus Live dot org. So as a media producer, I create the highlights with a great team of editors and individuals where we essentially go down to the bottom of our sea with our ROVs, as Molly mentioned, and most ROVs and Alvin have a camera on them.
Jonathan Fiely And so we'll do these big long dives of 36 hours plus going from the bottom of a seamount to the top and will see amazing things. And it's our job to boil down 36 hours into one of the coolest moments that we have. So that's my job. And and it's an amazing opportunity to do that. I got into this career just loving cameras, loving different types of environments and always looking and learning and exploring.
Jonathan Fiely And in my job now we have two real big goals. If you go to our YouTube, I'd hope that you could look at all of these different videos that some of them are funny, some of them are educational. But our goal is to share this amazing excitement of deep sea discovery with you so you don't have to watch all 36 hours of an individual dive and our goal is to keep it real.
Jonathan Fiely And if you have the chance to watch some of these highlight videos, whether it's from Okeanos or E V Nautilus, I hope you hear the excitement behind exploration. And that's what we do. We listen for these moments where it's 3 o'clock in the morning and someone sees something amazing that's real and it's life and it's an awesome role to have.
Jonathan Fiely So for some of our challenges with sci comm, it's not necessarily even just seeing those moments and editing them and putting them up on our Tik Tok or our YouTube. But it's also about thinking about how we can integrate more data into what we see. So you saw a little bit of our YouTube. If you go to our YouTube full dive recordings, we actually have part of our our actual scientific observations is chapters that you can go and explore and see what we noted during a dive.
Jonathan Fiely And then we're also working on some exciting new projects that actually take that live video through a process called photogrammetry. So here you go. Here's a highlight video of actually we're looking at an amazing little rock that has incredible pieces of coral on it. So we're investigate how to use actual gaming engines like Unreal Engine to take this kind of video that you see and actually create a 3D model of it so that live video where a scientist described each one of the species that we saw identified it could see that we can actually create a 3D model of that.
Jonathan Fiely And the goal is to stick this in the same 3D engine as is used in Fortnite Unreal Engine, so that people at your level and kids and kids at heart can all actually for using new media. So that's what I do. That's what we absolutely love with Ocean Exploration Trust and Nautilus Live.
Liz Hoadley Awesome. Thanks, Jonathan and I really love that you guys captured both ends of our data spectrum. And I think that's that's how we're going to channel our questions for this part during this event. So we've had questions come in about how we collect data, how we analyze, and then what do we do with it. And I think we've got time for at least one of each before we move on to the next section.
Liz Hoadley So Philip, if you don't mind, let's start with you. I think as technology team leader, you're perfect for this one. What are the benefits of using autonomous or uncrewed systems to explore the ocean?
Philip Hoffman So the answer kind of builds on answers that we heard to questions in the previous section, which really is that if we put autonomous vehicles in the ocean, which is our fancy term for robots of the sea, if you will. We can explore more places, we can explore them for longer and we can get more kinds of data on each platform.
Philip Hoffman So the video that Jonathan is talking about is one kind of data that we can get. We can get still images or photographs, if you will, and then we can get all sorts of environmental data and we can do it at depth, and we can do it over long periods of time like hours, two days and in some cases two weeks and even months now.
Philip Hoffman And it's great because it means we finally arrive technologically at a point where we can really understand the ocean from top to bottom in a way that we couldn't even ten years ago, because we have this massive fleet of autonomous vehicles that's growing every day that can give this data back to us. And this creates the breadth and depth of those autonomous vehicles.
Philip Hoffman Now, the Dumbo octopus in the middle is not an autonomous vehicle. I want to point that out. It's a living being. We do not use them for experimentation. But as Jonathan pointed out, we can get images of these creatures at depth in the sea and do things with those images that help us to understand not only the creature itself, but the habitat, the ecosystem in which it lives.
Liz Hoadley That's awesome. And I think you brought up a great point. We are gathering massive, massive volumes of data. I checked in with our exploration team yesterday and just see how to quantify that. And they were telling me in just a mapping expedition alone, we collected enough data in one day to fill like four iPhones worth of storage, which is blows my mind trying to make it relatable here.
Liz Hoadley And so we've had some questions about how we process that data. I think one that maybe each of you could speak to a different element on is how are scientists using artificial intelligence to help us with that data analysis. And whoever wants to jump in on that first? Yeah.
Philip Hoffman Well, so Jonathan sort of gave us a beginning pointer to that sort of the photogrammetry work that we do. And a lot of that photogrammetry work and a lot of the the engines for Fortnite and some of these other analysis tools that he works with and is very familiar, those are built on artificial intelligence or machine learning basis. They're they're hung on that framework.
Philip Hoffman The thing that machine learning does is it gives us the ability to sift through massive, massive volumes of data, tons and tons and volumes of data and find the thing that's right there. And this video is a great illustration of that, because those two little microorganisms and the other microorganisms swimming behind them, those are the important pieces of data in this video, even though the video is capturing all sorts of stuff floating around the water column that we have no interest in.
Philip Hoffman And machine learning allows us to extract all of those pieces and in many cases to determine what they are without a person having to sit there bleary eyed, poking themselves with toothpicks to try and find out, okay, that's this coral or that's this fish or that's this whatever.
Jonathan Fiely Yeah, absolutely. And and I would take people into the control room of the E V Nautilus as an example of when we're diving, we don't necessarily have the taxonomic expert on every single type of jellyfish or coral that's out there. But it is because these are and there are tons of animals that have been discovered and have never been discovered itself.
Jonathan Fiely So we really rely on not just the scientists that are joining us from the shore or that might be physically present inside of the control room. And you're looking at the control room right now. This is how we control the ROVs on E V Nautilus. But then using tools like artificial intelligence, we can run that video through a system after the fact and then use that to help pick out little elements that maybe the scientists didn't necessarily see or they weren't the experts that were there to actually make the identification later.
Jonathan Fiely It's an incredibly powerful tool for such a massive amount of data 36 hours, up to 36 hours, at least for just a single dove. It's incredible.
Liz Hoadley Wow. I don't even know how to process that volume. So power to you guys in your teams that do so. We are thankful for you. Jonathan. Before we turn to our next person, I've got one more question for you. I know you mentioned that your background was in videography and filmmaking. So we've had a lot of viewers come in that are working on camera systems for the competition and want to hear from you.
Liz Hoadley What are some of the biggest challenges related to underwater photography and videography that you work with?
Jonathan Fiely All right. So if you're working on a robot with camera, I'm sure you can take out your camera right now and poke outside and take a photo. But what my challenge would be is the fact that deep ocean exploration, we have no light, no light, no light. So if you're creating a robot with a camera, you need to bring your own light with you and you need to figure out how to get that light in relationship with the camera itself so that it gets a good exposure and a good picture.
Jonathan Fiely And this is not a small thing, as I'm sure many of you would find out. There is ROV Hercules right there. And in the middle of it, we actually have about ten total cameras in the middle and one big beautiful cinema camera right in the middle. I want to give the analogy of hiking up Mount Everest with a flashlight and a little camera that well, that's what we do during night where you can't see anything but your flashlight.
Jonathan Fiely So that's a major challenge that we have. And then the other big challenges are things like storage. Imagine 36 hours worth of recording video on a camera. How are you going to store any of that? And then finally, what I'll just say is that this is not just a video with a camera that's in charge of the ROV.
Jonathan Fiely This is the entire control room that is involved in the process of actually taking the video. You've got not just the video engineer that's keeping things in focus, making things that are making sure everything is in focus and recording. But it's also the ROV pilot that's actually pointing the camera where it's at. And then it's scientists noticing things like, hey, in the top, right?
Jonathan Fiely There was just a little thing that just passed by. I think that was a whale and the entire team has to move the ROV. There's one right there that's a sperm whale that we we discovered while we are down in and descending into depths. The entire control room needs to move that ROV, focus the cameras, the whole nine yards to be able to capture that moment.
Jonathan Fiely It is not a one person band to do what we do. That's it.
Liz Hoadley And sensing a theme and all of our expert answers tonight, and I'm appreciative of it and I hope our teams are to thank you, Phillip and Jonathan. I suppose it is no surprise that big data inspires lots of big questions from our budding roboticists, but I want to pause. Just make sure we've got time for our last challenge theme.
Liz Hoadley So thank you both and we'll bring you on in a little bit because I know we have a few more questions related to data and videography. So this last challenge theme is about accessibility, and this one is near and dear to my heart. We have just heard about some incredible ocean exploration technologies that are helping overcome big challenges related to exploring the ocean.
Liz Hoadley However, multimillion dollar instruments are not the only way to explore, and it is with that that I'm so excited to introduce Samir Patel, who's developing some low cost technologies to help us study the ocean and just so happens to be working with some charismatic organisms to get the job done. Welcome, Samir. If you could tell us a little bit about yourself.
Samir Patel Yeah, great. Yeah. My name is Samir Patel. I'm a research biologist at a very small nonprofit called Coonamessett Farm Foundation that's based on Cape Cod and Falmouth. And I work on sea turtles and I've been working on a variety of species, loggerheads and leatherbacks, Kemp's ridleys and green turtles. Surprisingly, they do all inhabit Massachusetts waters, but I work with them between North Carolina and Massachusetts, so a pretty broad range.
Samir Patel I apologize. I don't have any. I forgot a kid photo of me. That's basically it would just be me without a beard. And I finished high school and undergrad and really didn't have a specific goal in mind as to getting in the sea turtles. But I wanted to go to graduate school and I did. And amazingly I was in a lab that gave me the opportunity to study loggerheads in Greece.
Samir Patel And so that put me on this path to being a sea turtle biologist. And one of the dilemmas with sea turtle research is it usually comes with low cost solutions and low, low cost equipment. And so you kind of have to think a little outside the box and find multiple uses for common everyday tools to make it all work.
Samir Patel So to study sea turtles locally, we are trying to find out things like what do they eat? How do they respond to ocean development? We're going to have a lot of wind turbines of Northwest Atlantic, and so that was an example of us putting out one of our low cost camera tags on a leatherback turtle. And there is a picture of it right there.
Samir Patel And what is interesting, one of the things we've actually found locally is that leatherback turtles, which are the largest sea turtle species in the world, they inhabit Massachusetts waters and they forage at a very high rate here. They're constantly eating jellyfish and they do get disrupted by ocean development. And we actually had a study where we expose them to seismic survey sound.
Samir Patel And I think there's a clip that that show shows that which has a bit of that you can experience what it was like to be a leatherback and exposed to that sound in the ocean. So that clicking sound is what's called a sparker and it emits this loud click, which is an impulsive sound, like a hammer strike. And the purpose of that click is to map the ocean floor.
Samir Patel So it goes down to the bottom of the ocean. It's sent back to a receiver on a boat, and then that sound transmission then gets translated into the density of the ocean floor. And we did this study to get a sense of how would leatherbacks respond to things like this size of ocean development, specifically wind turbine construction, which comes with a lot of hammer strikes for pilings and seismic surveys.
Samir Patel And we notice actually that their foraging slightly declined a little bit, but they do eat a lot of jellyfish. They went from maybe eating 200 jellyfish in an hour to 100 in an hour, but they were still getting pretty satiated over the course of the time that we filmed them. But then in addition to that, we found their breeding events which is another issue around them.
Samir Patel And so it was a pretty amazing experience to have that footage and it all came from fairly low cost equipment that we developed, which were off the shelf, dove cameras and off the shelf tags and components like the things.
Liz Hoadley Thanks, Samir. Your work is so cool! Now, I know I'm a little biased. Sea turtles are my absolute favorite animal, but I'm really glad you could join us tonight because we've had a lot of questions, not just about the technology for ocean exploration, but specifically how it impacts animals. And so I appreciate you for including some of that in your answer.
Liz Hoadley Hopefully that answered some of our our student questions that registered with topics related to that. I've got a few more for you before we open the floor back for all of our experts. I think most importantly from a lot of these folks and teams are working on low cost robots themselves. And I think I see some Legos behind you?
Samir Patel Yeah. Yeah. I do have kids, so Legos are a big part of our house.
Liz Hoadley That's fantastic. Well, I think my first question for you is, why is low cost tech so important?
Samir Patel Well, it makes its you know, this is a strange way to phrases, but it democratizes this research. So it makes it so that a lot of people can have access to the level of technology that yields high quality products. So I do have our camera tag here and I can kind of go through the parts and and you can kind of see how silly it actually ends up looking when you compared to those deep sea ROVs that are very streamlined and painted nicely.
Samir Patel And this is a dive camera made by a company called Caroline's. Unfortunately, they're out of business, but it was an Amazon purchase. It goes to 250 meters. It records temperature and depth. It takes high definition footage. It's an amazing camera. And it's small. It's very small and conveniently in a relatively hydrodynamic shape. Instead of a GoPro, which is a flat face.
Samir Patel And so if you put this on an animal that is already very hydrodynamic, you don't want to increase the drag on that animal too much. It's a leatherback but those things are generally a thousand pounds. So it would be very hard to increase their drag by too much. Then the other components of this. This is a foam that you buy from a company that makes foam.
Samir Patel It's actually a local Massachusetts company. Again, more Amazon purchases with these suction cups, zip ties, rubber bands. This satellite tag and the radio tag are part of the two most uniquely animal behavior sort of ecologists devices. The satellite tag is $5,000. And but it is something that any person can just go to the website and purchase and then the way it releases, we have these little metal tabs here.
Samir Patel They are a galvanic release and it's basically a metal that has a known corrosion in ocean at a certain rate and certain temperature. And so we can put it out and then the tag will pop off the turtle within two, three hours, depending on how depending on the device that we put out the galvanic release. And then we do have local engineers that'll help us build a little tag.
Samir Patel And again, it's a Raspberry Pi in a in a waterproof tube that has a hydrophone and temperature depth sensor and GPS unit. But again, this is all accessible. You just go to the smartphone website and you can find all these boards and there's you can ChatGPT the code. And it is really something that can just be built in your own house.
Samir Patel It will take some trial and error, of course, but GitHub, things like that of these amazing repositories for building very simple but very useful oceanographic sensing tools. And then you just find the way to slap that onto an animal. You find the components. This is this red stuff is cinnamon dental floss. It really it really is Frankenstein-ed together with what we had around the office.
Samir Patel But it has worked for us for six, seven years now and we kind of are really happy with our little invention here and and use it over and over and over again.
Liz Hoadley Well, that is fantastic. And I love that you had it handy and able to share it with everybody. And I think that really speaks to like it's home grown. And those are sometimes the best solutions and certainly the solutions our teams are working on that are tuning in. Thank you, Samir. Now, before you run away, I'm going to bring the rest of our experts back on screen.
Liz Hoadley I know we're quickly running out of time, not slowly, very quickly. I want to be able to ask a couple more questions that have come in on the chat. And just now I know we have way more than we could possibly get to. We're going to answer some of these with responses after the fact, and I'll share more information about that at the end.
Liz Hoadley So hopefully our teams aren't getting disappointed. If we don't get to your question, we will do our best to try to hit at least the big themes for all of our questions. I think the first question I want to tackle is coming in from Samarth and maybe Anthony and Molly. I think you guys would be great to answer this one.
Liz Hoadley / Molly Curran They want to know how long does it generally take to plan a mission or to plan out the design and implementation of your different tools? Anthony, I can start off and then handed over to you because I think there's a there's a lot of answers to this and it depends on the scope of what you want to do, right?
Molly Curran So we've done projects really quickly and we've done, you know, keeping, keeping the scope small and understanding, know what needs to get done. And so we've done some robotic vehicles in a matter of short weeks or months, smaller vehicles. And then other projects that maybe Anthony can talk about a little bit have taken many, many years. So they're really it's it's a really big variety and it just depends on what you're doing.
Anthony Tarantino Yeah, for sure. You know, we we plan out a lot of things, projects and missions, and they're kind of different, but also the same. It starts with subject matter experts getting together and talking about what our objectives are and then planning that out. So with the Alvin upgrade project, we did it in two stages and it was executed over nearly 20 years.
Anthony Tarantino So I started in 2000 and started reviewing our requirements for the new vehicle and ultimately it was tested and sea trialed and commissioned in 2022. So if that gives you a sense for anything, that's a long one. And then as far as mission planning goes, I also deal with some mission planning here at Woods Hole and we put out a schedule, but the mission planning process, again, can be quick or long.
Anthony Tarantino But for Alvin, it starts with putting together a proposal, getting it funded by the funding agency, then getting it scheduled and then actually executing it. And that cycle can take two years or longer. So it is it is a bit a bit variable depending on on how things are happening and what your funding sources. So it's really a complex it sounds like a simple question, but it's a complicated one to answer.
Liz Hoadley Now, I appreciate you guys covered both ends of the spectrum from both short to the more complex. I think that gives our viewers the insight they're looking for. And I'm going to kick it to the remainder of our experts kind of following up on that. In your careers. Philip, Jonathan, Samir, do you have a favorite mission or projects that you've ever tackled?
Liz Hoadley I don't know if anyone. Samir, we just had you up. You want to go first?
Samir Patel So, yeah, sure. I mean, to me, it has been the camera tags on the leatherback. I work with loggerheads where we capture them and satellite tag them. I work with other animals that strand, Kemp's ridley and green turtles, that strand on the beaches. And so we have to do necropsies, which is essentially an autopsy on a dead animal.
Samir Patel But working with an animal that is a thousand pounds the size of a car, essentially, and then being able to access that animal, put a camera it, see what its life is like for those 2 hours. And it's also very local. We do this in Massachusetts waters. So I leave my house, get on a boat, put a camera on a turtle, hang out, recover it and come home.
Samir Patel It's pretty amazing to have that being just like my routine in my life in suburban Massachusetts. So that's definitely got to be my favorite one for sure. Yeah.
Liz Hoadley That's awesome. Well, Jonathan, if you don't mind.
Jonathan Fiely I'm sure I would I would absolutely love my routine to also be going out, putting cameras on sea turtles. I'll just say, of course, I'm biased. You know, I love cameras, I love technology. But the cool thing about deep ocean exploration especially, is that there's so much left to be explored. I mean, at the end of the day, a camera's just a tool and you either see something or you don't that indeed see exploration.
Jonathan Fiely You often see amazing things and you're never going to know what you're going to get on a dove. We go to the bottom of the seamount to the top of a seamount is kind of their usual exploration M.O. But we're so rarely even go to the same seamounts to do two dives, right? That's a pretty rare occurrence, and it just gives you a little bit of a show of how big the ocean is and so you don't know what your favorite thing is because you might say one dive was your best, and then you dive on a new seamount and you discover something brand new.
Jonathan Fiely And it is just amazing.
Liz Hoadley I think you capture a really great point, too. Sometimes you might be planning what you think is the greatest dive ever, but sometimes it's the stuff that comes up serendipitously that's the best.
Jonathan Fiely Oh yeah. I mean, I think every engineer here will totally resonate with the fact that sometimes you hype yourself up and you're like, this is going to be the best thing ever. I've done this for two months. It's going to be amazing. And you go down there and it is mud. Not that mud isn't cool. Some people love it. But then other times you're like, oh, well, let's just go down here.
Jonathan Fiely The weather was bad. I need to go over here to hide from the weather and we'll just dive on this seamount to see what's up. And then suddenly you make a discovery of a brand new species, or your vehicle performs better than ever done before in some challenging current or other circumstance. And that's that's why we're that's why we're ocean exploration ocean and not like ocean just engineering or ocean just science.
Jonathan Fiely Like you don't know what you're going to get. And that's what makes it so awesome.
Liz Hoadley Awesome. Well, Philip, I'm actually going to change it up on you a little bit to see if we can get one more question squeezed in. And I think since you did so much with autonomous tech, this next question might be perfect for you. We have a few writing in who want to know. Can robots replace all aspects of scientific diving?
Liz Hoadley Can they replace the human compondent of ocean exploration?
Philip Hoffman I don't think so. And the reason that I don't think so is that humans are incredibly well engineered environmental data gathering machines. And from the time we are born until the time we die, all of our senses are uniquely attuned to tell us all sorts of things about the world with which we are interacting and the compute power that would be required to do that with cameras and thermometers and pressure sensors, not to mention guidance systems.
Philip Hoffman And, you know, the whole the whole gamut of things, the compute power alone, to do that, to just replace one diver is probably more than the number of supercomputers we have in the world right now. And so I don't believe we can get there. What the autonomous platforms do is they allow us to go to places either where humans can't exist because of pressure or other factors or where they could exist, but it's incredibly dangerous for them to exist.
Philip Hoffman And that opens up so much more knowledge, it opens up so much more data and opens up so much more opportunity. And so let's put the autonomous craft where they're good can do and will continue to dive, because at the end of the day, we're better engineered to do that than any robot will ever be.
Liz Hoadley Awesome. Thank you all. We are right at time, so I want to be respectful for everyone tuning in and all of your time. Thank you to all of our experts this evening. If we can get some thank you's coming in from everyone else as well. There are a lot of questions in the chat. We will do our best to follow up with them and I will show you where to find some some additional answers and resources to find those answers.
Liz Hoadley But before we do that, thank you again and goodbye to our experts that evening.
Samir Patel Thank you.
Liz Hoadley Awesome. Well, I don't know about all of you, but I am feeling particularly inspired by all the brilliant minds that are working to solve some of our biggest ocean exploration challenges. And before you drop off and I understand if you have to, because we are now over time, but I have a few final activities and resources for all of you.
Liz Hoadley First, I would love to hear from all of you again, but with that, I need a little bit of help filling out a word cloud. So if everyone who is sent to you that if you can help us by telling us what ocean exploration challenge are you most excited about after attending tonight's webinar? And there's a few ways you can do that.
Liz Hoadley You can scan the QR code that is here on the screen, or you can visit menti dot com and use the voting code 12532799. And try to keep your answers short so that we can build a really, really awesome word cloud. And you can do that. And while you're doing it, I will keep going so that we can stay at a time as best as possible, so as these responses roll in, I want to share some additional resources that may help our first Lego League teams that are tuning in tonight.
Liz Hoadley And I know there's a lot of you. And so we have some web resources that we have been curating behind the scenes to help you prepare for your competition. So if I could get those resources pulled up on screen. We've got the first two here, the link for NOAA Ocean Exploration and the link for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Liz Hoadley These are lists of curated resources from both of our organizations that have been specifically queued up to help our first Lego league teams. So they are factsheets, they're videos, they're explainers and more that really dive deeper into the challenges of ocean exploration or exploring the ocean and some of the tools and technology that we talked about tonight and more that help us solve these challenges.
Liz Hoadley And then the last link here, as Jonathan mentioned earlier, if we could get those resources back on the screen, that takes you to Nautilus Live. So as he mentioned, one of the ways that everybody tuning in tonight can participate in ocean exploration is to join the dives, the lag time for a dive is sometimes less than 2 seconds, meaning you are watching what our scientists are watching while the ROVs are down below the ocean, which is just really, really amazing.
Liz Hoadley And you are hearing the scientists reactions live. That's my favorite part. Just hearing someone like Anthony, who's been in this industry and seen a lot of things and does works on one of perhaps the coolest robots, a little biased, again. Seeing what someone like that when they get excited, when they find something they like Jonathan said, that was not planned and not expected.
Liz Hoadley It's just really special. And we've got our words coming in from lots of you. Let's see if I can make this bigger. Wow. We hear lots of people excited about deep sea photography, virtual reality, awesome. Deep sea exploration in general and pollutions, and they seem to be very interesting. I can't wait to see some of the innovative solutions you guys come up with.
Liz Hoadley And the last thing to bring up tonight, we have a special opportunity that's being offered by our colleagues at Woods Hole to support our first Lego league teams, and they're offering to help you with experts in the field that are able to review your innovative ideas and provide feedback, which we know is an important part of your competition.
Liz Hoadley This is no small task. So this opportunity is available for a limited time. Only between October 7th and October 18th, first Lego League teams may submit their projects, their challenge and innovative solutions to the Woods Hole, K-12 Program Coordinator at the email on the screen K Dash 12 Coordinator at WHOI dot edu. And their program coordinator will forward your project onto an expert in the field that is offered to review student projects to give you feedback.
Liz Hoadley So don't miss out on this amazing opportunity. Definitely take that down. This recording will up on the NOAA website with the first QR code on the previous screen. So please do check it back or check back and take care of or take advantage of that opportunity starting next week. And with that, it's my last final farewell is to thank everyone for tonight.
Liz Hoadley This event would not be possible with so many people behind this, behind the scenes, both from NOAA Ocean Exploration, Woods Hole, the Inner Space Center, who make all of the digital production on this possible, the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute and our guests, experts from Nautilus Live and the Coonamessett Farm Foundation as well. Again, I'm sure missing people in there.
Liz Hoadley It took a village to pull this together and hope it supports you young roboticists. Thank you all for tuning in and good night.