Science Friday - Sea Floor Mapping, Hurricane Season Forecast. June 1, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

The deep sea is the largest habitat on Earth, but it’s also one of the least understood. As mining companies eye the mineral resources of the deep sea—from oil and gas, to metal deposits—marine biologists like London’s Natural History Museum’s Diva Amon are working to discover and describe as much of the deep sea as they can. Amon has been on dozens of expeditions to sea, where she’s helped characterize ecosystems and discover new species all over the world. And she says we still don’t know enough about deep sea ecology to know how to protect these species, the ones we’ve found and the ones we haven’t yet, from mining. But accessing the deep ocean is expensive; it can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 a day to run a research ship. So roboticists and artificial intelligence designers are developing underwater drones to map and sniff out the secrets of the deep with the help of sophisticated chemical sensors.  June 1 marks the start of the official “hurricane season” in the Atlantic, the time when powerful storms are most likely to spin their way out of the tropics. Each year, teams of forecasters try to anticipate the number and severity of storms to come. Some try to run climate models that simulate atmospheric behavior over multi-month timeframes, while other teams rely on statistics and comparisons with historic data for their estimates of the upcoming storm season. Michael Bell, co-author of Colorado State University’s seasonal hurricane forecast, says that after looking at factors including Atlantic sea surface temperatures, sea level pressures, vertical wind shear levels, and El Niño, their team is predicting 13 additional named storms during the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season (in addition to Alberto, which formed before the Atlantic hurricane season began). Of those storms, the forecast calls for six to become hurricanes and two to reach major hurricane strength. That’s in line with a separate forecast from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center estimating between 10-16 named storms and 5-9 hurricanes.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll dive into the sea for oceans month and talk about how drones could help map the deepest depths. But first, today marks the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season. That time when forecasters keep a close eye on storms swirling their way out of the tropics. And this season is already a bit different. Tropical storm Alberto made his appearance early before the start of the season. and as a subtropical cyclone made its way through the upper Midwest, drenching the Great Lake States.

Tropical weather in the Great Lakes, is that a sign of things to come? Is that the new normal? Michael Bell, associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. He is co-author of the Colorado State University's seasonal hurricane forecast, and he joins us now. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me on the first.

First, let's talk about Alberto. How unusual is this? Well, we typically see some storms that form in the Gulf of Mexico around June. Even though June 1st is the official start of the hurricane season, it's not that unusual to have something just a little bit before that of this type of system. So in this case, Alberto, as you just mentioned in the intro, is a subtropical storm, which means that it was a bit of a hybrid between what we typically think of as a, tropical storm which has fuel coming from the warm ocean surface and winter storms, which gets their energy from temperature gradients in the atmosphere. So this sort of hybrid storm is something that we kind of expect to see every once in a while in the early part of the season.

But so far north it hits the Great Lakes, too? Yeah, so that is a bit unusual. When we were looking at the radar imagery as it tracked across the Midwest, if you took the map off of it, you wouldn't necessarily expect it to see. such a well-formed storm that far north. Brian McNoldi at the Washington Post recently just published an article, though. Turns out there's been actually 11 storms that have fast over Lake Huron over the years, although Alberta was the earliest on record to go that far north. So I think in part it's due to that hybrid nature of the storm,

but certainly something interesting to go back and look at and see how it's able to survive for so long and make its way so far north. All right. Let's talk about your yearly forecast this year's new forecast you released yesterday. What are you predicting for the months ahead? 14 named storms, so that's a tropical storm strength or higher. Of those, we are forecasting six to make hurricane strength, and two to make major hurricane strength, which is category three or higher.

So those numbers are actually down a little bit from our extended range forecast we put out in April, and they're pretty close to the long-term averages. So on average, we would expect about 12 named storms in a season, close to six hurricanes and two major hurricanes as well. So we're forecasting a pretty average season moving forward, and that 14 name storms does include Alberto. So we're expecting about 13 more after this point. Well, why did you downgrade the number that you said earlier? You predicted a little bit more, but now a little less. Yeah, I think the biggest factor is really the changing ocean temperatures off the coast of Africa.

So for this forecast, we utilize four predictors in a statistical model, two of which are related to the El Nino Southern Oscillation. So related to ocean temperatures off the coast of Peru and the equatorial Pacific and the upper level winds in that region. And then the other two predictors are related to the conditions near Africa. So we look at the sea level pressure in the North Atlantic and the ocean temperatures off. off the coast of Africa. And in the Atlantic right now, the high pressure system that's parked over the Atlantic, which is a feature that we see there every year, is a bit stronger than normal, and that is increasing the trade winds and actually cooling off the ocean temperatures off Africa. And so since a large part of our hurricane activity occurs due to easterly

waves and these Cape Verdi storms, we call them, coming off of Africa in the main part of the summer as we get into July and August and September, that's the weather. that cooler water, we think, will inhibit some of the activity. That's offset to some extent by the El Nino conditions. We're expecting potentially neutral to slightly weak El Nino conditions, whereas last year we had Linenia, and with that Lanninia conditions, we saw enhanced activity in the Atlantic. So the difference being, tell us the difference between the two and how they affect hurricanes?

Yeah, so with the El Nino conditions, the ocean temperatures there affect the large, scale vertical wind shear. So, you know, hurricanes draw their energy from the warm ocean, so if the ocean in the Atlantic is warmer, that would lead to more activity. When the ocean temperatures are warmer in the eastern Pacific, that actually changes the vertical wind shear patterns in the Atlantic. And if we have more wind shear, that tends to rip the storms apart. So last year we saw La Niena-type conditions, which led to some reduced vertical wind shear and a very active season. We're transitioning out of that Lanina pattern

towards an El Nino, but at least right now the models aren't suggesting a really strong El Nino will set up, so that's part of the reason we're forecasting a near-average season. Are there any symptoms that you can see of climate change affecting the duration or the beginning

of hurricanes in the season? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. We've had actually a lot of good e-mail discussions about this, and I think There is some suggestion that the storms are getting earlier, but part of the challenge there is our record of activity over the ocean is actually quite short. So we can only go back to basically around 1980, the start of the satellite era, where we have very good records of how many storms and the intensity of those storms. As we go back before that time, most of our records actually come from ship reports.

And as you can expect, those tend to underestimate the number of storms since the ships try to avoid the strongest winds. So it's difficult to say statistically that that is occurring, and there's certainly an active area research to look at that. One thing we do know is that there is not a lot of correlation between the number of storms that form in the early part of the season and the total activity, since those tend to be different locations of Genesis for the storm. So, as I mentioned before, the storms that form in the early part of the season tend to do so in the Gulf of Mexico where the waters are warmer at the beginning of the season, and then they tend to form more off of Africa later in the season. So there's not a particularly strong relationship between the number at the beginning and the total activity. Oh, there isn't. Even you're saying don't pay attention.

Don't look behind the curtain, basically. That's right. Well, you know, the conditions definitely change as we get closer, you know, and we really see the peak of the activity. occurs in August and September. And that's, you know, for example, last year, we actually had a very near average start to the season, even into July and August, but then September was just a really incredible month

that set a tremendous number of records due to very warm motion temperatures in the Atlantic last year and very low vertical wind shear, which led to, you know, some of those really tragic storms of Harvey, Irma, and Maria. So we hopefully won't see those type of conditions repeat this year. If you have such variability toward the end of the season, what really, what great, and I hate to put it this, say, what's the use of the forecast, you know, if it's, I think there's a couple

of different things. One is, you know, we can do better in general than just predicting the average number of storms. So, you know, you can make a reasonable forecast just by picking the average every year. And this year, of course, we are forecasting the average, but, of course, not every year we do that. We go above and below. And so I think. there's some value in that. But also it's also about how do we better understand the hurricanes and what are the large-scale conditions that promote those. So those same large-scale conditions in the atmosphere and the ocean that produce hurricanes are the ones that cause them to intensify and weaken. And so I think a big part of this in terms of the science is what are

these factors, how are all these different, very complex, atmospheric and oceanic factors working together to produce hurricanes. And so that helps improve our science. Also, making these predictions early on, I think, gets people ready for the hurricane season. We always say it only takes just one. So even though we may predict an average or below average season some years, that shouldn't change anyone's preparation. We should always prepare well in advance of the potential hurricanes.

Yeah, as you say, people won't remember all the other predictions if there's one big one that affects everyone. Puerto Rico is still trying. Yes, Puerto Rico is exactly a real good example. And in some years we may have really low activity like 1992, but we had Hurricane Andrews. So even just one storm can cause a lot of damage. Do you rely on, you know, looking at old,

I'm going to say what the meteorologists on TV, say the spaghetti maps, you know, all the different forecasts by different predictors, and you look back in your records and say, oh, that looks like this one, you know? Yeah, actually, so for the seasonal forecast, we do something we call analog predictors, where we actually do go look at all the seasons, and we look at the atmospheric conditions

that were the same at the same time of year, and then look at what happened in those seasons. The spaghetti diagrams, you know, those are typically for individual storms, and so one of the things we can't do is make predictions about individual storms this far in advance. So, you know, we look at it sort of from, a big picture standpoint of, you know, how many storms and how strong they might be on average,

but we can't say, you know, with any certainty, you know, where any specific storm will go. Once we get into about the two-week time frame, then, you know, the models start to show some skill and be able to predict individual storms, and that's where those spaghetti models come in and the uncertainty of the individual storms. There's so many people involved. There are builders and forecasters and climate modelers and all these people. Do they talk to each other? Yeah, actually, I think we're making a lot of progress in that area,

and that's something that we really want to do more of as a community. You know, my group in atmospheric science, you know, we're working hard on trying to solve problems related to rapid intensification, heavy rainfall is a real problem in trying to understand that, as we saw with Alberto, you know, that was one of the main impacts. But, you know, we can make the best forecast possible, but if it's not communicated properly to the public, or to the emergency managers or the building codes aren't up to code.

You know, there's a lot of different factors that go into what makes hurricane season damaging. So I think moving forward, we certainly want to do more of that and try and really integrate. And I'm already talking to a lot of people in the engineering department at our university about electrical grids, water systems, and other ways we can all work together to improve hurricane resiliency. Well, I don't know what to wish a hurricane forecaster, so I'll just say have a healthy hurricane a forecasting season. Okay, thank you. We'll hope that they all stay away from land this year. Keep them far, far away.

Michael Bell, Associate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and co-author of Colorado State University's seasonal hurricane forecast. When we come back, we're going to take a deep dive into the world's oceans. Yes, it's World Oceans Month and how oceanographers are mapping the sea flu. and helping us understand the least explored habitat on Earth, and they're using drones and robotics, just like they do on the land. We'll talk about how they're doing that. Stay with us.

We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. It's the first day of June, which means happy World Oceans Month, everybody. Here at Science Friday, we are celebrating science throughout the world's oceans and meeting the scientists who study them. And today we're going deep, real deep, miles deep. where the water gets cold, the lights get dim, and the creatures get really weird.

Where hydrothermal vents nourish animals with chemical energy instead of sunlight and photosynthesis. These deep sea habitats are some of the least explored places on Earth, but deep sea vessels are sending back a few clues. Let me give you in a few examples. Research vessels like the Nautilus and Noah's Akeanos explorer are roaming the seas, sending down remote vehicles, capturing video, sampling the creatures of the depths. And these expeditions are routinely finding new species. We've got new jellyfish, octopuses, shrimp crabs, giant sponges, and, of course, microbes.

What could we find next? Well, that's what we're going to be talking about. Our number, if you'd like to join us, 844-8255. You can also tweet us at Cy Fri. Diva Amon is a marine biologist and research fellow with, at the Natural History Museum in London, and she joins us via Skype. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much for having me, Ira. Are you excited about this month? I am so excited about this month. Any time that we get to spread the word about our oceans is really a great time. Okay, let's define some terms first. And when you say the deep sea, where does that begin? What level has become deep?

So the deep ocean begins at about 200 meters depth. And of course, it goes down to our deepest point our oceans, which is just under 11,000 meters depth. Wow, that's a few miles, isn't it? Yes, definitely. Yeah, I'm not sure what the conversion is to miles. I can tell you from past experience. It's miles.

And you've been on dozens of expeditions to explore these places, including on the Nautilus. What does the modern process of deep sea exploration look like today versus what it used to be? Oh, so, okay, back in the day, you know, the beginning of the 19th century, late yeah but again of the 19th century it's sort of used to be mostly trolls they'd throw a net off the back of the ship and just kind of drag it along the sea floor see what it would bring up and now you know a century and a half later we've moved into an incredibly high-tech time for deep sea exploration we use things like

remotely operated vehicles as you said these are the incredibly high-tech robots that can go down to the deep sea floor we can control them from the ship They've got arms, they've got cameras, they've got different sensors. We can also use automated, autonomous underwater vehicles, and those we can just drop off the ship, and they can go and do our work for us without us having to actually be there with it. And additionally, there's, of course, submersibles

where we, ourselves, actually get to go down into the deep sea floor. Tell us what you see. Give us an idea of some of the weird, and I use that in a very good sense. Yeah, weird and wonderful, I like to say. So one of my favorites, the Hoff crab or Yeti crab, and these are blind white crabs that live at hydrothermal vents. And they actually, the ones in the Southern Ocean, which are my favorite, have been nicknamed the Hoff crab after David Hasselhoff from Baywatch, because they've got a really, really hairy chest, which they use to farm bacteria by basking themselves in the warm waters that are chemical rich coming out of the hydrothermal vents.

If that's not weird and wonderful, I don't know what it is. That's pretty weird. It's pretty weird and wonderful too. I never thought David Hasselhoff would be worked into that, but you did that very well. Why are there still so many places that we have not fully explored yet? You know, we always say that we know the surface of Mars better than the surface, the bottom of the ocean. Why is that? I mean, I know that sounds really cliche, but it's completely true. Over 99% of our deep sea has never been explored, and this is our old.

planet we're talking about and if we're talking about mapping the deep sea which I'm sure we're gonna get on to later on we have our our ocean floor has been mapped a minimum resolution no maximum resolution of five kilometers so that think about that that means you know entire villages on land will be missing mountains would be missing and so what does that say for you know the deep sea and the reason we haven't explored it is that it's it's really difficult to do deep sea exploration it's expensive incredibly expensive and it requires a lot of equipment requires a ship and a lot of infrastructure. And of course, it's done in really remote

places. So I'm imagining that, you know, there is still a lot to be found, that we, some more of these weird and wonderful creatures that we've never seen. Absolutely. The census of marine life estimated that every time one explores below 3,000 meters depth, your chance of finding a new species is about 50%. Wow. I know you're joining us from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean and you recently went on a research expedition to explore the ecological communities of the deep ocean there and I want you to tell us what you found. Yeah so it was a couple years ago now but we went down to it was an absolutely amazing experience because of course I'm from Trinandtabu and so it was really really special to me to actually get to explore my own country's deep ocean which

of course we don't have the capacity to do here because it's so expensive and technologically and technically intensive. So the Nautilus, the EV Nautilus, came to Trinidad in 2014 and used their remotely operated vehicles to go down into our deep seas. And it was the first time this was ever done using this type of equipment. And we found the most, I mean, I guess I'm biased, but the most amazing methane seeps. And that's basically an area of the seafloor where methane gas and methane fluids bubble out of the seafloor or see powder of the seafloor, and that methane and hydrogen sulfide is then used by creatures via chemosynthesis to make their food. They use the chemical energy found in these fluids to make their food in a similar way to animals using, or sorry, plants

using sunlight via photosynthesis on land. Chemosynthesis happens at hydrothermal vents and cold seeps and methane seeps in the deep sea. And so we found these methane seeps and what they look like is just amazing. They're basically as far as we can see, which of course isn't that far, because it's pitch black down there, so we can only see as far as our lights will extend. But I mean, just millions and millions of muscles. And these are not muscles like what you and I would eat. These are muscles that are a foot long, okay? And when you bring them up to the sea surface, they stink, like bad eggs, basically, because of the hydrogen sulfide. And apart from that, they had, you know, three foot long tube worms that were in bushes amongst these, you know, fields of muscles.

And a bunch of new species as well, a new species of purple octopus, which is yet to be described, a new species of sponge. It just was really fascinating. And, again, it was really important because we don't have the capacity to do that here, that kind of exploration. What an awful job you have. Wow. Sounds, it sounds excellent. Let me go to the phones to Renee in Cleveland, Ohio. Hi, Renee. Hi, Renee. Thanks for taking my call.

Hi, go ahead. I was just wondering how does the landscape of the ocean floor that far down affect the ability to send things down there? It seems like even if you were to bump into something, it would cause catastrophic failure because of all of the pressure. So how do you overcome some of those challenges of just being that deep in that kind of an environment? Yeah, good question. Well, that is a great question. So just like on land, the DFC has a variety of habitats. It's got everything from mountains to plains to canyons to trenches.

And so you're very right, very variable terrain. And so as a result, if we're going to be sending down these really expensive pieces of equipment like remotely operated vehicles, or tonnest underwater vehicles, submersibles, which have people in them, then we need to map the seafloor before we do that. And we do map the seafloor in an extremely high detail. It takes quite a while, but it's what usually on scientific expeditions,

you'll spend your first couple of days doing, mapping the area you're going to be exploring. And then, of course, that will identify to you any potential hazards that may exist down there. Well, you know, as a scuba diver, I know that you can't go down deeply and come up quickly because you'll explode, you know.

Is that what happens? How do you bring the samples back in any way that, you know, they're not disfigured, so to speak? Well, sometimes that is not an option. They do have pressure chambers that you can bring many animals

up in, but that's not really used very often. So when you're bringing up, I mean, most invertebrates, crabs, sponges, and so on, they tend to be fine. The change in pressure and temperature, because the deep sea is very high pressure and very low temperature. That change in pressure and temperature means that a lot of the animals,

invertebrate-wise, will be dead by the time they get to the surface, which is great for me because that means I don't have to kill anything. But the fishes are a little bit more complicated because they, of course, have swim bladders, which are full of air. And when you're coming up to the surface, of course, things expand because of the decrease in pressure. And so that means when a lot of deep sea fishes get to the surface, their eyes would have bulged out, and their stomachs would have erupted out of their mouths. And it's just generally a really, really not pretty sight.

Yeah, all right. Let's go back to Trinidad and Tobago. Your research, I understand, was expressly to characterize what's there now because there's oil and gas drilling that may begin off the coast soon, right? So this makes your work urgent before that all gets ripped up? Absolutely. So it's kind of like this race against time, right? Race against time before things are impacted to a point where we may not know what is lost. So yes, here in Trinandahoga, and this is not just in Trinand Tobago, it's around the world. Humans are running out of resources on land and in shallow waters. And because of the huge increases in technology, we're now able to push into our deep oceans and get the resources from there. And that's not only all in gas. That's food. That's food. That's. metals, you name it, pharmaceuticals, we can find it in the deep ocean. And so in Trinidad, our particular issue here now is that deep water, oil and gas exploration and extraction is due to begin this month.

So that's pushing ahead without us knowing what exists in most of our waters, Trinidad and Tobago's waters. So it's a bit tricky. And they're like they're not just oil and gas, but they're also talking about metal mining because there are mounds of metal modules down there? Yeah, so there are actually three types of resources where metals are really high quality and really abundant in the deep ocean. And those, as you said, are nodules, polymetallic nodules or crusts, which grow on sea mounts, or at hydrothermal vents,

those really special habitats that host huge abundances of animals in the deep ocean. And all of those harbor, as I said, really high-quality metals of various types. And there's now this sort of push to mine them in the future. It hasn't started yet, but within countries' jurisdictions, so Papua New Guinea may start deep sea mining as early as next year. But within international waters, where a lot of the resources are, that's likely about 5 to 10 to 15 years away. I understand that you've also done work.

in the Arctic. Are there unique species you found in Arctic waters? So it was probably the Antarctic, not the Arctic. Antarctica, sorry. But I would love to work in the Arctic. Yeah, in the Antarctic. So that was actually the Yeti crab that I talked about. It is where that was found. And so I was on one of the expeditions that explored the first ever hydrothermal vents discovered in the Southern Ocean. And it was just laden with these Yeti crabs as well as stalked barnacles that, almost look like, you know, car washes with their, with their, you know, when you push the car

through the car wash and you've got the, you know, scrubbers that wash the cars. That's what it looked like pretty much, just because it was so laden with barnacles. Wow. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about what's, what's under the sea with Diva Aman, a marine biologist and a research fellow with the Natural History Museum in London. Now, when I was in Antarctica many years ago, I saw a. people who were fishing for the what I think they call it the Antarctic Cod because they were looking for the blood to see the talk about in those days the antifreeze that was in the blood of the fish.

But they would talk about stuff. I mean, because the shelf drops off right there, right? The continental shelf just dives right down. And so you can go really deep off that shelf and find stuff very deep underwater. Yeah, and that's not just in the Antarctic. I mean, the Bahamas as well. there are lots of places where the drop-off is actually really, really close to land. Kiribati, Bahamas, and so on.

It's actually just sort of a stones throw away, not as remote and far as you would think. Yeah. So what would be your dream find? You talked about a muscular muscle you pulled up and some other really weird creatures, weird and wonderful, of course. What do you suspect might be down there that you haven't found yet? Or is it because you haven't found it, you have no idea? Oh my, that is such a hard question.

I've actually never thought about that. Well, I mean, wouldn't the objects that far, because there was no sunlight that reaches down there, aren't many of the creatures don't have eyes, and they really... Yeah, this is the thing. Everything down there was already so weird, and you wouldn't even be able to think of these animals.

It's like, you know, evolution went totally crazy down there and just sort of mush together things. I mean, a hairy-chested crab that farms bacteria. on its body, really. Well, let me, let me interject before we go to a break about something I saw a photo of, and that is an orb. It was a purple? Oh, yeah.

Purple? Was it glowing? It did look like it was glowing in the video, and so this was discovered by the Nautilus in 2016 off California, and it was, yeah, as you said, a purple orb. And they were like, all the scientists and were like, what is this? We've never seen anything like this. And let me tell you, that happens all the time when you're doing deep sea research. You're constantly like, what is this?

I've never seen this before. Is this new? And so they collected it and got it up to the lab. And when it was in the lab, it started to unfold. And they realized it was actually a plurobrank, which is sort of like a sea slug. And because it was purple and found off California, they could pretty quickly tell that it was a brand new species to science. How did they tell?

What is the process you go through to tell? So to say something is conclusively a new species, you have to collect it, which is, of course, one of the pitfalls with deep-sea science, because a lot of the time you're just working with imagery or video. So you need to have the sample in hand, and then that means you can look at the different morphological characteristics, so how the body looks, and that can include everything from its internal skeleton

to how many little fin rays it has on its left fin kind of thing, right, and how many spines it has on its right leg. And then on top of that, normally now we'll take a little bit of tissue, which we can sequence to look at its DNA, and we can compare that with other known species. And then using both the morphological and molecular characteristics, we can definitively see whether it's a new species or not. Wow, that's great. And we have incredible sites from your deep sea expeditions on our website, plus a whole swell of stories about the ocean, a submarine pilot who helps film a blue planet, an aquarium that grows coral.

and much more to come, much more to come as we celebrate the World's Oceans Month. Find it all at Science Friday.com slash Oceans Month. So we're going to take a break, and we're going to come back and talk a lot more about underwater drones now. That might help us map the deep. It might sniff out shipwrecks and whale falls and hydrothermal vents. The deep ocean is going autonomous, just like our cars are headed that direction. So are we in the deep oceans? Diva will be back.

We're also going to bring on other guests. So stay with us. Lots more oceans talk after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about exploring the deep oceans with my guest, Adiva Amin, a marine biologist and research fellow with the Natural History Museum in London. And just as drones and robots are taking over exploring the skies, the roads, and the planets, drones and robots are diving and exploring underwater, too. In fact, XPRIZE has challenged roboticists to design a

autonomous underwater vehicles that can explore the deep more cheaply than the ships we use today. And they announced nine finalists in the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZ competition in March. We're going to bring on one of the finalists. Martin Brooke is leader of the Blue Devil Ocean Engineering team at Duke University, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering there. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello. Hi there. How are you?

Fine. I thought I was not coming on first. I'm going to bring on to someone else. Jodick of Armani is overseas the competition. She's Senior Director for Planet and the Environment at XPRIZE. Welcome to Science Friday, Jodick. Thank you, Ira. It's a delight to be here.

Martin being a little bit shy. I'm going to talk to you first. Tell us about the challenge. What do teams have to do to win that $7 million prize? That's some prize. Was that for Martin? Yeah, that was for you. Oh, for me? Okay, yeah. I'm sorry.

Hi, Martin. Hi, how you doing? Good. So the $7 million Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is a competition in which we are incentivizing brilliant innovators from around the world to map the seafloor and the deep sea floor that you've just heard about at a very high resolution. And they have to do it autonomously. They have to do it quickly. There's no ships in the competition area.

And in addition to mapping the seafloor, they have to bring back images from the deep sea. And in addition to all of that, we have $1 million bonus prize in there from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for pioneering technology, which is an autonomous underwater smart sniffer. So technology that can detect a chemical or biological signal underwater. and then autonomously track it to its source. So that's all combined as a super exciting competition. You know, I find this very much like NASA sending robots to distant planets instead of people now.

You're doing sort of the same thing with the oceans here. Yes, that's exactly the model that we are using. In fact, one of the market failures and one of the reasons why the entire seafloor has not yet been mapped at a high resolution is because it's so expensive to send ships at sea. And so just like NASA sends robots to other planets, these robots will go out to the deep ocean, and we will stay on land at what we're calling mission control. There you go. Martin, now tell us about your project.

It's an aerial drone, right? Yeah. So at Duke, I teach design classes in electrical computer engineering, and we're always looking for something really exciting and challenging to motivate the students and sort of give them the reason to want to really do well in the class. And the XPRIES has been serving up these incredibly challenging and interesting projects that we've just really enjoyed being part of. And so we've been part of this team that are working on the ocean mapping.

And in our case, we have a rather limited budget, which actually fits their goal of trying to come up with a low-cost solution. And so we thought about it hard and long, and our solution was to come up with a large heavy lift hybrid gas electric drone that carries a synthetic aperture sonar mapping pod and the whole system weighs less than 100 pounds and is much, much, much, much cheaper than most other deep sea submersible systems because we avoid a lot of the big heavy pressure vessel things that have to go in.

So you lower this pod and onto the ocean? Yeah, and what happens? The drone flies out, drops the pod onto the ocean and flies away and leaves it there. And what the pod does is lowers a synthetic aperture sonar system down deep enough that it gets under the thermocline layer and all the problems that we have with wave guiding of sonar, and we can actually do synthetic aperture sonar mapping down deep with a relatively low-cost system.

And then we winch it back up, and literally we're using fishing line. We have 4,000 meters of 50-pound test fishing line that's used for deep-sea fishing to winch this down and up. And we tested it a while ago off the coast of North Carolina and it was working okay to do this. And that gets us a really low-cost system that doesn't use a lot of power. And when it's done, collecting the data for the mapping, it pulls its pod back up and signals to the drone. The drone comes back and picks it up, and there's hopefully multiple of these pods that we've planned to build like 10. And so the drone's flying around, servicing all these pods, dropping them and mapping, dropping them and mapping.

And why do you need to drop them? Why do you have to lower them down? Why not just do the sonar mapping from the surface? Well, there's this layer, I think it's called the Thermacline layer, that's about partway, varies between 600 meters to 1,000 meters down. And I'm not actually an ocean scientist, I'm an electrical engineer, so I could be getting this wrong. Hopefully Joy Dicca will correct me if I'm wrong. And what it does is it tends to wave guide sound.

And sound is by far and away the best way. I mean, dolphins and whales have figured this out. It's the best way to see in the deep ocean. Light doesn't go very far, and radio waves don't penetrate. And so sound, although will propagate really well, and we hope that our system, once it gets below that thermocline wave guiding layer, that sort of blocks sound from getting very deep, will be able to map about 1,000 meters out from itself.

And so we'll get a reasonably good chunk of mapping just from that one sonar pod, and then we move it on and on and get different results. But you have to get down below that thermocaine layer before you can do something. I'm getting the picture. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Sure. Thank you. Mark, leader of the Blue Devolution Engineering Team at Duke

and Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering over the air. Still with me are Deva Eamon and Jodika Vermani. So was he right about the thermocline, Joddaga? Actually, the thermocline is quite shallow. It's usually in the upper 100 or so meters, and it's a temperature gradient. I think he's referring to the deep scattering layer, which is also sometimes called a sound scattering layer.

So there is essentially a sound barrier there down there. Teva, speaking of how expensive these research vessels, these big ones are, to send out, it seems like something only richer countries can afford to do in the first place. But does Trinidad and Tobago have their own deep sea research program? or would they love to have what they're working on, what Martin is working on? Country would love to have them.

But the reality is that only about, I think, around 70% of nations have deep oceans within their maritime exclusive economic zones, and only about 16% of them are able to explore these environments. And Trinidad, of course, is not one of them. This is especially true for the less economically developed countries.

Hmm. And Jardica, NASA and the special, program have no problem inspiring people over the years with these the moon missions, the Mars missions, the flights to Pluto. You know, you mentioned this is sort of exactly the kind of project NASA knew about

and thought about setting robotics. I don't know if people feel the same excitement about exploring the ocean, but maybe this could get them exciting about what's going on. Yeah, this is our opportunity to discover a new planet. It is only four kilometers away, but as Deva described,

and you had mentioned this, and we and wonderful creatures and alien creatures at that down there. And the landforms, we've not yet fully explored what's out there. There's thousands of sea mounts yet to be found and cliffs that are thousands of meters in height. So this is a new planet, and we can inspire the public by casting it in that light. We've done some work around this topic exactly

to look at how to inspire the public. So there are certain differences in how the space community talks about space and the ocean community talks about the ocean. But using that NASA model is really good. You know, Deva, years ago, Jacques Cousteau had us all enthralled on TV almost every week in National Geographic specials about exploring the oceans. Do you think we need something like that to explore our own planet, something where that is very public? People can see what's going on? Absolutely. It's all about democratizing our deep ocean. And that not only involves exploring them more, but also communicating that, as Jiu-Tick was just saying,

you know, we've not been very good at that because we know so little about it. But as there's this huge push now to explore our oceans, to understand them better so that we can manage them better. And as a result, we should be better at communicating it. It's an amazing, inspiring place to Deep Ocean, and we should really be sharing that with that as many people as possible. I remember Bob Ballard's Nautilus Project, where he would get kids involved in watching deep exploration under the water. Absolutely. So Bob Ballard's project, the Ocean Exploration Trust,

which runs the Nautilus, as well as NOAA's Office for Ocean Exploration Research, their ship, the Oce Explorer, are two of the leaders in this. They live stream all of their dives from their ROVs, so you can be sitting in your house anywhere in the world once you have an internet connection, and you can be watching live what those ROVs are seeing,

whatever they are in the world, at that exact moment. You can be following along the scientists, hearing their narration, hearing them exclaim that they've seen a new species and follow along and be that explorer with them. It's just their incredible programs. Jardiga, Deva mentioned earlier how the resolution of the ocean floor is so large. It's like a whole city in one spot that we don't know about. Do you think that your kind of exploration could help us map those cities or increase that resolution much higher?

Yes, absolutely. So the competition itself is looking at five meter horizontal resolution. Diva earlier had said, you know, five-kilometer resolution is what we have for almost the entire seafloor at this point. So that's a huge leap forward. There is an international effort underfoot to have the entire seafloor mapped at around 100 metre resolution by 2030. If you took the technology that we have of today, the estimate is that it would take somewhere around 600 years to get that kind of a map. So the technology that's coming out of the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is really going to help in us achieving that 2030 goal of mapping the seafloor at a high resolution. which will feed back into exactly what Deva was talking about,

the ability to find out what's out there to discover smaller features and hydrothermal vents much more quickly and much more cheaply. Does that excite you, Deva? Absolutely. I mean, the dearth of technological capability and knowledge that exists worldwide with regard to our deep ocean means that inappropriate or inadequate management decisions are being made, that we have unaware populations.

And it just generally, I think the world would be a much better place if we knew more about our deep ocean. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Joddaka Vermani and Deva Eman about deep sea exploration. It's just, you think, did I hear you say, you think you can get the whole thing done by 2030? Yeah, yeah, there is a global movement, movement.

seabed 2030, which is not just the XPRIZE, but there's a number of other organizations and entities involved with this to get the whole seafloor mapped by 2030 at a high resolution. And then going back to something else that was mentioned earlier about, you know, being your own explorer and following along with the Oceolianus Explorer or the Nautilus. One of the aspects of this competition is imagery, and we didn't specify when we launched this competition, what kind of imagery we were looking at, because the field of virtual reality is changing so incredibly quickly that it's conceivable that we would have a number of avenues in which we can explore the ocean, including virtual reality in the next few years.

Wow, virtual reality, that would be something. Get to see all of this. Yeah. Let me give you the other side of the coin here, and that is by making access to the deep ocean cheaper and more democratic, won't we also open the oceans up to unwanted exploitation? Where you're going to maybe killing the stuff that you're going to discover? Well, I think what we're really going to do is open it up to allow deep sea environmental management, which DIVA's touched upon a couple of times, which will give us the insight to see what's going

on down there. Right now, it's so expensive that we don't have global eyes on what's happening down there. So we want to open it up for deep sea environmental management, deep sea conservation, even deep sea ecotourism. Deep sea ecotourism. Well, you know, that goes along with the space model, doesn't it? Yes. I mean, there are, there, does anybody, that's interesting. There aren't very many submarines that take people down to see what's down there.

Are there any at Genoa, Diva? There are a couple, yeah. So I know that you can pay, for instance, the MERS, which are the Russian ones, as well as there are a couple of shallower ones. And it seems to be a thing nowadays where a lot of philanthropists tend to have a super yacht, which they will also make available for research. And these super yachts tend to be equipped with submersibles, which are amazing and very generous of them. So I'm sorry, go ahead. Did you want to say something? Yeah, I was going to add to that, though.

In addition to people actually going down in the submersibles with something like virtual reality, you can sit, put a headset on and turn around and look up and down and get a whole new experience of the ocean from your living room, basically. And when am I going to see this? Come over to X-Pribe and I'll show you. That's for me, but how about everybody else who's listening? I think these things are coming online. I think we've seen this in the gaming industry and in other industries,

how they've really taken to different kind of visualization. And I think that's now spreading. I know in the medical industry, they're taking that on for things like heart surgery. And so this is something that is probably going to be online for the ocean world in the next year or two. One last question to you, Jertica. Karl Reefs are one of the most talked about endangered habitats in the oceans. are there any plans to mobilize people around some sort of coral reef X prize? That's a fantastic question.

Yes, actually, we have just launched actually five prize design ideas through a competition on our sister platform, Hero X, one of which is saving coral reefs. So if anyone out there has an idea of a competition design to save coral reefs, I highly encourage you to go onto our HeroX platform. Another one on there is a natural disaster prediction XPRIZE, and I know today is the first day of hurricane season. So we're also looking at how can we improve the prediction capabilities

through an XPRIZE and bringing in some of this exponential technology. I hope we've fittingly kicked off National Oceans Month. I want to thank both of my guests, Jodicum Vermedi, who is Senior Director for Planet Environment at XPri. Jodica Vermeini, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much, Ira. It was such a pleasure. And Diva Aman is a marine biologist and research fellow with the Natural History Museum in London. Diva, thank you for taking time to be with us today.

My absolute pleasure. Thank you, Ira. And one last thing before we go, you know, Science Friday's favorite ocean creatures are cephalopods, and Cephalomania will soon be sweeping the nation as we launch Cephalopod Week. We'll be stretching our tentacles into cities across the country for a series of movie nights. So join us. Go to ScienceFriiday.com slash movie nights for tickets and information. BJ Leiderman composed our theme music, and we want to remind you we're all over social media all week long. So have a great weekend.

I'm Ira Flato in New York.