Miles: I’m going to talk today about Ocean Science and Technology and spatial data acquisition
and application. So I start with the position that the ocean is the most important thing
everywhere. And you guys that aren’t studying the ocean aren’t studying the most important
thing. And we really need new approaches to understanding something that has been a long-held
mystery in the ecology of the globe. And we’re approaching this today with a new approach
that oceanography that hasn’t gone for and that is the cabled observations, the use of
ROVs, AUVs – things like that. So we’re advancing technologies in the observation
of the oceans. Some people might think the ocean is kind of boring and the sea floor,
but there are amazing opportunities for discovery in methane gasses, evasions, different species
– things that no one has ever seen or actually ever understood. Only 5% of the ocean has
actually been visited. So we’re doing that by starting a course program here at the UW
for undergraduates in Ocean, Science, and Technology. We’re building our own cabled
observatory off our dock. We are building sensors and learning about power and data
consumption for observations. We started this in Spring. We had our first class where students
actually built some of their own sensors from scratch using micro control processors, learning
about data consumption, buoyancy, and all of those things. And it worked. For the most
part, everything sort of, maybe worked. One of the technologies that we drive our students
towards is a way to make observations remotely. In oceanography, instead of using light for
observations, we use sound. So it’s acoustics. Acoustics is a fundamental part of it. That’s
why we focus on the use of sonar. We teach a course here where we’re teaching people
to operate and operate with multi-beam sonar systems. This is us in Lake Union over some
sunken vessels that are out there and we’re using those to get students excited about
surveying and the method in doing that. This is a very interesting science in that you’re
putting sound into the water column and you’re measuring the time per distance calculation
in the return based upon the angle off of the ship. So there’s a lot of science and math
behind doing this. As you improve your ability to put sound into the ocean and measure it,
you’re able to record high-resolution imagery and structural geology of the sea floor. This
is an example down around Tacoma where we’ve done this. You see a lot of other interesting
things on the sea floor. These are pipelines. That’s actually a dead body up there. There
are airplanes and sunken vessels. So you’re never really quite sure what you’ll see.
One of the advances that’s happening right now – it’s about three year old technology
– is looking at the back scatter in the water column. So not just looking at the sound
returned from the floor, but from things in the water column. These are methane gas evasions
off the sea floor. So you can think of this as a slice through the water column as the
ship progresses. You’re able to look at zooplankton, phytoplankton, sediment moons,
gas evasions, and things like this so you’re really beginning now to look at a 3-dimensional
mapping approach to the sea. These are gas fields, evasions off the floor, because we’re doing
this with multi-beam, we’re able to calculate the volume of the gas fields, the
response to the current and the wave motion, and the height of these columns. So here you
can see over a 1,000 liter gas balloon evading off the Washington coast about 1000 meter
depth so this almost reached the surface. This technology then lets us look into the
3-dimensional model of the ocean and correlate it with species. These are fish populations
hovering around methane gas evasions off the Washington coast. This is also a technology
to be able to take the water column back scatter data – so what’s occurring off the floor, capture
it through software, and then add those off-the-floor returns to the on-the-floor returns to produce
3-dimensional objects as a spatial data object in space. So this is typically represented
by the mast, or the railing, things like that, off of a sunken vessel. But clearly, this can also be used
as a 3-dimensional object of gas fields in space. So, in summary, oceans are important,
there are a lot of really interesting things to see out there, we do this through remote
observations spatially, and we’re training students right now about how to do that.