Tony Zhou
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.