When I say deep sea exploration, you probably get images of intrepid
explorers climbing into deep sea submarines and putting on metal diving suits.
But much like drones have transformed the way we take to the skies,
it’s unmanned and autonomous vehicles that are leading the way in ocean exploration.
On one recent expedition to the bottom of the Pacific, the Lu’ukai ROV
discovered as many as 30 new species, including this gummy squirrel.
Technically a sea cucumber, not a squirrel, though.
I'm here at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and
this is the Avast lab.
Andy, hello!
Jaida, nice to see you.
It is so wonderful to meet you.
This place is incredible.
There's so much cool technology in here, so what is there that you can show me?
Yeah, well, we're standing in the vast building which is dedicated
to developing new types
of autonomous underwater vehicles, as well as associated sensors.
So we have a test tank here.
We've got a pressure test facility upstairs, we have a rapid prototyping.
So it's about speeding the process of building new tools.
So I see we've got a couple smaller instruments over here.
Would you like to tell us a little bit about them?
So this is a very small underwater robot.
This one has a camera here.
It's even got a little mechanical claw for grabbing onto things,
and then propellers and lights.
As much as I'd love to spend my time scuba diving on coral reefs, an ROV
like this can dive way deeper and stay underwater for much longer than I can.
Here's the same type of robot working at over 50 metres with the Howie Reef Ecology Lab.
It's helping them to describe and understand the unique, deep
or mesophotic reefs of the Coral Sea Marine Park near Australia.
In a sign of how far things have come, now we've got an Xbox controller.
That's fantastic.
I mean, I could use that. That's great. That’s awesome.
You could. You could.
How deep can some of these robots go?
This is a very shallow system intended to be used in a tank here.
And then we have a range of devices, vehicles
that have a whole suite, if you will, of depth capabilities.
This is our vehicle, Orpheus.
Unlike the robot we were looking at before, this vehicle can go
over seven miles down in the ocean, actually.
11,000 metres.
A quick reminder of what we're dealing with here:
Plants and scuba divers can't survive past a few hundred metres.
At 1000 metres it's total darkness.
No mammals have been found deeper than 3000 metres.
Orpheus can dive almost four times deeper than that.
It's designed to go
into the deepest part of the ocean, which is actually called the hadal zone.
And so this is typically associated with very deep parts of the sort of ocean basins
or in trenches, the greatest one of which is the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific.
But these trenches have basically been, virtually, unexplored.
So what kind of
sensors do you have on this to be able to explore?
How are they helping us discover different things about the hadal zone?
Think of it as a little bit of a pickup truck.
It's got propellers that allow it to fly,
if you will, once it gets close to the seafloor, as well as lights.
lt's got batteries on board. And then has a series of cameras that not only
document the environment, but actually also
plot the vehicle's movement across the seafloor.
So what's your favourite thing that you've been able to see with these cameras?
So a number of years ago, before we built Orpheus,
we had a much larger, more complex vehicle.
And I can remember when we went to the Mariana Trench, it's actually deeper than Mount
Everest is tall, so it's a little like climbing Mount Everest, getting to the top.
But we were able to turn to the scientists and say
“Gosh, we're here now. What would you like to do?”
There is life there adapted to such an incredible, harsh, environment.
And there's science that really suggests that some of the adaptations
that life has made to live in the hadal zone, actually informs us
about life that might exist on other planets, which is kind of mind blowing.
Orpheus is going to go off next year to the Aleutian Trench.
Fundamentally, just explore.
Every time we look in a new part of the ocean, we discover something surprising.
Just tells you how much we have to learn about the ocean.
As a scientist, I thank you for all the work that you do in helping to build these
amazing things.
Thanks very much for visiting today. And...
And onward, as I like to say.
Onward and I guess downward.
Yeah.
There you go.
Obviously, there is a lot to see
at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutions, a vast lab.
But they also have some collaborative efforts with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
So let's head over there to see what they can show us.
Hello, Kakani.
So we've been looking at the roles of AUVs in the deep ocean,
and I've been doing a little bit of reading on this deep PIV system.
Can you tell me a little bit about what it does and what challenges it tries to solve?
My group is called the Bio Inspiration Lab, and what we focus on here at MBARI is developing
imaging technologies so that we can see life in completely different, novel ways.
The imaging instrument that's right next to me is called Deep PIV.
So this is that instrument
that can go on remotely operated vehicles and is rated to 4000 metres deep.
It involves an imaging system and an illumination system.
And in our case, it's a laser that we're using for illumination.
Photos and high def video are a great way to study an environment.
But these rely on having light.
And we're still working usually in 2D.
Kakani’s team is taking a new approach to this.
They're using lasers to scan in 3D.
So the first thing is a control can, and so within this control
can you can find a laser, the power supply, etc.
And then everything that you see up top is actually what the manipulator arm,
the robotic arm that's on the remotely operated vehicles actually carries.
A high definition camera, a video camera system.
And then here you can see is the laser housing that has some optics.
So we can transition from a point of light to an entire sheet.
And so I understand that you're using deep PIV to study larvaceans.
What is a larvacean?
So larvaceans are actually one of my favourite animals.
They are what we call basal cordates
So they are very, very, very loosely related to us.
And what they do is they make these beautiful,
amazing structures that I like to call snot palaces,
mucus structures that they secrete from their heads
that create these beautiful, intricate shapes that play an important role
in filtering food and other particulate from the water around these animals.
That's fantastic. I absolutely love it.
How is scanning in the ocean different or potentially better than scanning in a lab?
In our case,
the giant larvaceans that we study here, I mean, they're much too big to put in a tank.
Their mucus structures can be up to a metre or two metres across.
And so we're unable to do these kinds of observations
or scans in the laboratory environment.
But I want to say that, you know, DPIV can be used for
all sorts of different animals in the ocean, not just larvaceans.
So if you had ambitions to become a deep sea explorer,
it might be time to learn some robotics.
But as a shark researcher myself, I'm off to think about how this is going to help my work.
See you next time.