Discovering the hidden secrets of the ocean - with Jyotika Virmani

thank you Hassan and the Royal Institute I as you said I'm Jani I'm the executive director of the Schmid ocean Institute and I'm about to say something that I think probably every scientist who's stood here for the last hundred years has said it's such an honor to be here and such a privilege so thanks again to the Royal Institute so I'm here to talk about our Oceanic Enigma Our Mysterious world that is under the waves and uh what you see behind me is a glass octopus it's actually a transparent creature and you're looking at its internal organs there and this imagery was taken by our ROV Sebastian it's our underwater robot and I'm going to talk some more about that later um and it was taken in the Phoenix Islands in the South Pacific in 2021 at around 600 50 M below the sea surface but this is just one minuscule Speck in a vast vast ocean um and the ocean as we perhaps all know is important to our lives uh it feeds uh it's the primary source of protein for two billion people it provides 50% of the oxygen that we breathe um it uh it controls our weather and our climate and it's because the ocean is so unknown and yet so so important to our lives that the UN has declared this decade the decade of ocean Sciences for sustainable development goals so we're partway through the decade and I'm here today to tell you A Tale of human exploration through technology and the Marvels that it uh it can uh reveal to us so let's start a little further back in time modern humans Homo sapiens us uh We've evolved over 300,000 years in an atmosphere that we can breathe and our exploration has been with our own two feet for the most part uh for that time frame but not only exploring the land around us and the environment but uh We've also been able to move and live and build on some amazing places and uh this is the Meteora region in Greece and uh for any of you who've been there there are these monasteries that are built on top of vert called Cliffs and these were built hundreds of years ago and they were built using the technologies that were available of the era pulley and levers and rope to haul the material up and to live there uh on that on the tops of those Cliffs but our world is not land uh it is actually primarily ocean uh it covers 71% of our planet surface is covered by the ocean and um as Arthur SE Clark has said uh you know it's it's really uh this planet should not be called planet Earth it should be called ocean um but not only does it cover 71% of our surface uh of the planet but uh the deep sea contains about 80% of the livable space on this planet as far as we know which means that all the cities the mountains the forests the deserts all of that is only in 20% of the livable space on this planet um but it's not a lot in terms of volume the ocean is actually quite small and that's because it's really only about 3.6 kilometers in depth so it's although it covers a large area it's only it's a very thin layer uh on our planet um so uh so despite the uh uh surface area as I said uh it's really a small amount and it's not yet been explored only 5% has really been explored and that's because of course it's dark it's high pressure it's saltwater it's really difficult environment to see through and therefore it's still very much an enigma so of course the ocean has been explored to some extent it's been explored for actually hundreds of years by people who lived along the coastline and it would be of course remiss of me being here in the UK not to mention this uh uh amazing uh Expedition the HMS Challenger it was four-year Expedition around uh the world and um it revealed about 4,000 or so new marine species uh they made uh measurements of the sea Flor as and when they could in the in using the technology that they had again this was using Technologies of the time levers Pullers net pulley Nets Etc um but we of course are no longer living in that era of Technology we are now in a new technological Revolution uh we're living in an era where the world is very much connected uh and things are changing at an exponential scale technology is changing at an exponentially fast scale so I'm going to just delve a little into what exponential growth looks like by giving you an example through data storage so exponential of course means a doubling of the steps that you just took so each step you take you double it that's what exponential growth looks like for so for data storage in the 1950s to store 5 megabytes of data uh it would cost $120,000 and you would need a forklift in order to store five megabytes of data by the way that black and white image behind me you could store six of those on that $120,000 device with a forklift uh so you fast forward 50 years uh now we're looking at megabytes 128 megabytes of data but it's smaller it can fit on the tip of your fingertip uh and it only cost $99 fantastic um but that was 50 years of progress however if you look at the next 10 years you've increased megabytes to gigabytes and you've also decreased the cost now if you add another 10 years what do we have we have the cloud you don't even need something to balance on the tip of your finger anymore um and you can store terabytes of data so what technology is doing is it's it's going faster and faster but it's going at it's it's changing at a faster scale as well at faster Pace as well and that's that's something really difficult actually to con as a concept to get because most of us think linearly uh in straight lines there so where what kind of areas of Technology change are we seeing you've all in the last two or three years how many of you have not heard of artificial intelligence this year yeah I don't see any hands not raised right art arici intelligence 5 years ago H it was kind of there maybe in science fiction maybe not now it's everywhere uh other areas that are changing quickly sensors robotics synthetic biology virtual reality uh Material Science and 3D printing so all of these Technologies are great and they are really helping us to help understand what's happening in the ocean and we're living through this amazing time and so it's really the uh merging of the ocean and technology that c was the birth of the schm ocean Institute and Schmid ocean Institute was started in 2009 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt and we're a philanthropic foundation and we operate a research vessel this is our current research vessel falor 2 and we provide this at no cost to scientists from around the world to cut to conduct cutting Ed research in the ocean to test new Marine Technologies um so falor 2 is our second uh major vessel we had falor before this and I'm going to show you some uh footage from falor as well as falor 2 when we got this vessel uh we got it in 20121 so not very long ago and it came to us with zero science on board zero scientific capabilities so we spent 17 months transforming this into a state-of-the-art research lab it's 110 MERS in length and it has seven stories so it's quite a big vessel uh with a lot of scientific capabilities it has over 200 square meters of lab space it's got dozens of ocean and Atmospheric sensors on board for scientists to use uh it has a high performance Computing system um it has a very sophisticated Communications system and I'm going to talk about that in a in a second um and it has um a plora of other sampling capabilities on board as well and so I'll talk about one of those and that is our ROV Sebastian which I mentioned earlier so ROV as I said it stands for remotely operated vehicle and uh Sebastian can go down to 4,500 M depth under the ocean and on board a 4k camera systems which means we can capture footage like you saw with that glass octopus when you combine that video capability with high sophisticated Communications it means we can live stream video from the deep to anyone in the world who's got internet access so that's all available on our YouTube and actually as I'm standing here right now uh Sebastian is live streaming uh off the coast of Chile um so that's happening right now but um so it can live stream um and we can capture amazing footage it also Al has the ability to um uh integrate prototype Marine Technologies and to collect samples and so you'll see some of that and it's the com combination of that and the communications that really helped especially during covid when we were all in lockdown and people couldn't travel um and that's when I started actually at SCH ocean Institute so I would sit in my living room I live in Los Angeles and I would watch what was happening from my living room The Vessel was in Australia and I could see what was going on there um but we were not able to get scientists on board for a period of time during 2020 because of covid but we have a fantastic crew an ROV pilots who were on board and so the scientists uh we we did our first telepresence cruise you're all familiar with telepresence now having probably everyone's done something like Zoom so they did their first telepresence cruise no scientists were on board it was our crew and they would they were operating under the direction remotely of the scientists and so I'm going to play a short video now in their scientist's own words of what that cruise meant and and how it changed how they interacted with each other we were falkor's first fully remote science team none of the science team could actually be on board the ship came about uh sort of in an interesting way because of covid-19 we had to figure out how to be able to communicate with the ship regularly but what really surprised me was you know that that actually turned into a real Advantage the fact that so many scientists around the world were were in [Music] lockdown we went to the Queensland Plateau a large Plateau out in the Coral Sea Marine Park it's one of the largest Marine reserves on Earth and so the aim of the expedition was number one to do a whole lot of multi-beam mapping to understand the the very detailed shape of the sea Flor the multibeam maps are really a very very crucial first step in understanding um the geologic evolution of these systems and this gives us more information about how ice sheets have behaved in the past how stable or unstable they might be in the future uh in response to um global warming because of course in the ocean nothing happens in isolation everything is connected both horizontally and vertically so now having this extra layer of knowledge is going to be incredibly useful for any future management remote sensing Technologies like multi-beam son up that's great in itself but it's another thing to actually put a camera there there and especially something as good as the Sebastian where I do feel like I'm I'm there on the seaf Flor one of my favorite memories my first dive a big squid swam across the screen and I was like oh this is a good start and We Came Upon This red blob and it was a c cucumber it flew up and used its tentacles to fly around and to to swim away it's just been exciting and I've got no other work done during this time because I've spent my day glued to the screen and waiting to see what would come up next probably one of the most uh stand out for me is just the number of chambered nautilus that we've seen I stop for Nautilus you know they say stop for rainbows I I stop for [Music] Nautilus there were quite a few species that we didn't expect would occur here so we call that range extensions when we see something that we know occurs somewhere else but but we've never seen it here before the chats that's been fascinating right suddenly I'm out there with 100 experts for everybody was just a really interesting experience I think it's something that you know really should be a model of of how to do this type of science um in the future Patrick is from Belgium and he's a slit snail expert I don't even know what a slit snail is but he's just said you've just found the first slit snail in the Coral Sea you know he's over the moon there were things that I've never seen before geomorphic features I have no clue what they are good morning everybody and we are now live what is most appealing about your work at se for me it has to be the people being able to facilitate uh their Endeavors to peel back what we don't know of the ocean floor is pretty rewarding everything in the world that's alive is basically forms a tapestry that ultimately holds us and I think it's important to think about that because every time you lose something you lose a thread out of the tapestry that ultimately supports us humans the research vessel falor was one of the few research ships in the world that able to operate through this crisis and I I think the Schmid ocean Institute have set a very very high bar this is the bar we need to work to towards in the future I guess the big message there is that the science must [Music] continue so um yes so we had a a fairly successful year in 20 20 I have to say um uh and Rob Bean who was in that video was Chief scientist uh for our very first hel presence crws um and one of the things we do ask the scientists uh we give this amazing facility to them for free we ask that they make their data and finding available as quickly as possible to the public and the idea there is the faster we can share data the faster our understanding of the ocean improves and uh we've all lived through that actually through covid with the sharing of scientific information led to the rapid development of vaccines um and so um and then the faster we can take action if we need to um so one of the things that was mentioned in this video is mapping the sea Flor uh and that's what I'm going to spend the next few minutes talking about is mapping the sea Flor and we have on board falor 2 some really amazing seaf Flor mapping Technologies state-of-the-art equipment um and as as was mentioned in this vid video actually one of the reasons we want a seaflow map is for management but there are other reasons um a seaflow map is very useful for um for for predicting how big a tsunami is going to be or storm surge is going to be um we need it of course for navigation navigational purposes so there's a whole host of reasons another one is um to identify where biodiversity hotpots are in the ocean but you may be wondering well why are we mapping the seafloor don't we already have a map of the seaf Flor and so this is from Google and it does show some features in the ocean um this map however is at a very coarse resolution for the ocean in fact in reality at a high resolution what we have is only 25% of the seafloor mapped um which if you do the math means that we don't actually know yet what planet earth looks like for 46% of this Planet it's still a big mystery to us and so we Schmid ocean Institute as well as many others are Partners in an international program the nipon foundation jebco CED 2030 uh and they are mandated to produce a map of the C4 at a very high resolution and so it's kind of like crowd sourcing all of our data is going into this uh effort to try and uh produce this uh global map at a higher resolution so there are two elements here um for map for a high resolution map one is what do I mean by high resolution and the other one is how do we cover something the scale of the ocean 71% of our planet is huge um in 2015 um it was estimated with the technology back then that it would take 600 years to map the sea Flor uh at high resolution since then uh we have had an exponential increase and change in robotics and so I will talk about how that is going to help us to map the seaf FL but first let me let me talk about um the resolution so I'm here in London and uh this might be a satellite image that you are all familiar with uh it is London there's the river temps flowing through and you can see this is a one meter grid uh you can see on here um uh Railway stations you can even see boats boats on the river uh buildings green spaces uh Bridges so this is the kind of resolution that we we know we're familiar with on land if London was at the bottom of the ocean this is what it would look like this means that we could you know we could have like 10 londons out there something the size of the city of London and we would not really know it's out there this is the current global resolution map a th000 m so it's really really coarse um what are we aiming for well this 200 met resolution map this is what we're aiming for in the coastal oceans let alone the whole ocean and this is what we're calling the community is calling high resolution and it is compared to the previous one it's just not quite as high as on land um globally we're aiming for something like a 400 met res solution so again it's not going to be uh great but it's a good step forward as a first path for high resolution but we still have a way to go to get to something like this so let's talk about some of the technology that we use and where we're heading uh that may actually get us to something like this so how do we map uh the sea Flor so it's done by multibeam son o on board falor 2 and um so that creates a sound wave it goes down it bounces off the seaf floor and the time it takes to come back because we know the speed of sound in water uh gives you an idea of how deep that water depth is pre this kind of Technology back in the old days how they would do it is using a lead line which is a weight you'd be on your boat you'd drop the line and you'd have it marked and when it didn't really move Much Anymore you'd know how far it would gone down very very very intensive very slow way of mapping the the ocean this is much faster so this portion of the image here um actually it's playing in Loop so it'll come back around you'll see a yellow line that's the transit of the ship itself and then a map is produced on either side and that's called the swath so this here you see the swath developing as the ship goes it's mapping uh along the way so what uh so so let me show you what that does so this is the course resolution map right now once we add a swath to this a multibeam map you now see the features so again that's what it's like without and that's what it's like after we've used multi-beam mapping a huge difference right huge huge difference so with so much of the ocean yet to be mapped it's really not surprising that we make discoveries very frequently uh so what you're seeing here now is something that was discovered um by doing systematic mapping of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and it's a 500 meter tall coral reef and so when when I talk about you know we don't know what the ocean is we're not talking about the little things we're talking about some big things 500 meter tall coral reef and we were there we had Sebastian we went down it's a very very healthy Reef right off the Great Barrier Reef on the plateau um the significance of this is that uh this was an area which ships had a had avoided because they didn't have a map and so they were wasting fuel which of course you don't want to do um now we know that this is here um they can they've got much better tracks for navigation purposes this was the first coral reef discovered in this area in 180 years and it joins a uh a series of seven other uh such caral reefs off the Great Barrier Reef there so in total Schmid ocean Institute has mapped over 1.5 million square kilometers of seaf Flor to date but as I said it's it's not uh It's Not Unusual I suppose to say that new discoveries are made every day and uh it's my great privilege as a sneak peek for all of you to share our latest uh this has not yet been formally announced and so uh this is uh we we will be releasing a press release on on this I think um these are four new sea mounts so these are underwater mountains and these were discovered at the end of last year so actually only three weeks ago um as our vessel was transiting from um Costa Rica down to Chile which is where it is right now and um the the they're all over 1.5 kilometers in

height and the tallest one is over 2.6 km so again as I said these are not trivial small features uh and this was actually discovered by uh and mapped by our crew on board um so uh John and toer if you're watching and the crew that were on board during that Transit uh fantastic job uh so uh that's that's what they did over the holidays uh you know just a little thing there um so uh but the Technologies uh to map the seaf Flor are improving and we are get getting to better and better resolution which is what I'm talking about here so I'm going to play a very very short video right now um last November we had scientist a chief scientist and his team from um Memorial University in Canada Newland Canada on board uh Dr John Jameson uh and they were testing some novel new technology called um synthetic aperture sonar and this is technology that's been used in space and in the atmosphere and on land for for many many years but has never really been tested fully in the ocean uh and this this is a technology that will then take us to very high resolution but also with a wider SWAT so I'm just going to let him do the talking and and take you from what's a satellite image to where we are heading with this kind of Technology most of the ocean has been mapped with Technologies like Satellite Systems using radar um but those give you very coarse resolution data we can then improve on that we can use vessel mounted multibeam that gives us better data but it's still relatively coarse so we've been improving that by putting uh systems on board the ROV we can start to understand the morphology of the C4 and the SAS goes uh one order of magnitude more than that so this is really high resolution it's getting to the point where we can see some of the uh geological features are directly in the imagery we can then overlay photo mosaics on that and that will give us millimeter [Music] resolution so that's where we're heading with this technology uh and it's really really early days um but you can see with that exponential technology Trend who knows where we'll be in the next five or 10 years so that's the resolution what about the scale um so in recent years as I said we've seen an increase in uh robotics so autonomous or remote control technology and um uh here's an example behind me this is sail drone this was actually the development of this was funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Marine technology partners and um this is a a photo of it ahead of our vessel falor where it was gathering data so that the scientist could do more um targeted research uh and the advantage of Technology like this the autonomous or remote robotic technology is that it can go to places humans can't so through the eye of a hurricane and sail drones done that and gather data um it has sailed around Antarctica in the winter uh which is really really rough uh and it measured CO2 carbon dioxide and it was amazing scientists found that with that data that instead of what they thought was the ocean was absorbing carbon dioxide around Antarctica during the winter it actually outgasses it puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere so that has an implication for climate models so technology such as this it can go to places that we wouldn't send a vessel with humans on board for obvious reasons uh another example of an uncrewed technology is this seit and this was built and developed here in the UK H and this is the winning technology of the sh ocean Discovery X prize as part of the winning team uh the jebco NF alumni and I I actually ran that competition so I know a bit about this one um the Breakthrough from that uh and this was awarded in 2019 so not that long ago um but this particular technology by the way even though it it won that competition it was only an engineering diagram in 2017 so again it shows how fast technology is moving the Breakthrough here was you have your surface robot but it had an ability to deploy and recover another robot an underwater vehicle with no humans at Sea all controlled from land in mission control and so the so you have two robots working in tandem they are both mapping they can both one can uh put one into the ocean and bring it back safely to land uh so that's this technology seit and actually again uh on the theme of sending it places where humans couldn't go it went and mapped the Tonga volcano The Calder that was left after the huge explosion in 2022 because it was too dangerous for humans to go there in case there was another uh eruption um interestingly in Full Circle uh that volcano had actually been mapped a few years earlier by the chit ocean Institute so scientists had a really great example of a fully mapped uh volcano and then one that had erupted underwater um and then to continue that theme of autonomy and um robots uh this is kind of like a next Evolution this has got no humans in the loop there's no people sitting at Mission Control monitoring and controlling this this has an AI Captain so this is the Mayflower autonomous system and this was built uh developed and built in Plymouth um here in the UK and in 20122 this did its first crossing of the Atlantic all by itself uh fully captain in by AI that gathered weather information and collision information and everything you need to and it had on board a number of scientific sensors so in addition to these surface uh robots we also have underwater devices these are called auvs autonomous underwater Vehicles we're really creative on our naming conventions here um and you see these these are the two orange uh long shaped devices so so our first cruise last year on falor 2 our inaugural Cruise was to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge uh and this is a photo from there and um that was to look for hydrothermal vents in the Mid-Atlantic uh Ridge and and scientists do not use not only just the mapping capabilities of the vessel but also the mapping capabilities of these auvs uh which produced really high resolution imagery uh Maps one meter resolution Maps and then from that they used chemical sensing technology and they they measured temperature and salinity in addition to that and then we put the ROV down to see what was there and they were looking for hydrothermal vents and the first time ROV Sebastian went down it found hydrothermal vents so that was a very effective way of doing this work in in the course of 40 days they found not only one hydrother Thal vent field but three which is incredible uh with dozens of black smokers and you're seeing some of the imagery from this particular Cruise what was interesting is that not only did they find the hydrothermal vents these vents were teeming with life as you can see there was shrimp and there's crabs and there's all sorts of creatures down there really really vibrant place so again you now see the transition from mapping all the way to biodiversity and finding life and that's the shrimp party that's going on by the way um so one of the other fact interesting facts about this particular site is that the the Mid-Atlantic about 30 or 40 years ago uh people had deemed it devoid of Life uh because of course they didn't have this kind of capability this kind of technology to go and see what was down there and so it had been earmarked for deep sea mining and so now we have footage to show that it is certainly not devoid of life and it's a really really bad idea to do deep sea mining uh and if that's this is just one example in the world of that how many others are there out there so um it's it's a mineral Rich environment but it's a very very valuable environment as well and we can't destroy it before we know what's out there um so hydrothermal vents I'm going to stay on the topic of hydrothermal vents they're really amazing places this is where the Earth brings nutrients to us through these vent systems all these nutrients come out all these U minerals and metals they come into the ocean Trace Metals ion things that are needed for um life um and part of that whole process are uh microbes and so I'm going to play another video for you now again uh in the words of the scientist this was a cruise that was in 2018 on falor uh and uh the chief scientist here was Samantha Joy Dr Samantha Joy from the University of Georgia and she's going to tell you about what they [Music] found this amazing ecosystem is located on the bottom of the ocean 2,000 M water depth in a hydrothermally impacted system in the GU space and in the Gulf of California it's one of the most magnificent things that I've ever seen in the natural [Music] world this feature is Extreme super heated they're toxic chemicals toxic Metals um High concentration of hydrogen sulfide there's all kinds of challenges living in an environment like this yet life proliferates this kind of feature offers you the ability to discover how Life deals with these kinds of challenges and not only you don't just deal with it you thrive on [Music] it those are the kinds of places that select for microorganisms that are really the superheroes of the ecosystem the metabolic Warriors that can tolerate extremes and do amazing things under challenging conditions and those kinds of organisms are the ones who have the most to teach us about novel modes of Life how to survive under you know precarious conditions and many times they have you know valuable biomolecules that can be used to advance medicine as well as [Music] science well I mean you're at the bottom of the ocean right so everything's different there it's good that is crazy good wow so man what kind of guas is that methane so that's methane yeah they're just amazing the interaction of the oil and the gas as it is discharged and then it got oily I know the other one's doing it tun now yeah there it goes the diversity of this is is is kind of blowing my mind right now and there's a lot of talk about CO2 Dynamics in the atmosphere and that causing a greenhouse gas but methane is the 30 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2 and what we're doing down there is looking at organisms that eat and produce methane and understanding their metabolism can have a application in science and how we deal with our rapidly changing world one of the biggest things to take away from this Expedition is we are finding these unique ecosystems that we know so little about and they're amazing but then 2 m away is piles and piles of plastic bags balloons and the detritus of the human race it's devastating to see that impact on these ecosystems before we even fully understand [Music] them and plastic you can see imagine the stuff that's out there that we can't see the water is warming oxygen concentrations are dropping by communicating the beauty and Majesty of these systems their importance to the natural world to Global biogeochemical cycles on this Earth We're making people fall in love with the ocean I mean when people really care about something you know they put their money down they put their Sweat Equity into it and they want to make a difference they want to do something about it to make it better and that's how I think change happens [Music] [Music] so hydrothermal vents amazing places I mean on land we have photosynthesis the creatures that live down there they are chem chemicals they use the chemicals that come out they there's obviously no sunlight down there um and they were found in 19 in the 1970s new ecosystem back then uh 50 or so years ago um amazing it is disheartening of course to see the uh human footprint is there before our eyes uh reach some of these places and we see we see that quite frequently and of course we pick up what we can but um there's there's more out there than we think however people are working on Technologies to address the issue of plastics and so last year we hosted on board in collaboration with National Geographic a National Geographic Explorer and scientist from Arborg University in Denmark uh who and she was testing Dr Laura Sanchez Simons she was testing a new microplastic detection technology uh on board and we have deliberately um built on board falor 2 a system for scientists and Engineers to test such Technologies a system where you can pull sea water and there's no plastic pipe contamination so a microplastic system for that so work is happening on that front uh uh to see first to understand and to see what's happening but also uh eventually to move towards how can we avoid uh such things but H High thermal vents as I said 1970s 50 years ago new ecosystem um last year we had an amazing Discovery uh and that was another new ecosystem and this uh was actually underneath the hydrothermal vents uh so scientists knew that bacteria and viruses flew in the cavities that were you know from hydrothermal vents underneath the sea surface itself underneath the sea floor I should say um but we didn't have any clue really that there were there was animal life uh and that's what was found was this animal ecosystem uh this was an expedition last August that was led by Chief scientist um from uh University of Austria Dr Monica brigh and uh and what you see here on the video are worms and um lari of uh tube worms and so this goes back to that whole question of deep sea mining just because you think there's nothing there does not mean there's nothing there we have not yet fully explored and understood our own planet and so here is an example of that this is underneath the sea Flor and this is just one mo one small spot who knows what else lives underneath the seafloor um so anyway so this this was a huge huge Discovery a new ecosystem uh that exists down there but now I'm going to move away from the seaf FL and mapping and talk about biology uh and the Marine uh water column and so what you see here the ocean of course is home to creatures of all shapes and sizes uh and this is um this was a video footage that was caught by ROV Sebastian quite serendipitously by the way uh in the ningaloo canyon area of Australia in in 2020 in April of 2020 uh and it's thought to be the longest sea creature in the world 145 m in length it's a seona for uh and they think this Ro the the circular pattern that it's in is some kind of feeding pattern um but what to me is amazing I mean it's a gorgeous image amazing but what to me is amazing is this was in 2020 we're finding something that's 145 mters in length in the ocean how big is this ocean it's massive how many other things are out there we don't yet actually know H and that's what we're on this journey for but it's not just the very big it's also the very very small so this is an image of a 1 cm pygmy seahorse that was in the coral reef uh and um if you cannot see the seahorse yet I will show you there it is um and um it's it's little and it's very well camouflaged and uh this was captured Again by our ROV Sebastian and the amazing Pilots ROV Sebastian is the size of a car so I look at this and I think this is like driving a car and seeing a safety pin on the pavement as you're driving by that's what this image is like uh it's just remarkable for that but it shows we get we go from the big to the very little um we also have creatures that are in the water column uh this is a Rams Horn squid the spirula spirula you may have seen a horn that's like a spiral shaped that spiral horn is actually inside the squid um and it assists in its buoyancy this is the very first footage of this creature in the wild and this was actually also caught in 2020 of Australia uh by RV Sebastian and Alor um interestingly the story behind this one is uh this as I said was the first time it was seen in the wild it has been caught and has been kept in captivity in places around the world and in captivity this creature always swims with the eye down and in the wild it swims with the eye up and so quite literally this footage turned this squid science Community upside down all puns are their own reword by the way so it's perfectly acceptable to say that um but seeing these creatures in the wild is different some of them have got different behaviors than when they're in captivity so we do need to look into that um so schme ocean Institute as I said we're a partner with seabird 2030 we're also a partner with another international program the uh neon Foundation necton ocean census um and the leader of that is sitting up there in the corner um but uh so ocean senses has a goal and in fact actually ocean census was launched from this very room in April of last year so it's not even a year old yet the goal for ocean census is to discover 100,000 new marine species in 10 years um and that's quite a challenge really because uh so far our rate of discovery of species is about 2,00 ,200 per year which sounds like a lot but it's a number that's not changed since Charles Darwin's era or since the Challenger Expedition since the 1800s we're still at the same rate of discovery and so the reason part of the reason this was set up is because we now have these new technologies coming online um so until a few years ago the average time it would take to identify a new species was 21 years um and a year or so ago I think that dropped down to 13 years um so we're heading in the right direction and so we're very proud to be a partner on uh ocean census as well um so let's look at some of that new Marine biological sensing capabilities and technologies that are coming online um these are called squishy fingers very scientifically technical name that uh and these are very gentle fingers they're m Ed this in this example on ROV Sebastian uh this is stuff that was built by uh scientists at Harvard University and engineers at Harvard University uh and 3D printed on board the vessel itself depending on the needs of the scientists on board um and so the challenge really is some of these creatures are really delicate and very hard to sample and so you need something that's soft that can um that can take those samples uh and some of them of course have got uh interesting shapes uh and so you need uh the technology that can pick those up um another technology again out of Harvard um and it was tested by scientists from uh Harvard and uh City University of New York and the University of Rhode Island and uh Monterey Bay Aquarium research on board valkor is this and this is the rotary actuated device the rad sampler and it's kind of like you can imagine a football um that's open and then when the creature swims into it it will close around that creature uh this is something for the midwater column so not on this nothing that's sitting on the sea floor nothing that's in the surface or very near the surface but something that is really hard to to um um measure and and gather samples from that floating midwater column itself very notoriously difficult to study um the same group tested this technology this is the Deep PIV uh where PIV stands for particle image velocimetry and it's essentially like an x-ray system for uh for creatures gelatinous creatures underwater and so what you see on one side of the screen is the uh laser beam that the light beam I should say that is uh creating the scan and on the other side is the scan itself so now where you're heading towards is being able to to detect uh and see some of the features of these creatures without even having to take them out of the water so I'm going to show you oh uh let's see is this video working this this will take a second I think to load I hope anyway so that's the direction we're actually heading in is can we use technology not to take anything out of the water but ALS but just to see what's happening in the water okay so this is the same sensor the Deep PIV uh and you'll see a squid run just zoom right through uh what you can use this technology for in addition to looking at the creature itself is also to look at Water movement and fine- scale particle distributions and uh turbulence so it's very useful uh very interesting but very very very new technology that's really in Prototype stage uh the same group of scientists also tested this this is Iris uh it's a camera system and you again you see it mounted on ROV Sebastian on one side and you see what the camera is seeing on the other side and what this does is create a 3D image so you now get to see what the math and the uh where the movement of creatures actually are through this particular system instead of the 2D image that you get from video or photography so again a different way of analyzing and studying these uh midwater column organisms we've also tested on board um Edna so environmental DNA and so Edna is technology that actually it's now available for the air and and land but uh it it for the ocean you can get a water sample and you can analyze it and see what swam through because we all leave a a foot print a fingerprint behind so whether that's fish scales or something else you can really tell what has been in the water column so montre Bay Aquarium Research Institute is uh testing this along with John Hopkins University putting Edna sensors on auvs underwater vehicles that I mentioned before for mapping um and So eventually maybe we can get a map of a biological map of the ocean and the water column as well um um so that's Edna we've also tested that um some of the advantages of using Edna uh would be for example for fish fish assessments and for fish management fisheries management um purposes uh or to look for invasive species where you may not necessarily see the invasive species but you know it's in the area because you know what's in the water itself so thanks to all these Technologies and more I think we're looking as I said a future where instead of uh taking species out of the water we'll be able to hopefully identify them in the water column uh instead of in the lab so the ocean is full of amazing wonderful weird glow-in-the-dark electricity conducting life and you see some of those in there um so I hope you're getting a sense of you know some of the magnificence that is the ocean some of the tech technology that's coming online uh that's in Prototype stage um so the final step here really is how do we convey this to a broad audience uh how do we convey this to uh to everyone in this room and everyone online and and Beyond so we have a schme ocean Institute an artist at Sea program uh where we bring on on board alongside the scientist and Artist as well and they learn about the science and I believe at least one of them might be in the room today but they learn about the science and they convey it in their own form of Art and we were going to have an artist at se exhibit here got delayed in customs there's some things that technology can't really help I'm afraid um and so it should be here tomorrow so if you're back at all sometime this week uh it will be on display our artist at se um we're also working in partnership with neon uh to broaden this kind of idea and we're working on taking the ocean to different cultural areas so whether that's fashion or music or Sports how do we with our ocean visuals and expertise uh interact with people who have different cultural expertise and societal expertise so that's a a program stay tuned uh we'll uh get more from from that uh and then as I wrap up um I want to just finish uh by saying that I'm going to be back here next Saturday uh because we will have the world premiere of a film our inaugural ocean watch uh it's going to be a series actually of uh films that we're doing in partnership with the Royal Institution where we bring to you the latest and greatest discoveries from falor 2 so I'm going to play a little teaser uh trailer here for you next Saturday beneath the surface of the ocean lies a hidden world of Wonders the deep ocean is the Last Frontier of exploration on planet Earth but in recent decades scientific advancements have opened a window into its many domains and brought to light discoveries that are redefining our understanding of life in the oceans [Music] in 2023 Schmidt ocean Institute set sail a new research vessel to unlock its Mysteries named falor 2 [Music] these are the stories of falor 2 and its first chapter into a lifetime of [Music] exploration give me one minute so that was written and narrated uh by Leo uh Richards who will be joining us next Saturday live here as well along with my colleague Dr Carly weer who's the director of communications at Schmid ocean Institute uh and we'll have uh the showing of the film and we'll have a Q&A so it just leaves me now to say thank you thank you very much to all of you for being here uh in person and to those of you who watched online um I also want to say thanks to my family uh my 96-year-old dad who's sitting in the audience not nerve-wracking at all um um and um and my mom who is no longer with us but uh for me she was the first scientist I knew because she was my mom um and I also want to say a huge thank you to Eric and Wendy and the Schmid ocean Institute team uh the crew the staff none of this could happen without them so thank you very much um as we I hope you continue to join us as we explore the 71% of our world that's beyond our Coastline thank you

2024-02-22 00:30

Other news