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.