Tony Zhou
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Welcome to our latest episode in Series 5 of Longitudes of Imagination. I’m Tony Zhou, a Longitude fellow at Yale University. Throughout this series, we’ve invited members of the U.S. National Marine Sanctuaries to share their experience towards the Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project. SanctSound is a collaborative project between the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy to better understand underwater sound within the 7 national marine sanctuaries in waters off Hawaii, and the East & West coasts.

Today’s episode features conversational highlights I shared with Samara Haver, a postdoctoral scholar at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. You’ll learn how sounds produced by marine animals, physical processes (ie. wind, waves), and human activities are measured and assessed. Additionally, Samara kindly shares the technical skillset and personal qualities she believes great scientists possess.

.

Samara Haver
I’m a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University. And here I work within a cooperative institute that is jointly between NOAA and the Hatfield Marine Science Center at Oregon State University. A lot of the research I do is with National Marine Sanctuaries, National Marine Fishery Service, and then the NOAA line office that I’m officially affiliated with through the university is a Pacific Marine Environmental Lab.

Tony
The theme of our podcast series is on imagination and creativity, and we’ve been exploring how scientists use their creativity and imagination in their day-to-day work. Just as a starting point, how did you get interested in marine research? And what are some of the pivotal moments when you look back at your career and education background and connect the dots to get to where you are now?

Samara
So I definitely didn’t always plan to become a scientist, and certainly not to be a marine scientist. I grew up visiting the coast in Oregon with my family, and I always loved playing in the tide pools and going to the beach, but it didn’t really connect for me that that was a job you could have, or even really being a scientist beyond, you know, sitting and looking at a microscope, that was a career. I was interested in science and so I thought the natural progression would be to study pre-medicine. I really enjoyed learning about the human brain so I ended up majoring in psychology and neuroscience. I wanted to study cognition, I was interested in how people think and perceive things. I also had an opportunity to attend a program called Sea Semester. On this program students live on board a tall ship, learn to sail the ship, and then also do individual oceanography, marine biology projects, which I chose because I just wanted to do something totally different from my major and get out of the state, see something new. I came to realize, ocean science is something that people do have careers in and that I could study. And so I wanted to bring neuroscience and marine science together. And that brought me to marine mammals. Marine mammals have really evolved cognition, really complex. After college, I eventually had an opportunity to intern at a NOAA research lab in Woods Hole. And that lab focused on using passive acoustics to study the ocean, kind of bringing together marine mammals and that cognition. It was studying animal communication and using technology to do this research, and I really liked bringing those things together. And I thought it was really cool to listen underwater. So after working in that research group for a few years, I decided that I wanted to go to grad school and continue my education. I completed a master’s degree at Oregon State University, and then I was fortunate to be awarded a fellowship and that allowed me to complete a PhD.

Tony
Wow. So I’m actually really interested in this because I’ve talked to some friends about this. I do a little bit of machine learning research. And one aspect of- I guess just to talk about conversationally, is learning how different animals in the world, including humans, communicate and encode language, and at least some of the conversations I’ve had are like, how intricate and advanced whales communicate to one another because they will be super far away. And I’m probably totally off when I say this, but they’ll send a message to one another. And they’ll get it and then they’ll meet at the exact location of somewhere. Is that true?

Samara
I’m not sure. We don’t really know what they’re saying, if you will, to each other. It could be something like that, but certainly they are communicating over super long distances. Whales, especially Baleen whales, communicate at these really low frequencies, which travel really efficiently underwater. Sound travels four times the speed it does in water as it does through the air. And then the really low frequency sounds don’t lose as much energy as they’re traveling. It’s just- they’re just pressure waves so they can travel for these really long distances. So yeah, potentially Baleen whales are communicating over many, many kilometers, depending on other things in the environment. It’s quieter and noisier.

Tony
Would you say that they communicate via code, like digital code in a way, or no, that’s different because we use words as a way of encoding our language and meaning. Don’t whales- and I’m not sure if other marine animals do this, but they use frequencies and kind of like bite-sized code?

Samara
Different species have different vocalizations. People think about dolphins whistling, and Humpback whale song, and then some species use echolocation, which is like a sonar basically, which they can use to find prey or detect other things in their environment. They are really long distance communication. Yeah, different species have different sounds, which as scientists, we’re able to listen to those and then know what species it is.

Tony
Okay. Would you mind going more in detail about the current projects that you’re working on right now?

Samara
I have a bunch of different projects, but really the unifying theme of them is trying to understand the soundscape of different environments, and understand what we call the acoustic habitat for these animals. So soundscapes are sounds from animals themselves, and fish and shrimp, any biological creatures. And then there’s also sounds from the environment, like wind and rain and ice, volcanoes, and then sounds from humans from cargo vessels, from cruise ships, from sonar, seismic air guns, anything that humans are doing, that’s adding sound into an environment. And so because a lot of marine animals rely exclusively on sound to communicate, to find food, to navigate, avoid predators, because the ocean is so dark and washes away scent, really sound is what these animals evolved to rely on. So when it’s too noisy from other sound sources, then it becomes a conservation issue for these animals, because they’re not able to basically live out their life history and survive.

Tony
I see. So the amount of sound that additional noise from outside of the environment that gets into the ocean that disrupts their way of living, and their way of life.

Samara
I mean, there’s different ways that sound can be disruptive. You know, it could just be an animal notices a sound, or we can have something which we call masking, which means that maybe one animal is trying to communicate to another animal, but it’s too noisy because there might be a vessel passing above them, or seismic air gun survey happening nearby and the signal can’t be received. Or you know, a sound is really noisy in their environment and that could potentially cause an animal to surface too quickly, or it could cause hearing damage. So there’s several ways that- it’s a spectrum of ways that additional sound can be harmful.

Samara
And what I’m particularly focused on is looking at chronic noise. So NOAA has ways, scientists have ways of measuring sound from loud sources that have a very clear stop and start point and saying, How loud is too loud, and when is this basically too much and when it might be harmful? Though when we’re talking about things like shipping noise or continuous vessel noise that goes on and on without a really clear start and end point, it’s hard to define how much that could be harmful, or even being able to say that it’s harmful at all, because you can’t really isolate it in the same way as a single loud sound.

Tony
Right. Would vessels be one of the biggest contributors to this additional sound and noise? Or are there others in the top five or top three rank?

Samara
Yeah, so it comes from all different sources. But when we study sound and environments, terrestrial or marine, we’re looking at the frequency or the pitch of the sound, and then also the intensity. And so when I’m looking at vessel noise and these chronic sources of noise and how that might impact Baleen whales, I’m focused exclusively on low frequencies, really low pitch sounds that can travel quite a distance in the ocean. So there’s also high pitch sounds that can be disruptive, but those…we’re kind of dividing up the spectrum to look at different sources.

Tony
So when you set up an experiment, what are some assumptions that you go into that experiment with?

Samara
So when we set up an experiment to actually get it rolling, basically what we’re doing is we’re taking an underwater microphone called a hydrophone and putting it in a waterproof pressurized case with a bunch of batteries and flash drive cards. And we’re leaving that in the ocean to just record that data for us. An audio file basically, which we can then go back and look at and figure out what’s going on in the environment.

Samara
First, we’re hoping that our equipment works and that we record good data. We do research ahead of time based on previous studies, based on what researchers have found in other fields of where to put these instruments. You know that this is an interesting environment important to animals where we want to listen. And then we’re also hoping that the instruments that we also put in place to help us get the hydrophones back, that those work as well. Because we put these in the ocean for sometimes up to two years.

Tony
You never bring them back up and just leave them?

Samara
Oh, no, we do, we do. Yeah. So they’re anchored to the seafloor, depending on how deep it is, they’re either sitting on the seafloor, if it’s say, less than 100 meters, or if it’s much deeper, they’re suspended in the water column. And we use a float to keep the instrument in place, but there’s no surface expression. So we can’t just reach down and pull it up the way you might with a buoy. We have these acoustic releases that when we go back to the site, we can use essentially a special instrument to talk to the releases and tell the release to unhook itself from the anchor. And then the float will bring the hydrophone back to us. They are archival, the ones that that I work with primarily, so that means we don’t get any data back until we get the instrument. So we kind of always have our fingers crossed, you know, putting it in, bringing it back, hoping that everything went well, so that we can do the next step, the research.

Tony
Have you ever lost the equipment to the ocean?

Samara
Yes, unfortunately it happens. You know, sometimes things just don’t work right. The most disappointing is when you get it back, and then there isn’t any data on it.

Tony
Is that because the instrument wasn’t able to capture it, or there just weren’t any animals that went by?

Samara
I mean, when something happens with the instrument, we don’t even have data to look at. If we get the data back and we don’t hear any animals, then that’s an interesting result. Because we’re learning something about that environment, you know, how come we didn’t hear any animals? What’s going on here?

Tony
Okay, let’s say you get the data, you’ve analyzed it. What are some conclusions- or maybe solutions, maybe that’s a better word. What are some solutions that you and your team, and maybe people in this field, have come up with to reduce the noise, because I don’t think vessels are going anywhere anytime soon. I think they’re probably just gonna be in the ocean. And it seems like with ocean research, and the way that the world wants to expand cities, there’s probably going to be more things put into the water. So what are some solutions for how to declutter and remove this noise?

Samara
So first of all, you’re exactly right. And ships are getting bigger and faster. And we know that bigger and faster ships are noisier. So sound levels from vessels are increasing. And then we also know that animals are impacted by this. And so trying to figure out how to do something about it. Some of the projects that I’m working on are with National Marine Sanctuaries, and also with the National Park Services interested in what kind of management actions might be appropriate for animal conservation. So like you said, vessels aren’t going away. But managers do have some tools, like voluntary vessel slowdowns during certain times of the year when we know that sensitive species are present, or monitoring particular areas during certain times of the year. So Glacier Bay National Park is a great example of this. During the summer months—which is the peak tourism season in southeast Alaska, it’s also when Humpback whales are they’re feeding and harbor seals are breeding there—they have a vessel quota system, which essentially restricts the number of vessels that can go in and out of the park. It’s harder in more open areas. But some of the questions that we’re asking, is looking at these environments and trying to get baselines to understand, you know, what’s going on here? What animals are here, places that aren’t as well studied as Glacier Bay, for example. And the question is, When are animals here? When do they need management actions? Or do they need management actions at all? Because if we put a hydrophone down and we listen to the environment, and sure, maybe there’s some vessel noise, but we also might hear a ton of sound from animals and it doesn’t- as far as we can tell the vessel noise isn’t overwhelming the soundscape in the same way that it might be in a more urban area, more urban soundscape, then we have a different situation. There’s only so many resources available for these types of management actions, even if it’s just the time that people have to commit towards these problems. They are trying to identify where attention should be, where resources should be directed.

Tony
Right. And so it seems like currently it is kind of in the developmental stage of coming up with where things are needed, and at what rate and what quantity. But what is the ideal hope that these experiments lead to eventually?

Samara
It’s a great question. And I am a scientist, not a policymaker, but the cool thing about sound and ocean noise, as some people would describe it, is that it’s not like other types of pollution. If you stop the sound source, it just goes away. There’s no cleanup. Obviously harm can be done, but it’s not like an oil spill where it can take decades to clean up. The sound is, it’s just energy. It just dissipates. So a lot of focus on mitigating sound is looking at vessel technologies, how to make vessels quieter, and what needs to be done to potentially retrofit older vessels and designing newer vessels that are quieter and then looking at where vessels are moving in the ocean. Are there particular shipping lanes or routes that intersect with important habitats for endangered or threatened species? So a lot of pieces of a puzzle.

Tony
Yeah, I know. It sounds very complex, but also very interesting at the same time. Do you have any unexpected results that you had that were either very motivating in a way that surprised you, in a positive way, or unexpected results maybe you had hoped or expected something and then it didn’t come out that way?

Samara
Sure. Yeah. So that has happened many times for the years that I’ve been doing this science, but an example in this case, it’d be…One of my dissertation chapters, I looked at the overall soundscape in Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary. We’d never done any recording there and trying to look at the soundscape and understand the different sound sources. Cordell Bank is right near San Francisco and Oakland, and so it’s a major shipping port, a lot of vessels going in and out delivering to those major ports. One of the parts of the project was looking for vocalizations from specific Baleen whale species to identify them in different times of the year. That area had a voluntary vessel slowdown in the winter months. And what we actually found is, by using passive acoustics to supplement existing visual observations, we found that whales were likely in the area in an extended season beyond what was already known from the visual observation. So that was a cool result because it gave National Marine Sanctuary managers and scientists and stakeholders information that whales were there during these other times of the year, and potentially looking at adapting management in response to that.

Tony
Yeah. Okay. So now just some rapid fire questions for students who are interested in marine research, whether they started already in marine research, or they started in a different field and want to get into marine research. What is some advice that you’d have for them to either continue down the course or pivot into this field?

Samara
It’s important to not only master the field that they’re interested in, but also practice writing, and public speaking, and skills to work with other people. These aren’t things that are necessarily emphasized as much in the sciences, as a lot of, you know, coding and science classes, but to be a successful scientist you also need to be able to write and talk about it.

Tony
What do you think are qualities outside of, let’s say, a professional skill set that one would have to have to be a successful scientist?

Samara
I would say determined. It’s important to not give up at roadblocks. And then they have to be passionate, because it’s really hard to convince other people to care about these things if you don’t care yourself.

Tony
Yeah. Do publications matter?

Samara
Unfortunately, yes.

Tony
Why unfortunately?

Samara
Well, because I think publications are only valuable if other people can read them, and it costs a lot of money to publish open access, and that’s a big hurdle for students who are already trying to raise money for the research projects, for their own tuition, et cetera. And there’s also a lot of emphasis on the scientific manuscripts, which aren’t necessarily written in a publicly accessible way. So yeah, it’s really important because that’s how we document the science, but it takes time away from telling other people, finding ways to communicate it in less technical ways, and also, it’s really expensive.

Tony
Yeah, absolutely. Would you recommend students to pursue a PhD if they wanted to do marine research?

Samara
If they love doing research, they should pursue a PhD because that is, that’s the whole job, is doing research. So if you love it, then it’s a fantastic opportunity.

.

Tony
It was really interesting to hear how Samara transferred her background in psychology to wildlife sciences, where she now explores the acoustic habitat of marine animals. As a conservation challenge, analyzing these soundscapes to better understand how sound can disrupt an animal’s behavior is a critical step towards developing solutions to protect the ocean and marine life.

We hope you enjoyed the last episode of this series. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript.  Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Melisa Acimis
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Melisa Acimis, Longitude fellow from Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey.

Welcome to our ongoing series on imagination, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology! In this series, we spoke with scientists about their work in underwater sound monitoring in our oceans.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with John Ryan, senior research scientist at MBARI. 

As an economics student I was interested to hear about the effects of sonar on living beings. We started our conversation with his role in the field.

.

John Ryan
In order to understand life in the ocean, we need to understand not just the forms of life, but also their environment, their very dynamic environment. Oceanography is an integration of multiple science disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, even geology. All of those together allow us to understand life in the ocean.

I finished graduate studies on the east coast of the United States in a state called Rhode Island. There I learned to study physical and biological oceanography. And then it was time to take that next step after school and that is a postdoc, a postdoctoral research position. So I came to MBARI for a two-year postdoc… 24 years ago. I’m a biological oceanographer at MBARI. MBARI, by the way, stands for Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. So we’re a nonprofit research institute, affiliated with a public education center called the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and our job is to develop and apply new technologies to advance ocean science. So on any given day, I might work with autonomous robotic submarines. In fact, we’re starting an experiment tomorrow that will have three cooperating autonomous robotic submarines (it’s amazing) studying microscopic algae in the ocean, particularly the kind of algae that produce harmful algal blooms. My work could also involve listening in the ocean.

Melisa
Our main subject.

John
Yeah, studying ocean sound. For that, I do both research to understand natural sound, from ocean life—because many ocean life forms use sound in all of their essential life activities… so we can hear their lives, really—but we also study ocean noise and how human impacts can negatively affect the ocean soundscape and the lives of ocean animals that use sound.

Melisa
Great. What is your favorite thing about your work? And is there a philosophy behind your actions?

John
My favorite thing about my work is understanding the beauty and complexity of life in the ocean. I love it every day. My second favorite thing, or it’s equally favorite, I love to share the excitement of ocean discovery. I love to do education and outreach. And I get to do that in my work, which is fortunate. I won’t just engage the public in lectures, for example. We also work on public exhibits, technologies where people can walk into a free and open public education center, push buttons on an exhibit and learn about the ocean soundscape.

Melisa
What is this exhibit? Can you elaborate on that?

John
So imagine that you walk up to a large screen, and in front of you is a beautiful image of the ocean off coastal California. And there are a series of buttons embedded in this graphic and you can push a button and then in front of you on the screen, ocean sound will come to life, but you won’t know what that sound is from, you will only see a visual representation of the sound. A line will move through that visual representation as you hear it. So you’re fully engaged with the sound. It’s a way for people to engage with the sound first, guess what it could be, and learn what it is. We built two of those so far and I have a third to go to another public education center — because where we live, there is a lot of tourism. So people come here to vacation, which also gives us a chance to reach many people with this knowledge through our exhibits.

My philosophy- I was going to be in the world of business. I did this job in business to see what it’d be like and I realized, when I’m 50 years old, I won’t be happy because I won’t have contributed anything to make the world a better place. I will have made money for a business and that can be healthy. You can support a good economy. That’s great, but I wanted to do something that would help us live in greater harmony with nature. Because all around me I saw how we were destroying nature. So I changed direction and I chose to major in biology because I thought that would be very important to living in harmony with nature because it’s the science of life. And if we understand the science of life, we can understand how to be harmonious with it.

Melisa
Great answers. I’m impressed with your idealistic way. Can you summarize the ocean sound monitoring project in a few sentences for a lay audience?

John
Yes, the importance of understanding ocean sound is that the ocean is a world of sound. It is a strange world to us, but one in which sound travels very powerfully. It travels far, and it travels fast. And what that means is, ocean life has evolved to use sound in so many ways. So just by listening, we can learn so much about ocean life, about their life activities: communication, navigation, foraging, socialization, reproduction. We can hear it. It also means that we have to be careful about the noise we introduce to the ocean, because it can cause harm.

Melisa
I read about how far sound travels underwater and I came across some key words such as sound channel, hydrophone, and by doing a little of this research I have seen SOFAR. Could you speak about the nature of sound underwater? And how that may be significant for marine life?

John
Yes, you mentioned the sound channel or the SOFAR channel. That is a location in the ocean, the location being depth, really, because it spreads out across the ocean. The sound channel extends across an ocean basin, 10,000 kilometers of the Pacific. And what it is, it’s a place where there is a minimum sound speed. And just the way sound energy travels through the ocean, that minimum in the sound speed that is determined by the physical properties of the water, traps the sound energy and allows it to travel farther than it otherwise could. So that’s a unique thing. And so that’s how we can hear sound produced at one side of an ocean basin and all the way on the other side, if that sound has a sufficient intensity, source level, and a low frequency — because low frequency sounds travel much farther than high frequency sounds.

And then you mentioned also finding the word hydrophone. Well, a hydrophone is just an underwater microphone. And what it is recording, at the very least it is recording the pressure variations that result from a sound wave just as the very process that allows us to hear sound in air. So we record those pressure oscillations that result from the sound. And we record that at a very high sample rate — in our case, we’re sampling sound pressure at more than a quarter million times per second, so a very high sample rate. And the reason we do that is because many animals in the ocean are using sound that’s far above our limit of hearing. So if we’re going to detect their sound production, their use of sound, we have to sample at a very high rate. For example, some species of dolphins or sperm whales will produce echolocation clicks (to help them find their food in a dark ocean) that have a frequency more than five times greater than our upper limit of hearing. So it’s very high frequency. We sample pressure in the ocean with a hydrophone at a very high sample rate, then we can study many sources of sound. Since we’re on the topic, there are really three categories of sound that we can study: biological sound, or biophony; sounds of the Earth, or geophony; and sounds of human activities, anthropophony. We study all of those.

Melisa
Could you elaborate on the effects of sound in the ocean on mammals?  What should be done to reduce adverse effects?

John
There are really four ways that our noise can have a negative impact on ocean animals. The first is interference with communication. It’s called masking. It’s like if you and I were trying to have this conversation, and someone was operating a jackhammer next to my chair, it would be really difficult for us to have that conversation, and in many cases, we are preventing them (marine animals) from communicating with one another. A second harmful effect of our noise is a behavioral disturbance. We can cause a population to move away from a source of noise, when in fact that population needs to be there in order to survive because their food resource is there. So we can cause them to be malnourished, for example. And then a third way that we can have a negative effect is to cause acute or chronic stress. You know how in people we can measure stress hormone levels, like cortisol and such, and we can feel that stress. We know stress has many negative effects on our lives, in our bodies. We’ve learned that our noise also has caused stress in marine mammals. The last effect is that if a sound is so loud, so intense, it could actually damage body tissues. So it could destroy their hearing, temporarily or permanently, it can harm their hearing. And there are even indirect effects. For example, one of the deepest diving mammals, the beaked whale, it lives (forages) so deep in the ocean, and there have been these very dramatic occurrences of beaked whales washing up on the beach and dying. And the reason they died is because they experienced very loud sound, very loud sonar. The sound didn’t cause their death (directly), but they panicked. They swam to the surface very fast. And if you go from a very deep depth at high pressure to the surface at low pressure too quickly, air bubbles come out of solution in your bloodstream, and it causes terrible things.

Melisa
As part of our imagination theme, we are interested to learn if there is room for imagination in your line of work. If so, could you speak about that and share an example of your approach to coming up with or developing new ideas?

John
Imagination, as you know, is important in everything humanity can do. And it’s very true in science. Let’s talk about two areas: research and education. For research, it’s very important to imagine what it must be like for the life of a species that you’re studying. So for example, imagine weighing 150 metric tons, but feeling weightless. And imagine speaking with only your voice, no technology, and being heard by your friend 100 kilometers away. Imagine needing to eat tons of krill (shrimp) every day in order to survive. (This describes the life of a blue whale.) This imagination gives us a sense of what it’s like for the species that we want to understand and protect. And some of these species (like blue whales) are still endangered. They’re still listed as endangered because their populations were decimated by commercial whaling. So we have to imagine what it is like for that species to survive, and better yet thrive, to recover from the harm that was done by commercial whaling. And then imagination immediately comes in when you enter the world of data. You know, one hydrophone, one little tiny hydrophone, collects two terabytes of data in a single month, 24 terabytes in a year. One little instrument. And so here you are, you’ve got this year of data, a mountain of data; what do you do with it? How do you begin to sift through all that data to find the sounds produced by different species? And each species can produce different sounds. How do you sift through that to understand what species are living here in this region, in this biologically rich, bio-diverse habitat? Who’s here? When are they here? What are they doing? It takes a lot of imagination to apply analytical tools to a mountain of data and to come out with understanding. Lots of imagination. I guess what I’d also say is that we’re never just working with sound data. We get other types of information from satellites that orbit the Earth and look down at the environment and tell us, how is it changing from year to year, from day to day? And how did the animals respond to that?

And then I think, very briefly, that it takes a lot of imagination to translate from the language of science into the language that everyone understands. Science is full of its terminology and its complexities. But your job when you are taking that information into education is to use your imagination to create communication that people not only understand, but in a way that allows them to connect with ocean life. If people don’t have any awareness, science can bring them awareness. But if people don’t feel any connection, why should they care about that (species or topic)? Well, then it’s hard for them to understand why we should work for conservation to protect these beautiful ocean environments and species. There is imagination and learning to help people connect.

Melisa
Could you tell us one thing you would change in your career life? What would you say to your younger self?

John
What would I change in my career life? I think I would have taken the pressure off myself at a younger age, because as a young professional scientist I was a little bit, how do I put it, anxious or nervous that I was never doing enough. That my work was not good enough.

Melisa
You’re a perfectionist.

John
Yes. Thank you. You are right. And in that way, I think I caused a little bit of suffering for myself needlessly. That also caused me to not communicate as well as I could have about what I want to do with my career, how I value my contributions. Instead, I looked to other people to assure me that I was contributing enough. I think what I would have said to my younger self is: Relax, have confidence that this path that you chose is right for you and that people value your contributions and enjoy your work. Don’t worry so much about what you’re doing. Just focus on making a meaningful contribution, and that’s enough.

.

Melisa
Talking to John Ryan was illuminating. Since his way of thought of ocean and biology is so holistic, I realize that every action I make gives a birth to new consequences over animals in the ocean, especially our noise pollution turning to pressure on these animals. Also, he likes educating people to make a connection between these species and us so that we have a motivation to save the planet and have empathy.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Jacqueline Buskop
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jacqueline Buskop, a Longitude fellow from Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Welcome to our ongoing series on imagination, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology! In this series, we spoke with members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Eden Zang, research specialist at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, located on the island of Maui. She is a contractor through a company called Lynker Technologies since 2018.

As an environmental science student, I was curious about the deployment of underwater technology and its recovery in a harsh seawater environment. We started our conversation with a discussion of the SanctSound project and how her work in the Hawaiian Islands is different from other marine sanctuaries.

.

Eden Zang
The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries has sanctuaries all over the US, from Florida all the way to American Samoa. We fall right in the middle of the Pacific. So we’re like underwater national parks, and at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary we are a single species sanctuary, which is unique that we focus on the humpback whale and their habitat here in the Hawaiian Islands. One particular project that I’ve been involved in since 2018 is a project that’s called SanctSound. This project focuses on understanding and characterizing the soundscapes, which is basically every sound that is in an environment, but the categorizing this so that we have these baseline understandings of what’s going on in our sanctuaries. This involves seven different sanctuaries around the US, as well as one Marine National Monument here in the Pacific.

Jacqueline
Wow, that’s really cool. How does your work at this sanctuary differ from the other sanctuaries or other locations?

Eden
Our sanctuary is focused on a single species, the humpback whale, specifically the North Pacific population of humpback whales, whereas another sanctuary might focus on iconic reefs or more of an ecosystem-based management. Previously I have focused on different marine mammals, different animals in the marine environment, including invertebrates all the way up to this charismatic megafauna. So it’s been really great to hone in on this and really get to know the species. They’re really an interesting one, sometimes people can say, oh, you know, we know a lot about humpback whales, or they’re pretty common or whatever. But you know, I think they’re pretty mysterious species, and we’re always learning something new. It’s kind of like, the more you know, the less you know.

Jacqueline
I noticed visiting the sanctuary’s website, there’s a blurb on the front page about the intersection of ocean stewardship and Hawaiian culture. Since you’re in such a unique location, could you describe what it means to be an ocean steward and how the sanctuary coexists with indigenous Hawaiian heritage?

Eden
Yes, that’s a great question. We’re working to protect not only ocean resources, areas of important scientific study, but also these important heritage and cultural sites. And here in the Hawaiian Islands, we do have a very unique situation where we do have up in the Marine National Monument very significant cultural sites, here in the main Hawaiian Islands as well. So it’s really important that we not only reach out to indigenous people to understand the history and but also understand the stewardship that their ancestors and they currently are doing to work to protect the resources. So there’s a lot to be learned from indigenous cultures, not only from a historical point, but also understanding the land and the ocean, and here in Hawaii that’s all connected. You know, there’s a very big connection between what we call mauka, which is the mountain, to makai, which is the ocean.

Jacqueline
Indigenous cultures are such a huge part of the Hawaiian Islands and hold a significant impact. You could say the same for geological impacts to the island too. The Hawaiian Islands are a volcanic hotspot chain, and the marine sanctuary is close to the summit of a massive undersea volcanic mountain range. Eden, has volcanism affected your work in Hawaii since you’ve been there?

Eden
Yeah, that’s really interesting, because while we focus on other aspects in our research department, one of the main things that we do focus on is underwater acoustics. One of the biggest things and that introduces sound into any marine environment is what we call geophony. So naturally occurring sounds, which often are seismic events or can be volcanic events, and so that is something that can be heard on our recorders here. So fortunately, none of our recorders have ever been covered by underwater explosions. That would be pretty deep. But we’re on the other side of the island there. But other than just having it introduced into the soundscape hasn’t affected it too much.

Jacqueline
Obviously the whales are one of those players in the soundscape. What else do you guys hear in those recordings?

Eden
When we look at a soundscape, there’s three main things that we’re listening to. We’re listening to the geophony, like I mentioned, so naturally occurring sounds, either from seismic events or things like that, which also includes physical processes like rain, winds, waves, and then the biophony. So that’s where the humpback whales fall into. So you’re hearing different whale species, different dolphin species, different fish that do make sound in the underwater environment. And then of course humans. We are in the marine environment as well and we’re introducing sounds. We have things like boat noise, vessel noise, you know, scuba bubbles, all of those different things we can hear in our underwater recorders.

Jacqueline
Could you summarize your current role and how you overcome any challenges?

Eden
I’m mostly focused on fieldwork and data analysis. Fieldwork is just basically categorized as going out and doing the data collection. So a lot of our data collection includes going out on our vessel, which is called the research vessel Kohala. We do local work around the island of Maui, and we do things like vessel surveys to count humpback whales. We do deployments to deploy our underwater acoustic mooring packages. Then once we get all of that data back, we are analyzing that data and interpreting it and figuring out what it all means. I would definitely say of course, fieldwork is pretty fun. And it is one of my favorite things to do because you get to see these animals in their natural environment and just observe, that’s what we’re doing out there. We’re not trying to alter their behavior at all, but we’re trying to just observe and understand what they’re doing. And I think it’s just such a unique thing to be able to watch these animals. And they’re so unique from any other place that I’ve seen humpback whales. Hawaii is just very different in the way- the numbers of them, the density of these animals, and so to be able to see it in such high numbers is really, really exciting and really cool. And it never gets old.

Jacqueline
You mentioned that technology and data analysis are a huge part of what you do. How has your relationship with technology and data analysis changed throughout the years?

Eden
It’s really interesting because there are different opportunities out there, especially with machine learning. That’s something that I don’t know a whole lot about, but other people do and have reached out to us. And so one particular partnership is with Google. They were working with another office of NOAA, another line office. They were looking at doing an automatic analysis detector of humpback whales in a particular area where it’s not as high-density as the Hawaiian Islands. But what was really interesting is we were able to then work with Google, train the model to then work on our data, which has a really high density in animals. So that’s been really interesting to be able to work with external folks to lean on their expertise to help us in our jobs.

Jacqueline
Very cool. Machine learning has all sorts of applications and I feel like every day I learn about a new one. So applications to cetology, which for our listeners is the study of whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

Could you tell me a little bit about how the technology is deployed so you can collect data?

Eden
For our acoustic mooring packages, what we do is we send down an instrument on a temporary anchor. And it’s then attached to an acoustic release, which is then attached to some line with the acoustic recorder on that, and then a float, a very heavy-duty float. So it has a lot of tension and it allows the package to sit vertically in the water column. And we can deploy these for up to six months, eight months at a time. And, in fact, in some of our deployments, they’re out there for a year. They’re not necessarily recording that long, but we don’t have the ability to go recover them because of the remoteness of the location, which is in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. But when we do recover them, what we do is we send a signal to the acoustic release, and then it just unscrews. And that float that has all that tension on that, once it unscrews, it just pops to the surface, and then we’re able to recover it. So we do actually have to physically recover these instruments to get the data from them. These acoustic recorders, they’re really handy because you can program them to record at different duty cycles. For the SanctSound project we were actually recording continuously, so 24/7. But for other areas like the national marine monument, we wanted to extend our recording time as much as possible. We had that on a 50% duty cycle. So recording 15 minutes every 30 minutes. So we were able to get quite a long period of recording, I think from October to- some of them were May, June timeframe.

Jacqueline
Have you ever had any difficulties recovering some of the tech from the water?

Eden
Oh, I would like to say no, but we have. It’s always scary when you send down several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment to the bottom of the ocean and cross your fingers that you get it back. Some things that can interfere with the recovery of an instrument can be biofouling. So if it gets biofouled, which is just organisms growing on different parts of the release, if it biofouls it enough, it won’t allow it to release. So that has happened before. Of course, sharks live in the ocean. And so sometimes sharks are very curious about our acoustic mooring packages. We suspect some of ours that have not been able to be recovered might have been chewed on a little bit by a shark and the float might have released from it. And so we can still talk to our moorings, we know they’re there, but we can’t get them back up, so in that case we might be able to schedule some technical divers to recover those. Sometimes the technology and everything isn’t as great as you want it to be to be able to recover it, but most of the time it works.

Jacqueline
From the data that you recover, do you plan to create an action plan?

Eden
So SanctSound, one of the big priorities for that was to create a repository for all of this data. Now that we have wrapped up this four years of data collection, anybody in the public can go to our website and look, and if they’re interested in particular sounds in their area, different data products, they can really go in there and delve in and explore what we discovered. So moving forward, we do want to continue some of that effort. And we’ll continue to archive our data nationally so that it is publicly accessible to other scientists, members of the public, whoever wants to access it. So not only was it interesting for us, and we had a purpose of characterizing the soundscapes in these regions, but we also want to make sure that it’s publicly accessible, and so that it’s out there for everyone to use.

Jacqueline
Accessibility is so important. I love the concept of democratization of science, and making it easily accessible for people who are outside of the fields to learn a little bit more.

Eden
Yeah, and it’s actually a great resource for grad students. I mention that, you know, for Longitude, since you do work with current students and students that have just graduated. If you don’t have resources for a project, but you’re very interested in a question regarding underwater noise, you can use this data and we can share the resources. There’s no use in recreating the wheel. If we have the data and you have the questions there, then you might as well use it. The ultimate goal in my eyes is that we’re protecting these areas, we’re learning more about these areas. We’re informing management. We’re informing the public. There’s no reason to, like you said, hold it close to the chest. It’s out there for everybody.

Jacqueline
What form is the data in?

Eden
So the data right and now is- you can get it in the raw format of just wav files. So it’s easily accessible that way, you can just download it and get it from the website that way or from the National Archive. And then also we have some other products that we worked on. So revisiting our discussion regarding technology, there was some effort for this project as well to standardize processing of the data. And so folks were able to create programs that helped us automate our analysis a little bit better. So for instance, a dolphin detector picking up whistles in the data set that we can then manually verify, or a vessel detector. There’s different products that came out of this that are publicly accessible as well. So lots on there to explore and to utilize.

Jacqueline
So Eden, I was curious, being from Arizona, what drew you to the field of Marine Science and to work specifically with humpback whales?

Eden
It’s really interesting, because it’s really come full circle for me. I was in Arizona working in nonprofit fundraising. I was established there. But I’ve always had this curiosity about the marine environment and about animals specifically. I don’t know what it was, but one time I was watching a documentary on the killer whales of New Zealand, and how they use cultural dissemination of hunting practices, and I was just so fascinated with it. And I kind of thought, now’s the time that if I’m really curious about this for me to go and explore this. And so I started to do some research. And I said, you know, Hawaii looks like a very interesting place. There’s the humpback whale song, a lot of animal behavior questions wrapped up in that. So I packed my bags, came with two suitcases and didn’t know anybody. And said, I give myself six months to try to make this happen.

My background is actually in communication. It’s not in science. So when I got out here, I started interning and volunteering wherever I could and taking any job that was involved in marine science. I didn’t start out with humpback whales. I actually started out working at our local aquarium, working with fish and invertebrates. But again, I said anything that was ever involved in marine science I would take. It took a while for me to get back full circle. So the humpback whales are what drew me to Hawaii, but I didn’t actually start to get to work with them specifically in a scientific role until 2018. So it was a lot of persistence and hard work to get there, and lots of jobs to be able to come full circle.

Jacqueline
I do have to ask, Eden, do you have a favorite humpback whale that frequents the sanctuary?

Eden
Oh, I can’t play favorites, right. And you know what, to be honest, there are so many that visit our waters. So I don’t necessarily have a particular favorite. But you know, one of my favorite things to do is take Fluke ID shots, and that’s how we actually identify individual whales. The fluke is the tail of the animal, so the underside is basically like a fingerprint. And so we can take a picture of that, and then it would be interesting- then we can go back into our catalog and then say, oh, you know, we saw, so and so, I won’t give them a name—Frank, let’s say, or something like that—and see that we’ve seen them year over year. So that is something that different researchers have focused on in the past. Another introduction of technology that has really helped researchers in the field is something called Happy Whale. It’s a database that you can then submit all of your Fluke IDs, and then it matches kind of using facial recognition, but for the fluke, to see where the matches are. So you can see if you know where your whale has been spotted by not only yourself, but other researchers or other members of the community. Anybody, if you’re out on a whale watch, can take a picture of a fluke and submit it to Happy Whale, then you can see where and if anybody has ever seen your whale before. So pretty cool.

Jacqueline
I wonder if anyone has reconstructed their tracks from location to location?

Eden
Yeah, actually Happy Whale will do that. And I also get alerts when a whale that I’ve submitted previously is seen again, I’ll get an alert to say oh, you know, it’s been spotted up in Alaska now, or it’s been spotted over in Mexico. And so it’s really interesting to have that history. So I always get excited when I see an email from Happy Whale in my inbox.

.

Jacqueline
Growing up, whales had a special place in my heart because of their familial nature and charisma. Speaking with Eden Zang gave insight into one of the most unique ways to study these charismatic creatures: soundscape ecology. She revealed the three main things that acoustic researchers listen to–geophony, biophony, and anthropophony, and explained the ups and downs of collecting this data in the field.

What I found to be most important is that the SanctSound project revolves around accessibility. The data collected by the SanctSound researchers is publicly available on their interactive portal, so anyone with an interest in acoustic data from varying marine environments can listen to our oceans.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript.  Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Laurel Chen 
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Laurel Chen, Longitude fellow from Rice University.

Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology!

In this series, we spoke with the members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Ms. Lindsey Peavey Reeves, a West Coast Region Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project Coordinator at National Marine Sanctuary Foundation in California.

As a fellow and biomedical engineer by training, I was interested to hear about the synergistic intersection between our work, which is grounded by high technicality. But I was also interested in hearing about what the SanctSound project was, and the impacts the humans and infrastructure had on the ocean. We started our conversation with a deeper dive into her current position, as well as what her role entailed.       

.

Lindsey Peavey Reeves
I am the sanctuary soundscape monitoring coordinator for the west coast of the United States. I work for the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, which is housed under NOAA, and I am on staff at the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. It’s a little complicated, but it’s through an MOU, a financial agreement that this government office has with the Sanctuary Foundation, which is hugely beneficial in lots of ways. One of those ways is that they can hire staff to do these specialized roles, take on these specialized roles, which is what I’m doing on the west coast. So I’m based in Santa Barbara, California, but I work really closely with all of the five sanctuaries on the west coast of the US, from the Canadian border, the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, down through California. So we have the greater Farallones sanctuary, the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and then Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. I work really closely with those five sanctuaries to monitor underwater sound in and around the sanctuary. We work with a really large network of partners to accomplish this, because it’s a really large undertaking. It’s hard for us to do it solely as one organization. So we work across a lot of different organizations. We had over 50 individuals that were a part of that project, over 20 different organizations, so that’s kind of the magnitude when I’m talking about partnerships. It’s quite large, both on the coming up with the resources to make it happen, but also the implementation of it as well.

But what do I do in particular? Mostly it is coordination. So I do jump on boats a lot, and do a lot of the field work myself. As I said, I’m based in Santa Barbara, California, so Channel Islands is in my backyard and easy for me to access and to help out with fieldwork. But some of those sanctuaries I mentioned are quite far away. And so what I do is work with the staff and the partners that are in those local areas and we coordinate the vessel time, getting all the gear in the right place at the right time in and out of the water, and just making sure that we’re trying to collect data as continuously as possible.

I also work with a team of analysts that are also scattered all around the west coast, and even beyond that. They are really focused on working with the data once it comes out of the water. We have all of these standardized procedures that we use across the entire national network of our sound monitoring project. Our west coast team of analysts uses those procedures to process the data and come up with standardized data products. So things like sound levels over time where we might tease out a specific sound source that we’re interested in, like humpback whale calls or fish chorusing, snapping shrimp sounds, things like that. I do a lot of the coordination of the fieldwork, data collection, and then the data processing. And then we also have this parallel process that we feed our data products in. That’s the archive of the raw data and the data products. And this is what makes this project really impactful because we have open access to our methods, but also our results.

One of the most challenging but rewarding things that I do is bridging the science that we’re producing to the management applications and how we’re actually going to solve some of these conservation problems. Some of that is producing peer reviewed publications or contributing to them, working with the academic community, and then some of that is really just working with our staff at the state and federal levels to try to better manage our marine protected areas and our protected resources.

Laurel
Thank you so much for that really comprehensive rundown, Lindsey. I was hearing you talk, I was just… I felt so empowered by how broad your work and this organization reaches. It seems to be not only science-related, but there’s a lot of social and governance-related things with it as well. So to me, that makes me really happy. I studied engineering in college but I really- this year was the only year where I actually got to branch out, take a few more humanities courses. It’s makes me really happy to hear what you are working on right now, and this bigger position and role really brings a lot of people together, a lot of people in different specialties to really create this richer understanding of something. And it’s open-access as well, which is something that I really think was super cool, because now everyone can access it if they want to learn more about not just SanctSound, but also the other projects that you’ve been working on too. So that’s super cool. You touched on this a little bit, but I was actually really curious to hear what you loved most about the SanctSound project.

Lindsey
Yeah, sure. One of the things I love about soundscape monitoring just as a discipline is that it’s holistic. You actually gave a good description of how it’s holistic, like our approach to it, with needing to work with people and building relationships and trust and expertise, as I’ve said, but from a scientific aspect I love that it’s holistic in that we’re looking at entire ecosystems and how they’re functioning. In our case, we’re doing stationary monitoring mostly, and so we’re looking really intensely at one place but over time. You know, we’re listening to all of the different sounds that are happening in concert. The biological sounds, fish, snapping shrimp, whales, all of the fun critters that we think about when we think of marine ecosystems, but also the biophysical sound that we might not think are noisy, but they actually can be quite noisy at times, like tides and currents, wind and waves, earthquakes, things like that. Hurricanes. So we’re listening to all of those things happening at the same time: rain storms passing by at the same time that dolphins are chatting it up. And then also anthropogenic sounds. So all of the things that humans are doing, all the human activities that are happening in these coastal areas, in our case in these national marine sanctuaries. We do have some remote ones, but on the west coast we have quite a few that have strongholds in the coastal regions. So we have military activities happening, we have vessel traffic, whether it’s large commercial tankers or fishing vessels, or recreational vessels, dive boats, things like that. Kayaks. I mean, all kinds of ways that we are accessing these spaces now. And so we’re able to listen to all of those things happening at the same time. I think that’s really powerful. And one of the things that I like most about this project, because we can really tease apart each one of those things individually, because we do have such amazing, really smart people working on this project that can do things like artificial intelligence, and use these automated techniques to draw out specific sound sources, if we just want to listen to killer whales, we can do that. So if an event happens, we can detect that, and so we can detect a disturbance to the ecosystem. I just love that we have that capability and that power in this holistic sampling approach.

I also think that underwater sound in general is very relatable to people. We use sound. Most people who are able to hear really value that sense, and they really relate to how important it is for an underwater organism to thrive and to really succeed in reproduction and communication and their social activities. So I think we have a real benefit with underwater sound and being able to translate what we’re learning and why it’s important to people. So I love that.

Laurel
Switching gears, how did you develop interest in this field, whether it be marine science or just soundscaping? What was your pathway that you traversed from point A all the way to today?

Lindsey
How much time do we have? [laughter] When I was in school, one of my basketball coaches was a science teacher. And she was one of my mentors. She suggested that I do some science camps over the summer. I was mostly doing sports camps. I was like, oh, that sounds fun, I’ll do something a little different. So she’s really the one who got me into this Marine Science Camp in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It’s called Science at Sea. You might be familiar with this organization, because now they’ve grown and they do college programs, and experiential learning programs, which was sort of my first experience doing that hands-on type of learning. I spent 10 days on the campus and then we spent 10 days on a schooner, a type of sailboat, putting everything that we had just learned in the classroom into practice. And so that was my first really like, Aha moment. There was a female oceanographer who was leading that part of our program, her name was Cheryl Peach. I’ll never forget her because I was always like, wait, you can get paid to explore the ocean and learn new things and go places people have never been before, and pull things up out of the ocean and just see what’s under there? It was just so like, Well, I want to do this, of course I want to do this. It was really empowering for me to see this professor being the person in charge on this boat and everyone following her lead. And so I was just like, I want to do that. This sounds cool. So that was my first time that I fell in love with marine science as a career. I really never lost that love for the whole science of the ocean and exploration. And so I pursued that in college.

After school, I moved to California. I didn’t know anybody, didn’t have a job at the time, but I moved to San Diego. I thought I wanted to pursue marine conservation but I wasn’t sure. Got some really awesome experience working in grassroots conservation, Community Conservation, and met some amazing people, from fishermen to community members to these amazing marine conservationists that are traveling the world. And that’s when I first started working with the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration. From then I went to Duke University and studied coastal environmental management. And that’s actually where I first started learning about bioacoustics. I got to jump on some Antarctic research programs where they were going down for two months at a time on these research vessels, and I was brought on to the project because I had spent so much time at sea at that point. I had a lot of experience doing visual observations, being able to spot different types of wildlife, whether turtles, birds, mammals, and then identify them. And that’s just one way that you can start doing population assessments. That’s why I was brought onto the project, but once I was there I was just a sponge and wanted to do everything. I started working with some of my colleagues on that project who were in bioacoustics. And so I really just dove headfirst and learned the ropes from them, and then just kind of fell in love with bioacoustics as well.

Laurel
Thank you so much. That was such a whirlwind but I really appreciate- you really trace this through everything and I think you were also able to do such a really cool project like Antarctica. That’s crazy! Segueing more into SanctSound as a project now, firstly I was wondering if you could summarize things in a few sentences to a layperson, and then also what would be your big take home message, or what is this driving significance of the project?

Lindsey
So SanctSound began in 2017, but we didn’t start actually putting sound recorders underwater until 2018 and 2019 in our sanctuary system in the United States. What the project aims to do is to monitor in as many locations as we can. In our case, we were able to monitor in 30 different stationary monitoring locations across the sanctuary system. So in US waters and territories, trying to establish baseline understanding of underwater soundscapes. We’re looking at the holistic soundscape, so all of these sounds that are happening at the same time. In our case, since we’re listening in 30 stationary locations, we want to establish baseline understanding in those locations. What’s the average sound levels? How noisy or quiet? Is it usually in the fall, in the spring, in the summer, in the winter? And what are the specific noise inputs that are common there? So maybe it’s common to have lots of biophysical sounds, lots of storms passing through, or different tidal flows, things like that. We want to understand the biologics that are normally there. And in some cases we have different animals that are migratory, so they might be present during some parts of the year and not during others. We want to understand what are those typical patterns of biological activity that we can record with our underwater microphones called hydrophones.

We are also at the same time recording temperature. So we are trying to understand the environmental conditions as well. And then again, we’re trying to understand what are the human inputs of sound? Because we want to have an understanding of, okay, what’s the current level of what we might consider noise pollution, what’s the current vessel activity, and some of our monitoring sites, they’re very near ports and busy harbors. And so we would expect to have the steady stream of vessel activity that we can record. We can also monitor vessels in other ways too, so we can integrate all of these different types of data that are coming in. And then we want to also understand more of the transient sounds, things that are only happening periodically, like maybe military testing that’s happening underwater. That’s the holistic sampling that we’re doing with SanctSound, and we’re trying to establish those baselines. So across a three year period in this case, we want to understand what is the typical or the average soundscape in these locations, particularly so we can understand disturbance, so if there’s an event that happens that would disrupt that average soundscape, we want to be able to understand that. 

I’ll give you a great example that everyone will be able to relate to, and that’s the COVID 19 pandemic. You know, COVID affected literally everything in our lives, but especially ship traffic. It rocked the international economy and it really influenced how goods were being moved by ships across these large waterways. We had an acoustic signature of that disruption in our records. We were able to record the reduction in noise input from vessels at these locations that typically would have the higher inputs of the vessel traffic noise.

Laurel
I think the example that you gave with COVID-19, I guess I learned today that COVID-19 did impact us, but also in another way towards sea life, ocean life. So that was super cool. I actually didn’t think of that being such an impactful use case, all of these soundscaping applications.

Lindsey
Yeah, COVID was quite a bummer for humans, but marine life has gotten a little reprieve. They’ve gotten a reprieve from the noise pollution.

Laurel
Yeah, for sure. Based on your experience with working in this field, or just in ocean science in general, what do you think really propels innovation in this field?

Lindsey
I think that it’s just- we have a lot of problems that we have to solve, and I think some of the problems are really big. It really requires a lot of creative and talented and smart people to come together to think outside of the box to come up with innovative ways to approach problems. We have a lot of what you would call “wicked problems” that don’t seem like they have a straightforward solution, or even any solution at all. But there really are ways to get win-win solutions. You know, maybe It’s not going to be one part of the puzzle is winning the whole game, it’s gonna be like a complete success story, but there’s ways that we can improve livelihoods and conservation status of species and people’s connection with the ocean, the climate situation, there’s ways that we can improve all of these things at the same time. That I think is what really inspires innovation, because it is a necessity. Yeah, we’d need to think outside of the box and approach things from a different angle.

Laurel
Absolutely. And I’m hoping that my generation hopefully has some good ideas in regards to all those issues, or the wicked issues, too, that you’ve mentioned. So I have lots of hope.

Lindsey
That innovation stuff we just talked about is what gives me a lot of hope, because I think we do have so many tools now that we can draw from to come up with those solutions to these wicked problems. I think that putting a lot of effort into sustainability is what really is interesting to me. So I do try to couch a lot of the things that I work on in my job, and in my role, into a larger vision of sustainability. And I know a lot of my peers do as well. So we are always on the same wavelength in that- but I’m always trying to think into the future, and how is this going to work towards this common sustainability goal that I think we have across sectors. Of course, economies want to be sustained just as much as we want to sustain ocean life and the health of our ecosystems. And so we have commonalities there. We have common ground. That’s been really motivating for me. Just always want to be working towards making things better for the next generation.

.

Laurel
Talking with Lindsey, I realized how far her work reached, from the Channel Islands in Santa Barbara, California, to the sanctuaries all along the Pacific West Coast, stretching even up to Canada. I was amazed to hear that ocean fieldwork amassed large amounts of data that were open access, which is hard to find these days. When Lindsey told me about how holistic soundscape monitoring was, from “snapping shrimp,” to biophysical sounds like wind and waves, tides and currents, to even sounds of human vessel activity, I became inspired by how applicable all this data is to humans. I also found it quite interesting that the COVID-19 pandemic even impacted the ocean, due to lower ship traffic, generating acoustic signatures for future soundscapers. As Lindsey mentioned, “we use sound,” and it’s “very relatable to people.” Harnessing technology to be able to translate underwater sound to the public, makes me hopeful that we can pay it forward for the next generation of explorers!

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript.  Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Jesse Annan van der Meulen
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jesse Annan van der Meulen, Longitude fellow from Rice University.

Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology!

In this series, we spoke with the members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Dr. Leila Hatch, research ecologist at NOAA.

As a fellow, I was especially interested to hear about how we are only on the verge of recording and understanding underwater soundscapes, and how much insight this is already bringing us into the world of animals below the sea as well as human impact on this soundscape. We started our conversation with a broader introduction to NOAA and how Dr. Hatch is positioned within this agency.

.

Leila Hatch

I work for the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is nicknamed NOAA. And in the United States, people tend to- like if I asked my neighbors what NOAA is, they say that’s where you get your National Weather Service data from. So every day when they look up whether it’s going to be cloudy, right, that’s how they think of NOAA. But of course, all the way through to if they live in a place where there’s a big hurricane, they think, who’s going to predict whether the storm is going to hit me, NOAA. And if they work offshore and they’re a fisherman, and they want to know if I go out today, am I going to get absolutely slammed by waves, they look at our oceanographic data and NOAA, right. So there is a- NOAA sits in our Department of Commerce which, once we start talking about all these more environmentally focused things—that is what I do—will start to be kind of questionable. Our National Parks Service is in the Department of the Interior. We do all kinds of protection of animals that are in these wildlife spaces, that’s all over in our Department of the Interior. And so folks think, well, logically all the stuff you do to protect sea animals, that should be over there too. But no, it’s in Department of Commerce. And that’s because it emerged initially from being the place that managed fisheries. And that was a business, right? That is commerce.

Inside NOAA, we have what’s called the wet side and the dry side. The dry side we consider to be all our weather services and satellites, and all of that information I talked about that’s associated with predicting climate, which is huge right now. And predicting and helping people with information about the environment, they need to make decisions. And then the wet side involves managing endangered species that live in the ocean, managing all the fisheries and making sure that those are sustainable. And then I work for the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, which is the analogous part that protects the places in the country that have been designated as special to protect everything that lives there.

Jesse
It’s a great explanation. How did you become involved in the SanctSound project specifically, and what is your role in it, and also more broadly, in NOAA?

Leila
I have been studying the effects of underwater sound—sound that is produced by people and the things we do offshore, and the effects that has on marine life—through my doctoral work and then on into my career. NOAA does not have responsibilities to reduce noise, just to go out there and control human sources of noise. I work in the parts of the agency that focus on the spaces, the places that are important to animals and marine life. So what I do for NOAA at an agency level, I partner with a few colleagues and we manage what’s called our agency level NOAA ocean noise strategy, which we developed and published in 2006, which is a way of wrapping our arms around the very many authorities we have across fisheries and areas and habitats and species. And collectively we’re seeking to reduce the effects of underwater noise on those species.

We have a very sort of synthetic science plan that underlies that, that is to better understand how animals are using sound to begin with, because the more we understand all of those uses, the better we can get at what it is animals need us to mitigate or reduce that is harmful. And we have a very broad monitoring strategy, which is to push us beyond monitoring this place in this way and then over here in this place, and this way. Some of which is sometimes needed, if you’re gonna build a wind farm right over there, or whatever it is, but broadly at its core, NOAA over decades needed a way of monitoring the way noise actually behaves, which is very large scale. So we produced a science plan that has this array of sensors underwater that are monitoring for a very long time. And we argued at the time that we put together the strategy that really sanctuaries should even have a finer resolution information that goes on. Again, this is long term monitoring that is focused in sanctuaries, and is underscoring how important the sound is to animals from a really wide range of taxonomic groups in these places. So we made that recommendation in 2016. That project was then funded in collaboration with the US Navy and myself, and the US Navy led from then on the sanctuary soundscape monitoring project. And that project is nicknamed SanctSound. It went from 2017 to this past spring, just about a month ago, when we finally pushed those products out.

Jesse
Wow. So just you basically just finished up with the project.

Leila
We did. It was a time-limited project. And our goal now is to definitely not stop, there’s still going to be monitoring going forward and in this national coordinated way.

Jesse
Okay. You have a ton of data to look at, analyze and…

Leila
300 terabytes.

Jesse
Wow, it’s hard to imagine how much that is.

Leila
Yeah, I tried to figure this out. You can fit 50 High Definition movies in one terabyte. So this is 300 terabytes. A very, very large part of this project was figuring that out. It was a really big push to just coordinate a data collection approach. But in terms of innovation, which is data management, how to get all of that data in one place in a way that you could compare it, and it would be there and anyone can download it and all of that.

Jesse
Okay. So you’ve briefly mentioned already that sound pollution is harmful to animals. Could you give a specific example of ways in which sound can harm animals in the sea?

Leila
The project underscored that there are several ways that recording underwater helps you better protect animals. And one of the really big ones is it helps you understand the interaction between humans sources of noise and the sound that animals need. We have several stories that we wrote, first of all little web stories that are all correlated on the portal that get into these different kinds of effects. 

Leila
I’ll give you an example off the coast of Massachusetts, here in the Northeast, in a place where a lot of low frequency animals use sound, predictably, during really important life functions every year. There are several stocks of endangered baleen whales that come here, and white whales, for example, there’s around 300 animals left. Every spring during their foraging time they often have their young with them. And they use their calls in order to keep a connection between mothers and calves. When the background noise gets increased by a lot of vessel presence, which we have in Stellwagen Bank, the radius, the distances over which they’re able to hear one another, are decreased. So inside the bay, you’ve made the hum a little bit louder for those animals that absolutely need to be here to feed on these copepod blooms that come in the spring, if you really think about what they are- the largest animals on earth feed on things that are some of the smallest on the planet in the ocean. So the only way that math works is that they evolved over a time period where those resources were predictably very high concentrations, and that they could basically hit a grocery store, right, that they knew where that grocery store was going to be, they could use the entire ocean basin as their place to look for grocery stores, but they needed to be able to find them. And they needed to be able to exploit them in a huge way in order to get the fat resources that they would need for the fasting periods that take place and the other parts of their life history. So all of that means that the magic of whales that migrate at those scales are the ability to find those resources. And if they start to become less predictable due to the effects of climate, the ability to exchange information with each other about where they are over very large scales, and the ability to keep track of other members of their population in general over very large scales, the ability to navigate using cues about the underwater environment. All of those are hugely based on their use of sound.

Jesse
I see. So for them sound is really the most important sense they have, is what it sounds like from what you’re saying. You know sight, I think, is the most important for us, but it’s not like that for animals in the ocean, that sounds like it …

Leila
That’s exactly right. And it’s a scale thing. So not only does the sound travel four times faster underwater than it does in air, so it’s more efficient as a means of communicating over very large scales. What’s very difficult about the doing this impact work is that we can theoretically assess the distance over which animals can project a signal under different noise conditions, but we can’t prove often that those full extents, those signals were always being used. We just know that we are encroaching on those full extents significantly, really reducing them in large steps. But it’s to do the science to really be able to prove that blue whale A is talking to Blue Whale B in a way that is providing information that is helping them make their living in the ocean. That’s tricky stuff. So we are often left with documenting the loss at scales that we know are relevant to the population, but that’s one of our trickier bits. Because there’s still a lot of magic to how whales show up where they need to show up to exploit these resources.

Jesse
So there are still many unknowns as well. Now you said that you’re an evolutionary biologist by training, how did you even get into this field? It’s a pretty specific field of study.

Leila
Very specific field of study. I think one of the easier things is easier parts of it, because I come from a landlocked, small town. I grew up in a rural place, and very active outdoors, very interested in animals, and on a farm and with a lot of animals. And that got combined with- my father is a musicologist. I loved music and hearing, always. And then it was a college town. A man moved there to work at the Cornell laboratory of Ornithology, which, that’s birds. However, he was supposed to run the bioacoustics research program. And that program became a place that I got really interested in working in in high school, and that I worked on for a long time, went away and did college, and then came back and did my PhD work as part of that bioacoustics research program, but also part of the broader university’s evolutionary biology program, because specifically I was interested in, can we use sound to track how whole populations of animals are related to one another, across the entire northern hemisphere? And if we know better how they’re related to another we’ll do a much better job managing them. At that time I was working on whales, and the International Whaling Commission is where they have to make decisions about how many of these animals are there in different groups over huge scales? And how are they related to one another? And what happens if you know we need to have a whale hunt over here? Is it really going to affect just this little population, because they’re sort of one thing to themselves, or are they interbreeding with this huge group over here? I was interested in how acoustics could give us a signature of that. That was also because I got really interested in policy and how we make decisions about the environment. I then left and worked in Washington DC in our Congress at the House of Representatives through a fellowship program. And then after that, I wanted to do this work working for government.

Jesse
It’s always so surprising what people end up doing. Would you have thought you’d be doing something like you do today maybe 30 years ago?

Leila
Yeah, you know, I mentor and talk to a lot of people now who are developing their careers and I honestly think mine is problematically linear. You know, for the oddness of what I do, I think it’s actually hard sometimes when I’m talking to people to answer that question, which is, yes, 30 years ago, I knew exactly what I would be doing. It looked like this, which is weird, right? I think a lot of people who I work with now have- because I now have a very broad portfolio actually, in terms of how I apply what I do. I work on how- where should we go with wind farms, or I work on, you know, is there something we could be doing on the vessel space? Can we work internationally better, and vessel noise control, making them quieter? So the day to day work I do right now is very general. But if you look at the path, it all does sort of go in a line, there’s not a whole lot of tangents. I think many people’s careers have lots of tangents. And they’re interesting, right?

Jesse
It is beautiful to hear examples of paths that are a bit more linear even though they are so… it’s such a special path that you took.

Leila
Thank you. You’re right. There’s a lot of luck that goes into linearity. But there’s also a lot of luck that goes into looking back and realize the path wasn’t clear, but you’re interested in where you got.

Jesse
Yeah, I’d also love to ask you if you have any visions for the future of the SanctSound project, or underwater sound research in general?

Leila
Oh, yes, I do. And it’s wonderful because when we started this project, again, it was a recommendation to go really deeply into what sanctuaries could mean for the next frontier. People should be able to go to their sanctuaries, listen to these places, download the information. The idea that we could really be a portal to people’s understanding of these places, either just from their experience or all the way to the science. That was that initial conception of access. Another way of understanding the beauty of these places and becoming more deeply invested in them.

Four years later, the program has had to marry that to all the other priorities of holding on to these places. And they had never had a standardized monitoring system. Period. Of anything. Taking on in the last year to consider what a transition will look like and to support it as much as we can. So I’m really pleased, I think we really do have a commitment to gather this information on a lot of our places and start to consider how it allows us to answer system-wide questions as well as being able to compare things apples to apples, so that you might say, if I have limited resources, where’s my threat the greatest? Or where’s the feasibility of an effect that I could have the greatest, and just trying to make those allocation decisions linked to a more comparable resource? So those are some of my dreams, keeping it going.

For me, my visions always are, how can we really affect human behavior? It’s such a funny thing to be an ecologist. But really, when you’re an ecologist, if you really are a conservation biologist, ultimately you’re an anthropologist more than anything else, because the effect we’re looking to have is on people and how they behave. For me, the next frontier will be continuing to work on the quieting front, and to embed it in emission control in general.

Jesse
So are you going to continue to work with certain partners, because I know that SanctSound- I read that they had quite a few partners listed as well in the project. Are they are very important?

Leila
They’re hugely important. To a certain degree, the list of partners we had in SanctSound, although it does include my colleagues at the US Navy, for example, the vast majority of them were partners in this: get the data out of the water all the way through the pipeline, get the data to people and analyze it along the way. So a lot of folks in the academic and data management space. Those will continue to be essential partners in the question asking and essential partners in data collection. But there’s a whole other suite of partners that are in place now but are likely to keep growing, that are in the other agencies and industry space, and other stakeholders who are non academic but who have a very clear vision for how the ocean should look in the future, as well as those who are not industrial but who are protective. So it’s those partnerships that are likely to be the ones that grow.

Jesse
So, I did prepare a little rapid fire five questions. They’re very easy, they’re not so serious.

Leila
Rapid fire means I have to keep myself short? I can do that.

Jesse
Yeah. What is your favorite marine animal?

Leila
Wales.

Jesse
What’s your favorite underwater sound?

Leila
Bearded seals.

Jesse
Bearded seals? Oh…what kind of sounds do they make?

Leila
Have you seen Star Wars? They used a lot of bearded seal sounds in Star Wars.

[sounds of bearded seals]

Jesse
Cool! What’s your least favorite underwater sound?

Leila
Probably air guns. I’m really not a fan of air guns.

Jesse
Makes sense. What’s your favorite ocean themed movie?

Leila
Finding Nemo? I have little kids. Oh, the octopus movie that just came out in the last couple of years. I am supposed to say Sonic Sea because I’m in it. I’ll say Sonic Sea too just so NRDC doesn’t get mad.

Jesse
Ok. Cool. Wow, you did a great job with the rapid fire.

Leila
I tried. I tried.

.

Jesse
So first of all, I’d like to thank Dr. Hatch for the insights she shared with us today. And after listening to her, I just felt inspired to tell a short story of my own that feels connected to this. Last summer, I was able to go to French Polynesia to do research in the fields of marine biology and ecology. And I experienced myself how many interesting things are happening in the ocean that we would never think of. There’s just so many intricacies going on, for example, the topic that I studied with Dr. Carsten Grupstra is the impact of feces of fish that live on coral reefs on coral reef health. And as many people pointed out to me when I told them about what I was doing, this is kind of a weird topic and you might think, oh, do we need to study this? Or is this important? And actually, we’re finding out that things like this, such weird and interesting things that are going on in the ocean and such weird interactions, can actually help us understand what’s going on underwater so much better. And the SanctSound project that Dr. Hatch was such a key player in, has also opened up so many new visions on the understanding of how animals communicate underwater, what kind of sounds we’re noticing underwater. It opened up a whole new world of understanding, really. And not only is this going to be able to help us better understand animals that live underwater, but it’s also going to help us understand how to better protect them. Sometimes we even learn things about humanity. So I just think that it’s really amazing how a project like this can lead to so many new insights on so many new areas. And I want to thank Dr. Hatch for doing the work that she does.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Jacqueline Buskop
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.  

For our new series prepare to dive in the ocean with us! We are continuing our Longitudes of Imagination conversations, and this time we are exploring underwater sound monitoring at the U.S. National Marine Sanctuaries.

I am Jacqueline Buskop, Longitude fellow and a recent graduate of Rice University with a masters in environmental analysis.

Alongside Longitude fellows Laurel Chen, Jesse van der Meulen, Melisa Acimis and Tony Zhou, we were thrilled to interview Lindsey Peavey Reeves, Leila Hatch, John Ryan, Samara Haver, and Eden Zang from the SanctSound project.  

Are you ready for a sneak peek of the upcoming episodes?  Leila Hatch, the project leader at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Lindsey Peavey Reeves, soundscape monitoring coordinator for the west coast marine sanctuaries, start with an introduction to how SanctSound project originated.

Leila Hatch
Broadly at its core, NOAA over decades, needed a way of monitoring the way noise actually behaves, which is very large scale. So we produced a science plan that has this array of sensors underwater that are monitoring for a very long time. And we argued at the time that we put together the strategy that really sanctuary should even have a finer resolution information that goes on, again, is long term monitoring that is focused in sanctuaries, and is underscoring how important the sound is to animals from a really wide range of taxonomic groups in these places. So we made that recommendation and in 2016, that project was then funded in collaboration with the US Navy and myself and the US Navy led from then on the sanctuary soundscape monitoring project. And that project is nicknamed SanctSound.

Lindsey Peavey Reeves
So SanctSound began in 2017 but we didn’t start actually putting sound recorders underwater until 2018 and 2019 in our sanctuary system in the United States. What the project aims to do is to monitor in as many locations as we can. And so in our case, we were able to monitor in 30 different stationary monitoring locations across the sanctuary system in US waters and territories, trying to establish baseline understanding of underwater soundscapes. We’re looking at the holistic soundscape. So all of the sounds that are happening at the same time.

Jacqueline
What are all the sounds in the ocean, you may wonder. Samara Haver, a postdoctoral scholar at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab speaks about them.

Samara Haver
Soundscapes are sounds from animals themselves and fish and shrimp, any biological creatures. And then there’s also sounds from the environment like wind and rain and ice, volcanoes, and then sounds from humans from cargo vessels from cruise ships from sonar, seismic air guns, anything that humans are doing that’s, that’s adding sound into an environment. And so because a lot of marine animals rely exclusively on sound, to communicate, to find food, to navigate, avoid predators, because the ocean is so dark and washes away scent, really sound is what these animals evolved to rely on. So when it’s too noisy from other sound sources, then it becomes a conservation issue for these animals because they’re not able to, to basically live out their life history and survive.

Jacqueline
Turns out, the nature of sound under water is much different than in the air. In one study it has been noted that sounds that originated at the Antarctic were heard all the way in the Bermudas!

John Ryan from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute speaks to Melisa about the role of sound in ocean life.

John Ryan
The importance of understanding ocean sound is that the ocean is a world of sound. It is a strange world to us, but one in which sound travels very powerfully, and travels far and it travels fast. And what that means is, ocean life has evolved to use sound in so many ways. So just by listening, we can learn so much about ocean life, about their life activities, communication, navigation, foraging, socialization, reproduction, we can hear it, it also means that we have to be careful about the noise we introduce to the ocean, because it can cause harm.

Melisa Acimis
Could you elaborate on the effects of sound in the ocean on mammals?

John Ryan
There are really four ways that our noise can have a negative impact on ocean animals. The first is interference with communication. It’s called masking. It’s like if you and I were trying to have this conversation, and someone was operating a jackhammer next to my chair, it would be really difficult for us to have that conversation and that in many cases, we are preventing them from communicating with one another. A second way, a second harmful effect of our noise is a behavioral disturbance like we can cause a population to move away from a source of noise, when in fact that population needs to be there in order to survive because their food resource is there. So we can cause them to be malnourished, for example. And then a third way that we can have a negative effect is to cause acute or chronic stress.

Jacqueline
Having just completed my environmental analysis studies at Rice, I was curious about what the Marine Sanctuaries had to offer in expanding our understanding of the soundscapes and how the recordings at each sanctuary differed. I spoke to Eden Zang from the Hawaiian Islands and then Lindsey expanded on the network they built.

Eden Zang
The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, has sanctuaries all over the US from Florida all the way to American Samoa, we fall right in the middle of the Pacific. So we’re like underwater national parks, and at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary, we are a single species sanctuary, which is unique, that we focus on the humpback whale and their habitat here in the Hawaiian Islands. This project focused on understanding and characterizing the soundscapes, which is basically you know, every sound that is kind of in an environment, but categorizing this so that we have these baseline understandings of what’s going on in our sanctuaries.

Lindsey Peavey Reeves
We work with a really large network of partners to accomplish this, because it’s a really large undertaking, so it’s hard for us to do it solely as one organization. So we work across a lot of different organizations. We had over 50 individuals that were a part of the projects, over 20 different organizations. So that’s kind of the magnitude when I’m talking about partnerships. It’s quite large, both on the coming up with the resources to make it happen, but also the implementation of it as well. And then I also work with a team of analysts that are also scattered all around the west coast and even beyond that, that are really focused on working with the data once it comes out of the water.

Jacqueline
The SanctSound project gathered 300 tetrabytes of data from almost 4 years of recording. As Eden shares, collecting the data was only the first phase of the action plan.

Eden Zang
So SanctSound, one of the big priorities for that was to create and you know, a repository for all of this data. Now that we have wrapped up this four years of data collection, anybody in the public can go to our website and look, and if they’re interested in particular sounds in their area, different data products, they can really go in there and delve in and explore what we discovered. So moving forward, we do want to continue some of that effort, and will continue to archive our data nationally, and so that it is publicly accessible to other scientists, members of the public, whoever wants to access it. So you know, not only was it interesting for us, and we had a purpose of characterizing the soundscapes in these regions, but we also want to make sure that it’s publicly accessible, and so that it’s out there for everyone to use.

Jacqueline
Accessibility of the data to the public makes this project even more interesting. John speaks about the role of imagination when studying the life of marine species, and also when trying to make sense of the data.

John Ryan
…imagination immediately comes in when you enter the world of data. It takes a lot of imagination to apply analytical tools to a mountain of data and to come out with understanding. I guess what I’d say is that we are never just working with sound data. We get other types of information from satellites that orbit the Earth and look down at the environment and tell us how is it changing from year to year, from day to day? And how did the animals respond to that?

And then I think very briefly, that it takes a lot of imagination to translate from the language of science into the language that everyone understands. Science is full of its terminology and its complexities. But your job when you are taking that information into education, is to use your imagination to create communication that people not only understand, but in a way that allows them to connect with ocean life.

Jacqueline
What is the hope for the future from the soundscape research? Tony and Samara speak about it.

Tony Zhou
Let’s say you get the data, you’ve analyzed it, what are some conclusions or maybe solutions, that maybe that’s a better word. What are some solutions that you’ve and your team, and maybe people in this field have come up with to reduce the noise because I don’t think vessels are going anywhere anytime soon. Like, I think they’re probably just gonna, you know, be in the ocean. And it seems like with ocean research, and the way that the world wants to expand cities, there’s probably going to be more things put into the water. So what are some solutions for how to like, declutter and remove this noise?

Samara Haver
First of all, you are exactly right. Ships are getting bigger and faster and we know that bigger and faster ships are noisier. So sound levels from vessels are increasing. And then we also know that animals are impacted by this. And so trying to figure out how to do something about it. Some of the projects that I’m working on are with national marine sanctuaries, and also with the National Park Service’s are interested in what kind of management actions might be appropriate for animal conservation. So like you said, vessels aren’t going away. But managers do have some tools like a voluntary vessel slowdowns, during certain times of the year when we know that sensitive species are present, or monitoring particular areas during certain times of the year.

Tony Zhou
But what is the ideal hope that these experiments kind of lead to eventually?

Samara Haver
… the cool thing about sound and ocean noise, as some people would describe it is that it’s not like other types of pollution. You know, if you just stop the sound source, it just goes away. There’s no cleanup, obviously, harm can be done. But it’s not like an oil spill where it can take, you know, decades to clean up the sound, it’s just this energy just dissipates. So a lot of focus on mitigating sound is looking at vessel technologies, how to make vessels quieter, and what needs to be done to potentially retrofit older vessels and designing newer vessels that are quieter and then looking at where vessels are moving in the ocean, or their particular shipping lanes or routes that intersect with important habitats for endangered or threatened species.

Jacqueline
Discovering the variety of sounds in the ocean and listening to them through the SanctSound portal has been an eye opener for all of us.  You can find the link (https://sanctsound.ioos.us) for it on our show notes and on Longitude.site.

Join us for the upcoming episodes to hear more about SanctSound and the roles of individuals who are turning ideas into action.

You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Subscribe to Longitude Sound Bytes on your podcast platform to make sure you don’t miss the stories and experiences we’ve prepared. You can also visit our website at Longitude.Site, for more information and content.

 

 

Tony Zhou
Hello, listeners. Welcome to our final episode of the Deep Dive with the Schmidt Ocean Institute series. Throughout the series, we’ve shared conversations with the leadership team at the Schmidt Ocean Institute. I am Tony Zhou, a Longitude Fellow at Yale University.

Blake Moya
And I’m Blake Moya, a Longitude fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. We hope you’ve enjoyed the series as much as we have. And in this episode, Tony and I will discuss a few highlights and topics that stood out to us.

Tony
We had the opportunity to interview six members of the Schmidt Ocean Institute team. I had the opportunity to interview Jyotika Virmani. Blake, you had interviewed Miss Corinne Bassin. And we also interviewed four other team members. And the collective understanding was that currently, we’re in a phase where the Schmidt Ocean Institute really is aimed at doing a lot of data collection.

Blake
Yeah, a lot of data collection that requires a huge amount of collaboration with the rest of the oceanographic community. And I think that was a big focus of a lot of the interviews as a part of the series, that bringing the whole community—the whole ocean mapping global team, as it were—together onto one task would be a great way to get it done, and get it done by 2030.

Tony
Right. And I think it really starts with the leadership, making that decision that, okay, this is the initiative that we want to follow through on and how are we going to go about it, and then reaching out to scientists and experts across the world to try to accomplish this task. What were some of your highlights that you had from your interview?

Blake
Well, I was actually gonna jump to one from Jade’s interview. One thing that Jade said in her episode that I think underlies a lot of all of the episodes together of the whole series is that where everyone in a community is driven by the same goal, but has a different perspective, it leads to a surplus of ideas that can propel innovation. And I think that that’s kind of the core of why collaboration helps something like this, like mapping the ocean floor, because as you have so many different people. You have your engineers, your data scientists, and teams from completely different sectors of the global oceanographic landscape, whether commercial or philanthropic, you really have so many different kinds of ideas that as a tinkerer is trying to assemble different ideas into something new. The more parts they have, the more they have to work with, the more interesting kind of things they can put together. And I think that that’s what we see with a lot of the technological aspects of Schmidt ocean Institute’s goals here.

Tony
Yeah, for sure. Having worked on data teams, and done some of grunt work of doing data collection, and probably the analysis part where the data needs to be formatted in a way that we can all use it as a collective team, rather than the data being siloed in individual research teams, because that’s the only way that we can actually come together and collaborate.

Blake
Yeah, when I worked at a neuroscience lab at the University of Texas at Dallas, my lab was actually part of a consortium for neuroimaging data, just like this consortium for seabed mapping data. And it was incredibly useful to have so much data that we didn’t have to go out and collect ourselves for use with testing some kinds of statistical models, or even just validating results of our own. Running an MRI machine is quite expensive, but I can guarantee you it’s nowhere near as expensive as taking a boat out to the middle of an ocean, no matter how small or large the boat is, I guarantee you, it’s quite an undertaking. And so to have people organized to do that in an efficient way is something very, very special for the scientific community that surrounds that data, just like it was for neuroscience.

Tony
Right. Absolutely. I think that’s why the mission at the Schmidt Ocean Institute is so special, because you have from the top down just people really interested in advancing this area of research. And not only are they wanting to improve their data collection, but they’re also improving their systems, as well as their equipment. And even, you know, we had to update that they now have a completely new ship. So now it’s called Falkor (too) and it can now handle the harsher climates in certain extreme areas of the ocean.

Blake
Yeah, and it’s really nice that Falkor (too) can handle those extreme climates. It means that now we’re saving another ship from having to do that, because we know that whatever Falkor (too) collects will become public. And so other people don’t have to be expending resources, there’s less waste in the community the more organized it becomes. And that’s why I think the word “community” is a better fit for what’s happening here, than the word “collaboration,” because while there is so much collaboration going on and it is so valuable, at the core of it, the motive of a project like this both relies on and constructs a community among the scientists who are studying the ocean. And among the people who depend on it, which I think it’s fair to say is everyone. We all depend on the ocean in some way or another, whether it’s because products that we need make their way across the ocean, or because we live on it, or we have to navigate over it. And I think really acknowledging that, you know, this is a planet we all live on. The ocean floor is a part of it. And it’s important to us all. So why shouldn’t we treat it as something that belongs to everyone? I think that community really might be a better word to summarize that principle than collaboration.

Tony
Right. One of the problems that they wanted to work on was building this community up, not only with industry and nonprofit organizations, but also academia, and just having everybody in this community working towards one mission-driven purpose. How would you approach that?

Blake
That’s why I chose Jade’s line there about everyone in the community having the same goal but a different perspective, is that a big challenge is not everyone has the same goal. I think one thing that was mentioned in multiple episodes was that commercial ships will have detailed maps over their trade routes, but there is no interest there. There’s no goal to map anything outside of the relevant route that they’ll traverse across. So it’s hard to actually align the community with that goal, because ships that are gonna travel on a fixed route are basically non-entities in the race to map the ocean floor. So I think it is building that sense of community about the importance of the ocean, fixing the ocean’s PR problem, that will get more people on board, get the program to see the value of this project and this pursuit and to join it.

Tony
I think the Schmidt Ocean Institute, they’re creating great initiatives to try to get people involved. They have their Artist Fellowship, and they also have opportunities where they allow different research teams to come aboard the Falkor and run their experiments, so that anyone who is interested in the ocean can become involved.

Blake
Yeah, it really does harken back to the Edge of Space series that we just finished airing, that it’s all about expanding a community and bringing down barriers to entry to science and discovery and innovation. That’s why I think projects like this are so special, I think it’s a word I might have used a few times, but there really is little else to describe it. And I think that one reason that I very much like these kinds of community-driven projects is because I work a lot with software. And one thing that I talked with Corinne about was the openness of software, open data, open source code. Corinne actually used the phrase “open world” in her vision of the future. I think that is an accurate view. Because the barriers to entry for computer science and software are a bit lower than the barriers to entry of space and the ocean. Just because the primary expense is getting a computer, which of course gets cheaper every year. Once you have that computer with all the open source code that’s around, it’s very easy to get involved with that community. And I think that fields of study with higher barriers are probably going to follow suit, and that is what we’re getting to see the crest of the wave of with the Edge of Space project, the IBM project, and with the Schmidt Ocean Institute here. So it is kind of interesting to get to see it firsthand. It is heartwarming to get to see barriers of entry for all kinds of people get pulled down.

Tony
Right. Especially for the marine biologist. In my interview with Jyotika, she was super enthusiastic about how discovering certain areas of the ocean allowed them to see marine life behave in ways that were completely unexpected, which challenged current theories. And this brings researchers back to the drawing board to rethink some of their theories on certain marine life. And who knows, I’m pretty sure as they continually map the ocean floor, they’re going to discover a lot more things and find a lot more species that we have no idea about.

Blake
And that’s the core of it. We’ve been talking about how, oh, we’re expanding access to this field. But what is this field all about? It’s the study of the ocean, it’s learning what’s beneath the waves, this actual discovery here is really the end result. The more and more people that are able to explore with this data out in the ocean, the more of these discoveries get to be shared, the more people get to be a part of them. And the more often these kinds of discoveries occur. So I think it really is the real goal, the end goal is not just on, let’s understand the ocean and the shape of the ocean floor and have a full map of it, but it’s also understanding the ocean as a whole and the life that’s down there. And what it means for us as other residents of Earth, what our neighbors down below are up to. It’s interesting how global the project gets. I think as someone who doesn’t go to the sea often—I’m from the swampy areas of the Gulf, not much the salty areas—but from someone who doesn’t really feel that tied to the ocean it is kind of crazy to remember like, yeah, that is most of the Earth’s surface.

Tony
Yeah, I know. It’s a lot to explore.

Blake
That’s the PR problem. But not everyone understands that implicitly.

Tony
Yeah. I think within the next decade, there’s going to be a huge explosion. Not only data, but just our understanding of our world. It’s going to be great.

Blake
Yeah. And we’ll get to say that we saw it coming, you heard it here first.

Tony
Yeah, at Longitude (dot site).

Blake
That brings us to the end of our episode in the Deep Dive with SOI series. Thank you all for listening.

Tony
We’re really grateful that the Schmidt Ocean Institute took time to let us learn more about their mission-driven purpose. So follow Longitude on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to make sure you don’t miss the release of the next Longitude Sound Bytes series. You can also visit our website, longitude dot site, s-i-t-e, for more information and content.

 

Tony Zhou
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hello listeners! Welcome to our latest episode of Deep Dive with the Schmidt Ocean Institute. I’m Tony Zhou, a Longitude fellow from Yale University. Throughout this series, we’ve spoken with the many incredible members of the Schmidt Ocean Institute — a nonprofit organization that conducts scientific marine expeditions. From business operations to data analytics, engineering, and robotics, the Schmidt Ocean Institute has joined the United Nations’ Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development: a global pledge of mapping the entire seabed by 2030.

Over the past decade, the Institute’s research vessel (Falkor) has mapped more than 1.25 million miles of the ocean floor, hosted more than 1,000 scientists on nearly 80 expeditions, and discovered countless new species and deep-sea bathymetry. Today, we are featuring conversational highlights I shared with Dr. Jyotika Virmani, the executive director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute. When not at the helm of advancing the frontiers of global marine research, Jyotika enjoys her ‘spare’ time as an award-winning Science Fiction film producer and writes a humorous informational tropical storm blog.

.

Jyotika Virmani
My role here is to oversee the whole enterprise, so not just the operations at sea, but we also have a very robust communications department as well. We’re really building up and developing our data work. We also work with scientists and bringing them on board the vessel, so there’s a lot of things that are going on. My role is to generally oversee all of the different moving parts and make sure it’s all moving in unison.

Tony
Would you be able to tell our listeners how you became involved with the Schmidt Ocean Institute, more or less where you started originally with your education, and the path that led you to where you are now?

Jyotika
I’m from the United Kingdom, and I actually grew up interested in space and astronomy. And living in the UK, one of our big topics of conversation is the weather, so I really got into the ocean through weather and climate and understanding our weather and climate system on the planet. And the ocean is a huge component of that. So I have a PhD in physical oceanography and a master’s in atmospheric science. So that’s really the two big components that control our weather and climate as far as the earth’s ecosystem is concerned, with the sun providing energy from outside. So with my PhD, I have done a few jobs since then. I was Associate Director for the Florida Institute of Oceanography, where we operated research vessels, as well as the Keys Marine Lab. I worked in the UK Met Office, which is a government entity, based in the UK. It’s like the National Weather Service in the US. So I’ve worked for government, and Florida Institute of Oceanography was very much academia. And then I worked also for an organization called XPRIZE, which is- we used to run large international competitions for development of technologies to really address some of the world’s grand challenges. And so I was involved in the ocean technology development projects, prizes, and competitions. And these are multimillion dollar competitions, and they’re global, they’re international. So I was involved in the Wendy Schmidt ocean health XPRIZE, which was to develop pH sensors. So teams from around the world competed about pH sensors to measure ocean acidification changes. We know the climate is changing, it’s impacting the ocean, we didn’t have the technology back then to easily measure those changes. And now we do. I also led the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, which was for teams to develop technology to map the sea floor quickly at scale. And now we’re on a track, along with a number of other partners around the world, towards a project called Seabed 2030, which means to map the sea floor by 2030 at a high resolution. Before we launched this competition, which was in 2015, the estimate was it would take two to 300 years to do this. So it’s really pushing that technology forward. That was a nonprofit, so I’ve had experience in different arenas. XPRIZE is my last job before I took this one.

Tony
Yeah, I saw the video of the talk that you gave for XPRIZE on YouTube.

Jyotika
Oh, okay.

Tony
Really interesting. The Longitude series, our podcast series, at least this season, we’ve been interviewing a lot of professionals in the field of oceanography and space. And there’s a lot of parallels between the tech that is needed to do the explorations in ocean and space. Would you say that ocean mapping is probably considered the biggest challenge right now in ocean research? Or are there others?

Jyotika
There are a few big challenges, and technology is certainly helping us to overcome them, because the ocean is so difficult to access and it’s not transparent. To me, mapping the sea floor is fundamental because when you have a map of a place, you have a fundamental understanding of where you are. And it grounds you, kind of, so you know where things are. But the other big challenge is, what’s the biodiversity in the ocean? The ocean encompasses about 95% of the living space on this planet. So if you imagine all the land masses, and the mountains and the forests and the rivers and everything above and all the atmosphere, that’s just 5% of this planet’s living space. And it’s just mind boggling to think of that. So there’s a lot of biodiversity we don’t really even know exists right now.

Tony
Right? So would you say the current data that we have might even be a little biased, because we haven’t explored the depths and the vastness of everything that’s out there in the ocean?

Jyotika
The current data that we have about the ocean is definitely biased. And if you look at history, it’s always been that way. In the old days, people used to think that there was absolutely nothing below the top 100 meters of the ocean, and then someone found something deeper. Technology allowed us to go deeper, and then they realized there’s actually an ecosystem down there. And we’ve got down to the sea floor, on average four and a half thousand meters below the sea surface level. But then the next question is, what’s underneath that as well? So yeah, we’re really very limited in our knowledge,

Tony
In addition to ocean mapping, what are some of the other projects that the Schmidt Ocean Institute is involved in?

Jyotika
We’re actually at an interesting phase at the Schmidt Ocean Institute. We’ve developed a new strategic framework since I came on board, and we’re also actually transitioning vessels. So the vessel that we were using for the last 10 or so years, the Falkor, we’re shifting from that vessel to a much larger vessel that we acquired in March of 2021, Falkor (too), so we’re going to be moving to that larger vessel. And the kind of work that we do, we invite scientists from around the world to come and bring their projects. We have a proposal process, review process. And it varies from mapping the sea floor to assessing the biodiversity. We’ve had projects that look at the sea surface layer using drones, even above water drones, to really use cameras to look at the sea surface layer and to look at harmful algal blooms. We’ve had scientists who look at hydrothermal vents, which is an entirely fascinating, different kind of ecosystem, and look at the chemical composition and health of the ocean as well. So it’s really a range of scientific activities, but we also support technology development. So for marine technology development, for those working in marine technology, to test new and innovative sensors, to test new and innovative technologies. Last year we tested some really, really interesting underwater technology that basically uses a laser light beam. And so jellyfish, for example, could swim through that, and you get like a 3D scan of what the composition of the jellyfish is. Part of the problem is, some of these creatures are so delicate, it’s hard to bring them to the surface without damaging them to really study them. And so being able to study things underwater in situ is really important.

Tony
That’s really cool. That kind of reminds me of like, holograms and body scans. So would you say then that you’re more involved in the science and the research side, or the financial side? Or do you balance both? And depending on that, what are some things that you consider when assembling effective teams for these projects to surround yourself with?

Jyotika
So the Schmidt Ocean Institute is more involved in science, pushing on the science and technology development. And critically, the open sharing of data is very important to our mission, because we believe the faster you can share data, the faster discoveries are made, and the faster action can be taken. So we offer this research vessel and high performance computing system. We have a very sophisticated underwater robot, all of that at no cost to scientists. And that’s where the philanthropy really comes in and supports that, because it’s quite expensive to go to sea. And in exchange, we ask that they make their data quickly available, openly available as fast as they can, in that spirit of open data sharing. So that’s the Schmidt Ocean Institute. Me personally, I look at the science, but I also look, of course, at the finance. I sometimes work with the communications team on messaging, or talk to data systems architects on data topics. So really I do a variety of things. We have partnerships and collaborations with other entities across the US as well as across the world. We’re a partner in the UN Decade, we’re actually an Ocean Decade Alliance member. And Wendy Schmidt is a patron of the ocean decade. The UN has designated this next decade, 2021 to 2030, as a decade of ocean science for sustainable development goals, so we’re a part of them. We’re a partner with Seabed 2030. We have a number of partnerships and collaborations.

Tony
Very cool. Very interesting. What are some things in the project that have been accomplished which you didn’t necessarily expect along the way?

Jyotika
So I joined right when the pandemic started. Before I joined, we had laid out the expeditions, brilliant people that work at Schmidt Ocean Institute had mapped out what 2020, what 2021 would look like as far as expeditions. And of course, with the pandemic, all of that changed. We were fortunate in that we were off the coast of Australia when it really came about. But one of the things that I worked on with the team here is to make sure that we continue to do safe operations at sea throughout the whole pandemic. So we continued operations, but it meant that we had to do a lot of pivots and changing of plans. So we actually stayed in Australia, and it was really great. We stumbled across the largest sea creature, a siphonophore. It’s about 45 to 50 meters in length. And so that was a serendipitous finding. In October of 2020, we had another surprise discovery. We were doing some systematic mapping off the coast of Northeast Australia, so Coral Sea, Great Barrier Reef region, and we found a new coral reef. It’s like, you know, a 500 meter tall coral reef. It’s pretty tall. So that was a new discovery, the first time something like that has been discovered in about 120 years in that region. And then the same week, we caught the first sighting of what’s called a Ram’s Horn Squid, Spirula, which has never been seen in the wild before, in underwater.

Tony
Is that a giant squid?

Jyotika
No, it’s not very big, but what’s remarkable is every time it has been captured, and it’s in captivity, it swims the other way round, every single time. And this is the first time scientists had seen it swim in its natural habitat. And it swims the other way. It’s like upside down. And so you know, quite literally, that one piece of video turned the squid science community on its head, turned them upside down, because all their theories of how the squid acts in the ocean—because that’s what they’ve seen in captivity—are kind of thrown out of the water really.

Tony
Oh, no.

Jyotika
So that was a surprise finding. Because the ocean is so vast, every time we go down there, there is always something amazing and new, or rarely seen out there.

Tony
Wow. Yeah, very cool. I think I love the water and the ocean, but also one of my biggest fears is being stranded out in the ocean because I would have no idea what’s underneath. I don’t know, is this maybe just a thought in my head.

Jyotika
That’s okay. There’s a word for fear of the oceans. It’s called thalassophobia. So because you can’t see it- that’s why, yeah.

Tony
Right. Yeah.

Jyotika
And we also have a wonderful Artist at Sea program.

Tony
Oh, right. Yeah, I saw that. You do. Would you mind explaining more about that?

Jyotika
Yeah. So the Artists at Sea Program is where we bring an artist on board to sail with the scientists so they can learn about the science that’s going on. They spend whatever amount of time, it could be a two-week cruise, it could be one month long, really learning and interpreting the science in their own way through art. And so we now have a collection of different pieces of art, ranging from paintings and photography to knitting to sound-based art. It’s a program that has been going on for a few years now. It’s a way of reaching audiences and reaching public who may not read the science, but would appreciate the art.

Tony
And to make it more accessible. Yeah, I think now there’s a lot of integration of both the humanities and sciences to try to blend both fields together in a lot of projects. So yeah, that’s very cool, because I do data science right now, but prior to that I studied music.

Jyotika
Oh, perfect.

Tony
It’s really cool to hear about these things. So what are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned over your career? It could be at the Schmidt Institute or anywhere else.

Jyotika
One of the things that I’ve faced repeatedly is perseverance. You start off thinking, this is how things are gonna go, and then something happens. And you shouldn’t get disheartened. You know, I’ve had some big setbacks, but just break down what the steps are. I think if you’re facing a mountain to climb, just break it down into small steps, and take the first, and take the next, and eventually you’ll get to the other side. For example, when I was doing my PhD, I lost my four or five years’ worth of data and work, and I had to kind of restart, not quite, but kind of. So it took me a long time to get my PhD, longer than some of my colleagues, but I did get it, and during the way, I learned so much more. I learned so much that it set me up for afterwards, where I came out of my PhD with all this additional experience and knowledge. So I could have quit after losing that many years of work through no fault of my own. So yes, when things look rough, just don’t panic. Take a deep breath and persevere.

Tony
Yeah, I totally agree. I think those points where you’re at a crossroad are such defining moments, because I personally think they set habits, they mentally set habits into your decision making, and how you will build as a person. It’s really generous of you to share that. So would you say these lessons that you’ve learned, a lot of them are through your own personal experiences? Or would you say you’ve also had the influence of mentors, or people in your life who have helped guide and navigate you?

Jyotika
Yeah, I’ve had a lot of good people surrounding me, especially during those times. For example, the PhD example I just gave, a lot of your audience is students. My PhD advisor was very much like, okay, here are some other options for you to think about and consider, and what do you think about this? Instead of saying, well, that’s it. It was really a collaborative, encouraging environment to keep moving forward. And another example is with the pandemic. That’s a recent example, where many research vessels, many vessels around the world were pulling into port in the early days to basically wait it out. And we instead pulled together the team and worked through it one day by day, there were some days where it was hour by hour that things were changing, but just working through it together with the same end goal, and persevere, and we found some great things in the ocean. So I’m glad we managed to do that.

Tony
So when you pull your team together, do you think you lead with big picture approaches, or are you more detail-oriented? Or little bit of both depending on the situation?

Jyotika
I think it’s both. I think you need to have a big picture that everyone’s aiming towards. But I think things can go awry if you don’t pay attention to the details.

Tony
Yeah. What would you say for students who are interested in working in this field, what are some important qualities or skills that they would have to either build towards or embody to be successful?

Jyotika
I think this is an amazing time to be in oceanography. I think this next 10 years with the ocean decade, and the focus on ocean sciences, means there’s a lot of energy and a lot of resources being put into oceanography. I think the other reason it’s great to be in oceanography right now is because of the technology. We’re undergoing this fourth industrial revolution, or technology revolution, if you like. And technology is allowing us to access the ocean. It’s kind of like exploring a new planet, right? It’s unknown. It’s new discoveries. And the technology is really allowing us to do that. So I think for those two reasons alone, it’s really great to be in oceanography at the moment. It’s a life of adventure, of travel, you get to see things that very few people on the planet really get to see and experience, and what you do is helping everyone. The ocean is such a large portion of our lives, what makes us all live on this planet. But then I think the other thing about oceans is it’s a very difficult place to work. And you made the analogy earlier between ocean and space. It’s a really difficult place to work. I think even if you work in oceanography to start with, there’s always other planets in the future as well.

Tony
Yeah, that’s very interesting to think about.

.

Tony
We hope you enjoyed these highlights as much as we did! Mapping the sea floor is a fundamental step that would lay the foundation for a new age of marine discovery. Examples such as how the Ram’s Horn Squid Spirula swims in the wild not only urges researchers to re-examine current theories of this animal, but build upon this mysterious world in the ocean.

Being in the context of a research university, I’m really grateful for how the exponential growth in computation power and data has provided researchers a dynamic edge in our analysis and overall decision-making. Industry 4.0 will no doubt usher in a wave of advancements such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and genomic editing, but it will be ocean exploration and research that builds towards our sustainable future.

.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and in the comments, or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. We would love to hear from you. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Blake Moya
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Blake Moya, Longitude fellow from the University of Texas at Austin. Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that are helping advance understanding of our oceans!

.

We spoke with the members of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which is a philanthropic foundation that is enabling scientific expeditions on their research vessel Falkor at no cost to the world’s scientists. As part of the UN’s Ocean Science Decade, they are also contributing to a worldwide effort in mapping the entire ocean floor by 2030.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Corinne Bassin, Data Solutions Architect at SOI. As a Statistics PhD student, I was interested to hear about how researchers handle the massive amounts of data collected so far out at sea. We started our conversation with her explanation of the kinds of data the research vessel Falkor collects.

.

Corinne Bassin
My academic background, way back when, is a mix of mathematics and oceanography, in general or science. So I have a bachelor’s in math, and a master’s in interdisciplinary marine science. Over my career, I’ve kind of straddled the areas that are more applied mathematics, and Earth Science, both in academic institutions as well as government. I’ve worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and I’ve also spent some time in the tech industry. And so now at Schmidt Ocean Institute, it kind of brings all these pieces together. For me, I’m the Data Solutions Architect. I’m basically working to help create a more standardized pipeline for the data we collect on our research vessel, and getting that data all the way out for students, scientists, anyone really. Open data to be used and made accessible.

Blake
So can you tell me a little bit about this research vessel and the kinds of data that you are cleaning and preparing?

Corinne
Sure, so the vessel that we’ve been using is the research vessel Falkor. And I’ve only been a part of Schmidt Ocean Institute for about nine months, though they have 10 years or more of data. So I’m still, as you can imagine, going through oceans of data, to get up to speed. The vessel has a variety of both Oceanographic and Atmospheric sensors that are always available when the ship is out, and also scientists may come aboard and bring additional sensors as well, or systems. We also have the Remote Operated Vehicle, Subastian, which is tethered to the vessel, but can go down 1000 meters and take video imagery, collect other samples, literally collect samples off of the ocean floor, collect water, and has sensors for getting things like temperature, salinity of the ocean, etc.

Blake
Wow. And that sounds like a lot of sophisticated machinery. So my first thought, as someone who also has to deal with data cleaning as a statistician, is, is the machinery sophisticated enough to come to you, or for the data to come to you in a pretty nice-looking form already? Or are there some common issues that come up?

Corinne
Right. I mean, whenever you’re collecting data, the sensors themselves generally have their own ways of spitting the data out. Most of these sensors have a variety of ways of putting data out, whether it’s in binary form, or just text data to files. We have some software and we’re working on building out more to interconnect these systems and make a more standardized pipeline, both to get the data out into files that are readable for both humans and computers, as well as putting them into databases and taking a step towards creating analysis-ready data.

Blake
Yeah, I worked for a time in neuroimaging, and the lab that I was a part of had joined a data-sharing consortium where all of the data that we collected and added to the database would have to be reformatted to match exactly what the guidelines for the Consortium’s data were, so that it’s more useful for other people.

Corinne
Right, and a lot of times each of these sensors may be taking data in different dimensions, and so you need to deal with- we haven’t even touched on the quality of the data itself. But just getting it onto more standardized time and distance and depth dimensions so that you can use some of the data together. But initially, you also just have to make sure that all the sensors are putting data out, and they haven’t turned off or run into other issues, or are running outside of their calibration or accuracy standards. So there are a lot of steps involved for sure to get there.

Blake
I believe, if I understand correctly, you have a bit of a knack for data visualization, a bit of an interest for it.

Corinne
Yeah, I love data visualization.

Blake
I do too. And I think that there’s a really hard balance to strike between what is easy for a machine to read and communicate, what’s easy to transfer between different computers, and then what’s easy to communicate from the computer to the person on the receiving end of the information. So do you want to talk a bit about how you tackle those kinds of issues, and balancing the communication of what I imagine is very high dimensional, very precise data?

Corinne
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I see those two as pretty separate pieces. In some ways, although there’s a lot of steps involved in making data flow through a pipeline, and standardizing it, there’s a point where you can say, okay, here is how we are going to standardize the data and make it machine readable. Or you can create an API or say that you’re going to put the data into a JSON or CSV or some kind of format, and you’re going to let other computers know that this is the format, and this is how they get the data. So although that’s challenging to do, you get to specify it. When you’re dealing with humans, even when you think you’ve created something that’s clear, you never know how people are going to interpret it. A computer, you understand how it’s going to interpret it, but people you don’t. So when it comes to visualizing for actual humans, there’s a lot of different things that go into play. I mean, obviously thinking about who is your audience? And what is their use case? Whether it’s someone who’s more technically advanced, or a student, or a policy manager? But also what do they want out of it? And then also, what are you trying to get across? Sometimes we make data visualizations to bring someone into the data to explore and not necessarily to make a point, but maybe just to view and be pulled in by the data versus telling a specific story. People oftentimes think, well, I have this data, this is the kind of graph I can make with it. But realistically you need to think about not just what you have, but what are the questions? What’s the story? Is there a story? It basically becomes a journal article in and of itself.

Blake
Yeah. And I think one large thing, too, though, is you do want to first get people to want to get more involved, especially if it goes to a lay audience, right? To build interest in something like seafloor mapping, you first want people to want to read more about what’s happening. And I think the visualization serves a huge role in actually sparking the initial interest into reading about what is ultimately a bunch of really large spreadsheets.

Corinne
Absolutely. And I think a lot of people will underestimate the really simple pieces of beauty when it comes to data visualization. But thinking about fonts and colors, and whether or not someone is going to be colorblind, or how it’s going to affect them, is a really big step in getting someone to continue to read or look at that data visualization. I think especially in the sciences, earlier in my career, and until recently, a lot of times that wasn’t given as much weight as it should have been in terms of creating some of these visualizations. We would say, well, it’s just for science. But each of these pieces are important, and how even subconsciously you take in the data.

Blake
Yeah, as a statistician I think the whole science comes down to, you have a bunch of data that is not interpretable to humans and you have to get it into a human digestible format. People choose different ways about what the important numbers, the important statistics are to communicate, what the good graphs are to communicate. But the end goal of science as a whole—I might be biased, because I’m a statistician—is to get that communication of what has been discovered or what has been collected by these machines or these vessels.

Corinne
Something else that’s been interesting in the last few years that’s really happened in our larger society with data visualization is that we’re starting to have a more informed audience in terms of data visualizations, especially because of COVID. Prior to COVID, you didn’t see nearly the amount of graphs and maps and things that now are taken for granted, so you don’t need to necessarily explain what the axes are and what they mean. And just having some of this general basic knowledge really changes what we’re able to do with our audience.

Blake
Yeah, the discussion of log scale on graphs at the beginning of the pandemic was a huge one.

Corinne
Right. Exactly.

Blake
Also, this is just a technical question for myself, what programs or what software do you use to generate your visualizations?

Corinne
Yeah, great question. It depends, is the answer. And new things are coming out all the time, and it’s getting a lot easier. I very much used to work a lot with just hand coding in D3, which is a JavaScript library for visualization. Even the original creator of D3 has now moved on to make it simpler to use D3. So it’s getting easier and easier. I am a Python and JavaScript programmer. So there’s a variety of tools available in Python as well, like Bouquet. But sometimes I do things simply in Google Sheets. It just depends. It depends what I’m trying to do.

Blake
So I know that you had given me a disclaimer about your involvement on the Seabed 2030 project, but if you can, would you share what you know about Seabed 2030?

Corinne
Sure. Generally, Seabed 2030 is working as a consortium I think, but with a variety of groups involved, to try and map the symmetry of the ocean by 2030. Less than 20% of the ocean floor is currently mapped. It’s crazy to think about that when you look at how much we know about Mars, really through a combination of both institutions and academic organizations, but even individuals with vessels who might have systems on their vessel for mapping bathymetry, trying to process all of that data and make it available for a variety of uses to move science forward.

Blake
And so the data that you work with of the collection from Falkor and Subastian, not bathymetry?

Corinne
We do have, no, we do- we are definitely part of the Seabed 2030 project. We collect bathymetric data from the RV Falkor, and it is very large data in terms of how many bytes you collect, and it needs to be cleaned and processed, which is a challenge. But we work with other partners who are very good at that, to process it and then put it out into public repositories and send it off to Seabed 2030 as part of that project as well.

Blake
And maybe a question with the silly source that I just thought of, but I imagine while all this data is being collected on the vessel, it’s probably difficult to wirelessly transmit it back to land. So is it wirelessly transmitted? Or is it that it travels by sneakernet? And somebody just walks on the boat and grabs the drive and walks it back?

Corinne
Yeah, this is specifically a problem with bathymetric data because it is very large, but really all of our data. All the data collected, some of it is small, and you could send it wirelessly potentially. Not that long ago it was very common, and still is pretty common, for the data collected on oceanographic research vessels to just be put onto a hard drive. And then once you got to shore, the hard drive is walked off the vessel and sent somewhere. We’re currently working on strategies to make that happen more livestream, especially with new satellite technologies that are coming out. But we’re definitely way in the early stages. We currently use a combination of it. Sometimes we’re able to get some data off the ship wirelessly, and other times we use a system that brings it off the boat on a type of hard drive, but then is put up directly into the cloud, as opposed to handing it to someone. It’s a little bit of everything at the moment. But the amount of data collection and the ability to connect to the cloud when you’re far off on the ocean is an issue.

Blake
I realize now how much I take cloud-based technology for granted because it’s been so long since I’ve needed to actually use a thumb drive. But I remember when people first started talking about- I was like, the cloud, where is the cloud? I don’t know if I trust it. And now it’s pretty much everywhere except for, I guess, in the middle of the ocean.

Corinne
Yeah, it’s interesting, because one of the issues now is that most data architecture systems, or companies that build things, are just trying to make it so simple. Oh, just use our cloud infrastructure. But we don’t always have access to that. And so we have to use a combination of older school methods of doing things, but also have it available to sync to the cloud when we can, or do a little bit of both. So sometimes organizations and businesses move forward quickly, but not everyone is able to take part in the systems they’re building.

Blake
Yeah, I remember hearing about the difficulty in bringing high speed internet to offshore oil rigs. Being from Houston, you know, they’re all out there, so you just hear a lot about it. But one of the things was that the people that are working on the rig, they need break time and you want them to have at least high enough internet to go FaceTime with people back home, but that was a struggle to get a network of that capability out only as far as just beyond the shelf. And even then these rigs aren’t speeding across the entire ocean. So it just leaves the problem of how difficult it really is to connect and network globally, not just overland, not just over static bodies, but even when you’re moving all the way around the globe.

Corinne
Right, exactly. And Schmidt Ocean Institute is definitely looking into new and different ways and really wants to push that ability and make it more possible, not just so that we can get data off the ship in real time, but also to allow people to be effectively on the ship that aren’t on the ship, to allow scientists or people from places that maybe wouldn’t ever have access to be able to really see and be a part of the live data streams. And it was something that I think was of interest before COVID. But again, COVID shows us why it’s so valuable to be able to do things like telepresence, and be able to have people in different places and be a part of that data.

Blake
Yeah, to actually use the global network we’ve been building for the last 30-40 years. One thing that we like to hit on in these interviews is what you think propels innovation, or how you think of new solutions to problems like, you know, mapping the ocean floor and going global with this consortium-style data effort. What you think drives these kinds of solutions to problems in people?

Corinne
Gosh, I don’t know that I have a good answer to that. I think right now, there’s a variety of different things going on in the world. But for me personally, what I’ve seen in the last, I don’t know, 10 years, is a pivot towards more of an open science, open data, open world kind of platform. Meaning that as anyone puts in all these resources to explore the ocean in these vast areas that we know actually very little about, that we’re not just saying, I’m the only one that’s gonna figure this out, but really, if one person goes and collects some data, that they understand that there’s more that can come from the value of sharing it and making it open, and allowing others to use it, especially 10 years down the line, 50 years down the line. It’s possible someone else will use that data in a way that we could have never foreseen. And so the more and more we collect, and the more and more we make open and accessible, the unseen value that we can collect from it down the road.

Blake
Yeah, I think that’s very true. It makes me think, again, I’d mentioned earlier, we’ve spent 30-40 years building up our internet architecture, the global network, and I remember hearing a long time ago that something like 60 to 70% of websites on the internet use this one little script that had been put out somewhere at the core of some CSS script a long time ago. And it’s just spread and proliferated, because they shared it. And it was useful. And now it’s everywhere, right? Which we can see the same throughout. Not just technology that we use for commerce and communication, but science and information knowledge as well. So what do you foresee? Or what do you hope to see as the direction of this kind of ocean science in the next four to five years, both through the communication and the technology?

Corinne
That’s a great question. I think that one, I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to do more as a community, to really bring the public into understanding the value of understanding the ocean, not just inherently, but for what it means for the earth and for climate, and that all these systems are highly interconnected. And I think we do that through a variety of visualization and storytelling. And also, like I said, making data and the science available in a way that it doesn’t feel like it’s held in a tall tower, a tower that is away from everyone. I think we’re finally turning in that direction. And I think it’s also really exciting to see that the up and coming students and new researchers that are coming into oceanography and Earth sciences in general, all have these mixed backgrounds, tend to have ability in computer science that never was there before. And I think we’re gonna see this huge power with the data and software and science moving forward.

Blake
All right, I had expected you to say, hoping for some data standardization to make things a little bit easier, but it’s good. I like the inspirational route, that is beautiful to hear.

Corinne
I’m a little jaded on data standardization, I think. I think it’s more likely we need to all just be aware of what our data actually is. And know that, you know what? Messy can be beautiful, too.

Blake
Yeah, you’re right, it’s actually less optimistic to look forward for the public understanding of the ocean as a whole, the opening up of science, than it is for people to just pick a standard and go for it.

.

Blake
My talk with Corinne helped me make an important connection between the sentiment about communication many data scientists share and the sentiment of openness in Corinne’s remark “open science, open data, open world.” Data science is primarily a communication problem: the communication of relevant insights from difficult-to-interpret data. I think people like Corinne and I, who enjoy being able to distill and deliver these insights, want to see them delivered far and wide because we enjoy and value sharing knowledge. It’s no wonder, then, that so many data scientists that I know are so interested in open source programs, open access data, and open access publications. And who can blame them? After hearing from Corinne just how much hard work and creativity goes into developing science like this, it’s no wonder she’ll enjoy seeing it shared by people across the world, who’ll soon be able to peer into the lowest depths of the oceans that surround us.

.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Chinenye Oguejiofor
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

My name is Chinenye Oguejiofor, a Longitude fellow from Tilburg University.

Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding of our oceans!

.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Mr. Errol Campbell, the Remotely Operated Vehicles Manager at Schmidt Ocean Institute, which is a philanthropic foundation that is enabling scientific expeditions on their research vessel at no cost to the world’s scientists. As part of the UN’s Ocean Science Decade, they are also contributing to a worldwide effort in mapping the entire seabed by 2030.        

As a global law student, I was interested to hear about the amount of work it takes to map the ocean floor and what kind of tasks you would have to accomplish to fulfill that goal.

.

Errol Campbell
I have been with Schmidt Ocean Institute for just over four years now. I’m in my fifth year with them after many years in other fields as an ROV manager, ROV pilot, technician, supervisor, superintendent, offshore manager, operations manager, etc. My previous time was spent either in the military or in the oil industry. So the split was roughly about 18 years in the military, 18 years in the oil industry, and laterally, my fifth year in science and research with Schmidt Ocean Institute.

Chinenye
That’s fascinating. Regarding Schmidt Ocean Institute, would you mind explaining what Schmidt Ocean Institute is and what an ROV manager’s job is?

Errol
Schmidt Ocean Institute is a philanthropic foundation, a marine science and research institute where we enable the world’s scientists to study what they want to study throughout the world’s oceans. It was founded and funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, where they purchased a vessel called the RV Falkor. And latterly, we have just bought just another vessel, which is named Falkor (Too). Currently the Falkor original, as we like to call it- both vessels are in Vigo, Spain. The new vessel was an R&M, oil and gas subsea construction vessel, currently in a shipyard in Vigo to be outfitted to become a science and research vessel. And the other vessel, the Falkor, has just finished all its science, and we brought it over to Vigo to go alongside Falkor (Too) to cross deck and transition all the equipment that we are taking from the original vessel on to the new vessel. So that’s what the vessels are doing at the moment.

We solicit proposals from the world’s leading scientists and we typically get about 300 a year. We have a committee and executive committee that reduce these proposals down to around about maybe 12-ish, that we will decide to support for that coming year. That is based on quite a few different things. It is based on geographical location. Typically we pick an area that we’re going to operate for that calendar year. Obviously it makes sense if, for example, the last couple of years we’ve been circumnavigating Australia, so the bulk of our scientists came from the Southeast Asia and Australia area. And the focuses we had identified for the last couple of years were the plastics, tsunami hazards, coral reefs, coral preservation, etc. So again, depending on the geographical location and the preferred field of study for that period will determine on what scientists we support. Once we decide who we’re going to support we will typically allocate them vessel time. So just for ease, say we pick 12 different science groups, then we would allocate a time slot for each group of scientists.

Chinenye
To study it?

Errol
Once a year. One will join in January and conduct science typically for a month. And then we’ll take them back in and bring on the next group and take them out. We also have provided whatever platforms they need to conduct their science on our vessel. And depending on what they’re studying, if they need the ROV, if they want the ROV, if they want all our science sensors, if they want to do mapping, if they want to take whatever kind of samples, we plan ahead of time, and we prepare accordingly to accommodate the relevant science group. We have two ROV’s. We have our ROV Subastian, which is a big work class ROV, typically the size of a big SUV, has robotic arms and sensors, the ability to take samples, whatever the samples may be. They may be rock samples, sediment samples, it could be gas, water, whatever samples, and obviously, we film everything as well in 4k video, and live stream most of our dives on YouTube.

Chinenye
Yes, I watched them! Some of your YouTube videos. It was very fascinating.

Errol
Yeah, it is really good. And that’s one of our goals, is to attract a larger audience and pass on our knowledge. And that is the key driver of the big deliverable from the science community, is that everything we do find has to be shared and accessible, so that’s one of the caveats to our supporting scientists. Okay, we will take you to where really want to go, we’ll enable you to do what you want to do, but you’ve got to share what you find.

Chinenye
I recently read an article that said that within the US specifically, since that is where SOI is based, people assume because scientists who study ocean mapping are doing this based off of taxpayers’ money, that all the information has to be shared. Would you say that this is the situation all around the world? Because, as far as I’m aware, as of 2017, that’s when ocean mapping became more of a phenomenon worldwide- would you say that it’s the case that around the world, they do tend to share the data that they get when mapping the ocean floors?

Errol
Yes, I would say. Obviously there’s been certain types of mapping or whoever done for self-interest in the commercial world. But I think the push for Seabed 2030 is bringing everyone together to share the data. So I can’t say for certain who pays for the data acquisition, but I think the trend now and the objective of this is for everyone to share their data.

Chinenye
Honestly I find it very interesting.

Errol
There’s many reasons you map the ocean floor, you know. So obviously, it’s great to map it to know what we’ve got and it gives us a knowledge of what’s where, and helps our studies or the world’s ocean, whether that be for whatever reason you’re studying it. The most exciting thing from an ROV perspective is we can identify areas of interest, because there’s so many areas, depends on your perspective on it, right? It makes us so much more efficient from a scientific perspective. If the area has been marked, for example, when it identifies hydrothermal vents or whatever, wheel falls or whatever it identifies, we can target dive with our ROVs much more efficiently, we can go straight to where we want to dive and dive, it means the ROV is not looking for something to dive on, you’re not wasting days and days of ROV time, vessel time, trying to find what you want to study. You know if the seabed has been marked for example, then you know exactly where you want to go.

Chinenye
So you enjoy having that certainty of knowing where your ROV is going?

Errol
Yeah, it just makes everything so much more efficient because you’ve taken a team of scientists offshore. The last thing you want to do is waste days and days looking for something you really want to be getting samples 24/7 if possible.

Chinenye
Understandable.

Errol
I would say the biggest highlight for me would be identifying targets of interest.

Chinenye
Speaking of your ROV management, as a Remotely Operated Vehicle manager, what would you say is the hardest part of your job?

Errol
People probably. There are several things. We’re quite fortunate in this situation with SOI, because I’ve got a very long experienced background and a lot of contacts in the ROV industry globally. I’m from Scotland. I’ve lived in America, lived in Singapore, have operated globally for many years. So I have a really good network. So that helps, but keeping good people in the pandemic impact has been a big challenge for us. Our ROV Subastian goes to four and a half thousand meters deep. So if you’re putting a high voltage and electronics and hydraulics and everything, four and a half thousand meters below the ocean, it’s always challenging. So it varies, really. Making sure you’ve got good, competent people, and then dealing with all the technical challenges, dealing with scientific challenges. There’s nothing really bad, but there’s lots of different challenges. There’s nothing that I dread and nothing that we can’t overcome. But, you know, there’s different challenges, different times, sometimes weather is a challenge, anything.

Chinenye
Well, as they say, teamwork makes the dream work. And you surely put that to practice.

Errol
Yeah, absolutely. If you listen to all our scientists, we do end the trip with briefs from all our science groups. And when you hear them, that’s one of the biggest things they say about SOI and the Falkor original, how good it was, and how accommodating it was, and how much of a team spirit there is. Everybody helps. If something breaks, every department will help to fix it, whether that’s the ROV technicians, whether we have to involve the engineers or the marine technicians. And so you’re right about the teamwork.

Chinenye
I really appreciate it. Because as technology keeps evolving, and as we’re moving on centuries, it seems that people keep relying more on machinery as compared to human beings. We can fix said machinery in the event that something goes wrong, so it is nice to see an initiative that focuses more on the core teamwork that helps make the machines run in the first place. Now in regards to how creative you can be on the job, I understand with being an ROV manager and working with the different types of scientists that you have, and the proposals that they bring in at the same time, is there any room for creativity in your research process? Or in your collection process as well?

Errol
Yeah. Always. But for most of the science we do, it can be repetitive. Some you’ve done before, whether it be using gas tights, or majors, or niskin bottles for water samplers, or rock boxes, core samplers, whatever. It can be repetitive, you know what I mean. But we’re always making things for the scientists and the scientists are always bringing new pieces to integrate onto our ROV, and there’s always room to make things better. And it’s just an ever-evolving process. If you bring something to put on the ROV tomorrow, and my team can look at that and say, it would be better if we did this, or if we did that, or whatever, then we’re always working together to enable the scientists to do what they need to do, and do it more efficiently.

Chinenye
So there’s always some sort of room for creativity with the different minds that come together to make this project a success.

Errol
Absolutely.

Chinenye
That’s always nice to hear.

Errol
Yeah. Again, typically, you’re well-prepared ahead of time. Because when we do this process of cruise planning, then we know. We have cruise calls, like six months out, three months out, a month out, so we’re really addressing all your questions in the months preceding up to your cruise, with a goal of being totally prepared. Although it does happen on the job, and always will, we try to be as best prepared as possible. Sometimes we’ll test things before the cruise. We’ve got engineers that take the drawings of whatever we’re trying to integrate, and we’ll have planned integration on to the ROV ahead of time so we’re not trying to figure it out and waste your time when you arrive.

Chinenye
With that in mind, what would you say exactly is, or if there is, a sort of formula to get the results that you intend to get? As you said, you have routine checks six months before the cruise, six months before the research itself is done. But for there to be room for creativity and imagination in garnering of your results, is there any formula to it, do you say? One person checks whether the ROV’s are working, another person checks where the other scientists are lined up, etc., and they assess whether the scientists have any creative ideas? Is there some sort of formula for it?

Errol
There is a process. A formula? I’m not so sure.

Chinenye
But a process instead of a formula.

Errol
The processes and procedures we have in place for everything, everybody’s working on it. We look at a science proposal, and then once we’ve got all that information, then many teams are working on it. The outreach media teams now are all working on how we’re going to live stream these. The ROV team are looped in and planning on integration sensors or whatever. The MTs, marine department, are looking at what their deliverables are from a mapping perspective, or a sample perspective, right up to the chief officer and the captain of the vessel. They’re involved in it, they know where they need to go, what they need to do. Are we transiting from A to B? Are we mapping this? You know what I mean?

Chinenye
Yes.

Errol
It’s a collective effort for sure, right from the Executive Director down to the people on the vessel. Everybody is involved, whether it’s- their chefs know that they need to cook for X amount of people. Everybody’s involved.

Chinenye
I think it’s very innovative. With innovation in mind, what would you foresee the future being for those who plan to map ocean floors? Are those within your field of work, whether it be for Schmidt Ocean Institution or any other group that seeks to map the ocean floor? Perhaps so as to reach the 2030 goal specifically.

Errol
Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think everybody who can needs to get involved in it. If you’re mapping from one vessel, you’re only mapping where you’re going, right? You can’t do anything else, you’re mapping where you’re going. There are other options. Whether you work in ASVs, and AUVs, and things like that, it could be expanding your footprint. They could be sent out on autonomous machines to mark X areas or wherever, and then rejoin you for the run. So maximizing potential I think has to be the way forward for everybody. Obviously it’s different for different organizations, but I think from our organization we will expand our remote footprint over the coming years and enhance our ability to map the seabed by more assets, such as ASV’s AUVs, and things like that.

Chinenye
It is my understanding that mapping the ocean for us is a very expensive endeavor to take on for any institution. It does seem like that would be a lot of work for anyone in the future, no matter what it is.

Errol
Yeah. But it’s like everything. Communication and collaboration is going to make it better. I think the commercial world needs to get more involved as well. For example, we have millions of vessels going all over the world every minute, every day. The more we can get involved, the more we can get mapping, the quicker we can attain our goal to map the seabed by 2030. Again, there’s areas that are more accessible than others, like, for example, can we involve the commercial industry? Everyone in all these shipping groups, whatever kind of vessels, can we get their buy-in to this? How do we get their buy-in? Because obviously, they are commercially driven and they want to get from A to B as quickly as possible, from a commercial perspective, so I don’t have the answers on how we can fully engage the commercial world. And then the other challenge is the more remote areas that- people don’t typically go and map these areas, right, there’s a huge cost involved, time, you got to have the assets to do it. So I think all of the like-minded institutions need to collaborate openly. For example, there’s no point in you going to the same place as me. So if we talk and I say, I’m going here, and you can say, Okay, well I’ll go there, you know, and-

Chinenye
Makes the work faster. Division of labor.

Errol
Yeah.

Chinenye
With your 18 plus years of experience, was there any set person, or were there a set of people, that helped you get to where you are today, with your background? Having gone to college and to where you are now, were there people that guided you along the path that you took?

Errol
Yeah, definitely. That’s like any work, any focus in life, any area of study. You’re always going to be working with people and learning from them. What we called back in the day, it was like journeyman, or tradesman, or whoever will take care of you for a certain period of time during your mentoring procession, and then you move on and you actually progress and become one of these mentors for the more junior people. So yeah, that happens everywhere, happens in the military, happens in the oil industry, it happens in science and research. That’s the case. You go in, you’re employed for this at the level and the skill sets that you have, and then you progress.

Chinenye
Slowly but surely, yes.

.

Chinenye
It is amazing to know that there are people out there who take it upon themselves to map the great ocean floor. One crucial thing that stuck with me from talking to Mr. Campbell is that there is always room for change. And if not, it just means you are happy with your finished product. Specifically when it comes to mapping the ocean floor, you know that there is so much that needs to be done, so much that needs to be accomplished, and at the end of the day sometimes your best really is all that you can do, which was really eye opening to hear, especially with the task as big as mapping the ocean floor. I hope that whoever hears this, and whoever gets to hear this interview, has an eye-opening experience just as I did and remembers that teamwork makes the dream work, and that working together can bring us much further than we ever thought we could.

.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.