The ocean is the engine that
drives our climate system,
storing tremendous heat and
moving energy around the globe.
To deepen their understanding of how
these systems work and
respond to global change.
Oceanographers need ships,
floating laboratories that give them access to
this vast reservoir of information.
You do have people that use
these giant climate models and ocean models,
but without data to
validate them, they'd be guesses.
A lot of the satellite work
can only see down
sometimes just a few
millimeters below the surface.
So you really have to be on a boat to
make measurements within the ocean interior.
There are still things and I think there will
always be things that we can
only measure from ships.
For me, I can't take a little copepod
from the ocean and do
an experiment sitting in my office.
I need to be out there on a ship.
Research vessels live out
their intended lifecycle and
eventually must be replaced.
As new technologies
emerge and as the needs of
the scientific community change
alongside the very ocean
they seek to understand.
The National Science Foundation set
out to meet these growing demands.
Funding the design and
construction of three ships
to forge the future of ocean science.
We need vessels with
all kinds of capabilities to reach
all of the world's oceans for
the different research topics.
The regional class research vessels,
like the three we're constructing now,
are intended primarily for
coastal environments,
the continental slope, the continental shelf.
And we're building three so we can support
oceanography needs on each of
the three main US coasts:
west, east, and Gulf of Mexico.
The regional class research
vessels are intended to
focus on coastal ocean research.
And there's really never
been a more critical time for that.
Climate change is real.
Climate change is being
caused by the buildup of
carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
This is warming the planet,
it's warming the oceans.
If we would like to be
able to understand this,
predict the trajectory of change.
There's never been a more important time
to study the oceans.
Each major US coast
to host one of these ships.
Oregon State University will
operate the first ship out of Newport, Oregon
with research spanning
the entire west coast up into Alaska.
The second will be managed by
the East Coast Oceanographic Consortium,
led by the University of Rhode Island.
And the final ship will be managed by
the Gulf Caribbean Oceanographic Consortium,
jointly led by the
University of Southern Mississippi
and Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.
We do have a fleet of vessels that
is available to all researchers in the US.
Even though you don't have to work at one
of the institutions as an operator,
if you get funded to go, then that's
the operator's job to support that research.
The United States Academic Fleet plans
for decades ahead,
renewing vessels not only to meet
the current needs of the science community,
but also to anticipate for the future.
The US Academic Research Fleet,
meaning of ships that are
available to do science on, are
managed by a consortium called
the University National Geographic
Laboratory System.
And that's a group of
organizations comprising
academic institutions that help make
these resources available to
scientists all over the country.
And so UNOLS was created
to coordinate and
make it a fleet
that's available to the academic community.
And they work with the federal agencies
to ensure that the right kind of
support is coming in, the right kind of
instrumentation is on the ship. And UNOLS
also projects to the future.
So we'll have ships that
are reaching their lifetime,
which might be 40 years or so.
And we need to be thinking about
replacing those ships.
The current research vessel fleet
that we have in
the Gulf of Mexico is aging
like it as in the rest of the country.
And we were running into the real possibility
that we were going to be without
that capacity any longer at a time after
the oil spill and hurricanes
and all these things that had
happened in recent history.
We knew that there was going to
be enough work in the future for
this regional class vessel in probably the
hardest working region of the United States.
There's really an increasing emphasis
on research and
our coastal oceans because they are
facing some serious problems.
And we need ships to go out and
sample to be able to study those problems.
The oceanographic research community
in the US has
been talking about the need for
these vessels for decades.
We had a conceptual design for
regional class ships that
needed to be what we call refreshed.
Oregon State University met
the requirements for leading such an effort.
And we were selected by
the National Science Foundation in
2012 and began the project in 2013.
The National Science Foundation
operates on a community-driven basis.
And so these were born
out of this community.
Keeping our fleet current is really important
for the competitiveness of US science.
It's also important to modernize the fleet
because we want to practice what we preach.
And modern vessels are
a lot more environmentally friendly.
They're much more fuel efficient.
And so that's a really important part
of keeping the fleet current.
We have those technologies now.
They have to be married with a ship that can
use them and use them
to their fullest purposes.
And when those two things come together,
the pace of scientific
discovery is going to explode.
And we expect that to fully
happened from all three of the regional
class vessels that are being built.
For these regional class research vessels
it'll give us a lot of
opportunities to go out to
the ocean and train the students.
Because they are the next generation scientists,
they need a platform to get trained to understand
the ocean and understand oceanography and marine
science. So that is important.
The future of ocean science in
the United States depends
on a vastly improved research fleet.
With these three ships,
we will be able to tackle some of
the most pressing issues
facing our planet today.
The RCRVs are critical
for this - state-of-the-art,
they're opening up
the opportunities to people
that have never really had
access to the oceans.
There's a whole cohort of students coming up
behind us trained in ocean systems,
trained in the issues that
our future generations are being faced with.
Let's look for those solutions and
progress into the future in a positive way.