-: Hi everybody, welcome to another
Media Lab conversation series.
As usual we are streaming this
and if you're watching on Twitter, you can tweet #mltalks
and we'll be doing a Q and A towards the end.
Today we have Dr. Katy Croff Bell.
She is the Vice President and Chief Scientist
of the Ocean Exploration Trust
and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer.
She will first talk for a little while about her work
and then we're gonna have a conversation,
then we'll involve the audience and questions from tweets.
But thank you very much for coming out
and please give us your presentation Katy, thank you.
-: Thanks.
And here.
Good afternoon everyone, thank you for joining us
on this gorgeous Friday afternoon.
We go to presentation, there we go.
So I actually, it's nice to be back,
I went to MIT as an undergrad
and does anyone remember course 13?
Blank stares, a couple.
Ocean engineering is what I went into
and got a lot of flak from a lot of my friends, they asked,
well what are you gonna do with that,
become a lifeguard, and (laughs)
and the answer was no, no, I wasn't.
When I
got to my about junior year majoring in ocean engineering,
got an e-mail from someone from the Science, Technology
and Society Department asking if anybody wanted to go
to the Black Sea to look for shipwrecks.
And naturally of course you're gonna
jump on that opportunity because that's what
MIT is all about, all sorts of incredible opportunities.
And that led me down this path of exploration
and using technology for exploration and education.
So now I'm the vice president of the Trust
as Joi mentioned, and working with this incredible ship,
the Nautilus.
So we have a 212 foot ship that can hold about 48 people.
Not about, exactly, the Coast Guard won't let us have
any more than that.
And we run four to six month expeditions every year.
So the ship is right now in the Gulf of Mexico
and we're actually as a part of the conversation
and Q and A gonna go live to the ship.
And so we have three primary goals for the vessel.
One is to go out to completely unexplored places,
poorly understood places in the world's ocean
because there are a whole lot of them
and we really really don't understand what's going on
on our own planet.
To develop the technology to do that more efficiently,
more effectively, and also to be able to communicate that
back to shore to let more people participate
in the expeditions than you could
with other types of vessels.
Now the ship has a sonar system
mounted to the hull of the ship.
It sends sound down through the water,
bounces off the sea floor, comes back up,
we record the return time and the angle
and then we can make pretty accurate maps of the sea floor.
Once we have those maps, and those maps
are absolutely critical because you don't want to put
your robotic vehicles in the water
without knowing where you're going.
So once we have those maps we have two robotic vehicles.
Hercules is the one with yellow on top
and Argus is the one down on deck right there.
And these two vehicles work together.
There's a cable, which we can sort of see,
running through the middle of the image
that goes down to the top of Argus
and then there's a neutrally buoyant,
that yellow tether is sort of wrapped around the deck,
goes to Hercules.
So the two vehicles are in the water at the same time,
always together, Herc's down below
and is a very stable platform on the sea floor.
Both vehicles have high definition cameras
and a whole bunch of other little standard def
utility cameras to be able to monitor gauges
and see what's going on down there.
Herc can also collect samples with his two manipulator arms
and lots of different types of sampling tools
depending on the objectives of the expedition.
So those vehicles go in the water.
And we have a team of scientists, engineers,
students, educators on board
that are standing watches 24 hours a day.
So since the vehicles are robotic and tethered to the ship
we're able to stay in the water for days and days on end
which makes it a lot more efficient than manned submersibles
and a lot safer as well.
So we have three teams of people that swap out
every four hours so that we can operate 24 hours a day.
And you have the technical team up front
and the science team in the back
but it really doesn't matter where people are sitting
'cause everybody has a headset on
and you talk to each other through an intercom.
So you could actually have science watch standers on shore
as a part of that science team
and the pilots would never know
because they're just sitting there hearing a voice
in their head and they don't care
if the scientist is on the ship or here at MIT.
So here's a diagram, you can see the vehicles
would be down on the bottom, connected to the ship.
Our team is on board and then via satellite
we're able to send the video, the audio from the team,
and a subset of the data back to shore
to our shore-based facility, called the Inner Space Center
at the University of Rhode Island.
And then the University of Rhode Island then distributes
all of that information out to a number of different places
including universities, so we're able to have science teams
standing watches in New Hampshire in Woods Hole,
and all sorts of places all over the world actually.
This was a console in Haifa, Haifa University in Israel.
So that we can expand the size of the science party,
'cause you can only have a handful of scientists on board
and what do you do when you find something
that's outside of the expertise of those people
who are on board.
So we're able to set up this network of scientists
all over the world and we can call them when we find,
you know, a shipwreck or a new type of animal or something
that the people on board aren't, don't know about.
And we can also use it for education and outreach programs.
This is our website, Nautilus Live, that is,
this is pre-recorded video right now,
but they are live in the Gulf of Mexico
so you can whip out your iPhone
and check out what they're doing right now.
I think they should be in the water.
And this allows anybody anywhere in the world
to be able to tune in and see what we're doing.
Both see what we're doing, hear what we're doing,
so you get audio from the ship
and also you can send in questions to our team
that's on board and they see those questions
and they're able to respond over the audio,
so you can hear answers to your questions or comments
24 hours a day.
So like three in the morning, you got insomnia, tune in,
start chatting with the team.
It keeps them awake too.
So where have we gone?
The first few years that we had the Nautilus
we were based in the Mediterranean Sea.
Also did work in the Aegean, the Black Sea,
and out a little bit into the Atlantic.
So I'll show you a few of the highlights.
This one is on the side of an underwater mountain
just south of Cyprus, called Eratosthenes Seamount.
And we were working our way up the slope
and saw this sort of orange staining on the rocks
and decided to zoom in and found that it was colonized
by these tube worms and also found that there were
tons and tons of chemosynthetic clams all over the place.
This is something that we totally didn't expect.
We had read all of the papers about Eratosthenes Seamount.
All of the papers said that there had been
sonar surveys here and there were gonna be
mud volcanoes on top and we found out
that there were none whatsoever.
And so even in this place where it's so close to land
and so close to so many people
and a lot of studies had been done there,
we found these areas where you had kilometers and kilometers
of these colonies of chemosynthetic animals,
these exotic ecosystems that don't really on the sun.
And it was absolutely incredible.
Now there's been a lot of exploration in terms of
oil and gas because probably what they're living on
is methane getting squeezed out of the sea floor
due to the movement of the plates toward each other.
Another place we spent a lot of time in was Kolumbo,
this is an underwater volcano
pretty close to Santorini in Greece.
So Santorini, very famous, late Bronze Age eruption,
the second biggest eruption in human history.
And Kolumbo is much much smaller just a few miles away
but turns out to be a lot more active today
than Santorini is.
So we went to take a look inside this crater,
it's about 1500 feet deep, and found that there was
a very active hydrothermal system going on there.
So water is percolating down into the sea floor,
which is very close to the magma chamber down below,
and getting super enriched in minerals and very very hot.
And we found that there's a lot of carbon dioxide.
All of those bubbles that you see are like
99.99% carbon dioxide coming out of the sea floor.
And it's not circulating outside of Kolumbo,
so it's sort of a natural ocean acidification experiment
where you have very very acidic waters
in this punchbowl shape and you'll notice that there weren't
any fish down there, there was nothing alive
except for all that orangey bacteria.
Here we go, shipwreck.
Being in the Mediterranean obviously there are
a lot of people living in the area
for thousands and thousands of years.
So one of the
major thrusts of our research in this area was to
look for shipwrecks, ancient history,
and we've found so far, oh almost a hundred
ancient shipwrecks in the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea.
Which is more than any other group has found in deep water.
This is one of the Byzantine wrecks that we found
off the coast of Turkey in the Aegean Sea.
And as I mentioned earlier, my initial trip out to sea ever
was to the Black Sea to look for shipwrecks.
And well that year, we didn't find any,
but we did the next year.
And one of the reasons for going there
is that below about 100 to 150 meters
there's no oxygen in the water.
And the hypothesis was that if there's no oxygen
then there could be no animals to eat the wood
or other organic material that's typically left behind.
Or that's part of these ancient wrecks that go down.
So you have sails, you have masts,
all of this organic stuff is gonna get eaten away.
And we found for the first time in 2000,
which was my second expedition,
and continuously since then that you can in fact
find very very well preserved shipwrecks.
Now the hull of this one is not terribly well preserved,
so it's not that impressive in that sense,
but it is one of the oldest ones
that we found in the Black Sea, it's about 2500 years old.
And in the next scene you'll see that there are human bones
up in the top right corner.
So we're able to find human remains
from these very ancient shipwrecks
that would not be found anywhere else in the world.
We went back the year after we found this one
to collect samples so that we could do genetic analysis,
figure out where these people came from,
what they were eating, all sorts of things
that you can find.
In addition to the bones there was a little tooth
that is kind of hard to see in the image,
but can give all sorts of information,
and we went back on the verge of getting permits
from the Turkish government and went down
to do a dive on the site and take a look,
and it turned out that trawling activity, so fishing,
had happened in the area and had completely moved
everything around on the site.
So it was unfortunate that that had happened,
but still very encouraging to know that this does exist
and we just need to keep getting out there and keep looking
'cause we'll definitely be able to find more.
Now in the sort of more modern history arena
we were actually looking for underwater volcanoes
in the Straits of Sicily,
sort of between Sicily and Tunisia.
And this was Halloween night in 2011
and there was somebody was tuned in to Nautilus Live
and saying hey guys, how's it going.
I was a World War II pilot,
have you ever found any World War II airplanes?
And we said no, because we hadn't.
And not like 30 seconds later,
one of the pilots nearly lost himself
because he could see in the scanning sonar,
they can look out ahead of the vehicles,
the shape of an airplane.
And this is what came up.
It was pretty incredible, and even more incredible
was that there were people on land on Pantelleria,
which is a tiny little island near Sicily, watching
and they said oh, that's probably from
the battle of Pantelleria, 1943.
There were two or three of these Italian planes
that were shot down by the British.
They don't actually know how many.
And so it was a great way to be able to include
the public audience when we had no idea
what we were looking at or when it would have gone down.
So we sent the data off to the historical commission,
or Sicily, and they were able to
follow up on that discovery.
In addition to the science and the exploration we also,
since our ship was based in Turkey for many years
and the Turks knew what capabilities we had,
two years ago there was a jet that was shot down
by the Syrians, a Turkish jet,
and so we happened to be mobilizing our team
to get ready for the expedition
and they asked us to go and look for it.
And so we did.
And in 48 hours we were able to locate it
with the help of sonar data
that the Turkish Navy had collected,
and recovered the pilots and sent them home, so.
So there are a lot of other applications that can be
accomplished with this technology.
So last year,
after all of our exploration in the Mediterranean,
the ship came over to the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf,
and that's where it is now.
So last year we did a project with a group called ECOGIG,
it's a group of scientists that are looking at the impacts
of the Deepwater Horizon spill on corals and other animals
that live on the sea floor, the brittle stars.
And that's actually the same project
that's going on right now, so we'll be able to talk to
one of the scientists that's out there.
They've been going back to the same corals
more or less every six months since that spill happened
to image them in exactly the same way
so they can get a time series of how the oil
and the dispersions have affected the corals
and the other animals down there.
And although this one looks very lush and happy
with all those little yellow polyps,
that's actually a different animal that's colonized
the skeleton of the coral so that one's
not actually doing as well as you might think.
We also did an archeological project last year,
this is a shipwreck that was found about three years ago
during a Shell Oil pipeline survey in the Gulf
not too far off of Galveston.
And they found that it was a copper-clad shipwreck,
so they had put copper on the hull of the ship
to protect it from being eaten,
which also protected it from being eaten once it went down.
And then we went back last year to start to recover
some of the artifacts so that they can,
so the archeologists can determine
when did this ship go down, what's its story.
And the going hypothesis right now,
that's actually a jar of ginger,
so somebody probably got seasick.
It's very heavily armed, you can see some of the cannons
on board, or guns as they're called on ships.
And the going hypothesis right now is that this wreck
was very heavily armed and could have been a privateer,
pirate ship, whatever you want to call it,
that had actually captured two other wrecks
that are right nearby.
So the very last night of the expedition we checked out
two other sonar targets and there were two other wrecks,
one of them carrying a cargo of tallow and hides.
Which were, you know, great commodities at the time.
And also another one that probably was carrying
a more organic cargo, so there wasn't,
there weren't any remains left.
But they are all based on the ceramics,
so you can look at the ceramics and determine where,
where they were made, and also date them pretty accurately.
So it looks as though they had come up
from the Yucatan Peninsula, which is now Mexico,
into the Gulf of Mexico and sank
before it reached Galveston or wherever it was headed
in possibly the hurricane of 1818.
So they're working on raising money now
so we can go back next year and continue the excavation
so they can learn more about this wreck
and also the two others that are right next to it.
Now in the Mid-Cayman Rise,
so this is south of the Cayman Islands,
sort of in the middle of the Caribbean Sea,
there are some of the deepest volcanoes on Earth.
This is an area where two plates are
moving sort of next to each other,
but sort of coming apart right here in the middle,
and so you have these deep, very deep volcanoes
and hydrothermal activity.
So this is very hot water coming out of the sea floor
and millions and millions of shrimp.
So some of the scientists were working on
the ecology of these shrimp.
Many of them live off of the very hot mineral-rich water.
They have chemosynthetic bacteria living inside them.
And interestingly, many of them also are
carnivores, so they're eating each other too.
We thought that it was probable, they probably just,
you know, these chemosynthetic shrimp
that are living off of what's coming out,
but it turns out that when you cut them open
and look at their guts, they're also eating each other.
So ongoing work there in terms of the ecology
and the ecosystems of these very deep vents.
Now this looks very similar to the Kolumbo volcano
and geologically it is, it's another underwater volcano
called Kick 'em Jenny.
In Grenada, donkeys, female donkeys are called jennies,
so being out on this volcano
is like being kicked by a jenny,
that's the origin of the name, and again, we found
very very high rates of carbon dioxide coming out.
Again you see that orange and white bacteria.
There were a few more fish here in than in Kolumbo,
but not too many,
and we're actually going back to Kick 'em Jenny this,
at the end of September, beginning of October
to continue the work here because it is so close to Grenada.
And looking for a sort of time series of activity here.
The last time it erupted was in 2001
and it erupts about every 10 to 15 years.
Also, on the slope of Kick 'em Jenny we were doing a dive,
so there's a very large underwater
landslide deposit, so there's Kick 'em Jenny
and then there was a massive underwater landslide
that occurred at some point long ago, we don't know when.
And the purpose of this dive was to go down
to the toe of the deposit and collect samples
so we could figure out the timing of this event.
It was very very large, probably caused a tsunami,
so you know, trying to understand the dynamics there.
And what we found was this unbelievable
chemosynthetic community living at the toe
of an underwater landslide.
Which we had never thought could have ever existed before,
but there are thousands and thousands of these
all over the planet and so knowing that this
rich diversity of life on the sea floor,
where we never expected it to be before,
is pretty incredible and so we're definitely gonna be
on the look out for them in the future.
Some of these muscles were 14 inches long,
they're like bigger than your shoes.
And there was one octopus in each of two locations.
So they kind of have their little territories.
And this is another place we're gonna be going back to
next year, or this year, sorry.
This fall.
And into the future, 2015 we're gonna be coming through
the Panama Canal and sort of working our way
around to the western Pacific.
Over the next several years we'll, it'll take a few years
to get there, because there's a lot on the way.
We have a workshop that we're gonna be holding in December
to bring scientists together that are working in this area
to identify really high priority places for exploration
in the eastern Pacific.
And then we'll mine that report and just start chipping away
from Panama all the way across to American Samoa and Guam.
So we're really looking forward to trying to figure out
where we're gonna go next.
So I mentioned earlier that we also,
in addition to the exploration, are using the telepresence,
and the exploration for STEM education.
And the idea is that it's super awesome,
it's super exciting and can we use exploration
to inspire and motivate kids
to get interested in science and technology.
And we think we can.
So over the last few years we have developed
a series of education programs
that sort of fit into this pyramid
and at the base you have the inspire level,
so trying to touch as many people as we can
with a relatively light touch.
So we do that with things like our website,
with Nautilus Live, through television specials,
working with 60 Minutes and National Geographic,
who are gonna be out at sea with us next week.
And partnering with museums, aquariums,
and science centers around the country.
So going live, bringing the live exploration to them,
doing interactions between the ship
and the guests in the venues.
And,
and that's it for that one.
At the next level, at the engage level
we're looking to really bring students into
the science and the technology and the math even more.
So you've got the wow that's really cool,
what do I need to do to be like you?
And then you say, well you got to study.
So working with school systems, after school programs,
Boys and Girls clubs, YMCAs to bring curriculum,
both in school and after school.
And again doing live interactions with kids
at their home institutions.
And we also have a couple of programs
to bring high school students out to sea with us.
So one of them is our Honors Research Program,
this is for students that are between
their junior and senior year of high school.
And they come to the University of Rhode Island,
they learn about standing watches at the Inner Space Center,
they learn how to plot and visualize and analyze data,
and then we send them out to sea.
They have to do presentations on their work
before they go on the ship
and then we send them all out to sea for about a week.
And they're standing watches right alongside our scientists
and they're part of the team too.
That's a pretty awesome program.
Hopefully I don't click that too much.
All right, at the next level is educating
undergraduate and graduate students,
and this is primarily through a series
of sea-going internships.
So ocean science, ROV engineering, sea floor mapping,
and video engineering and film making.
Those are our four internships, and so we have students
in undergraduate, graduate programs
from all over the world actually
who come out to sea with us.
And typically for about three weeks,
three to four weeks at a time.
And this year we're actually piloting a new program
so that we can work with even more students
because with a ship you have a limited number of bunks,
you can only have a couple of interns on at any given time.
So this new program, our engineering design challenge
will allow us to work with a lot more universities,
have students throughout the fall semester
design something to do something on the ROV for example,
collect hard rocks or design a new suction sampler,
or something to do with the ROVs.
Choose one of those designs at the end of
the fall-winter semester and then actually
work with one of the groups to build it and implement it
the following summer.
So we're gonna be piloting that this year
with probably about three universities
and then hopefully expanding that even further,
which we're really excited about.
And finally, at the top tier is collaborating
with hundreds of scientists and engineers all over the world
so that they can both participate at sea
but also participate from the luxury of their own homes.
And then go home and have dinner with your spouse.
It's quite nice (laughs).
So we've been developing all of these programs
over the last five years and this year we're starting to
sort of bring them together even further into,
oh sorry, one last program.
This one cuts across all the tiers,
this is our Science Communication Fellowship.
And so we have informal and formal educators
from schools, Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCAs,
museums, aquariums, all sorts of different types of people,
even we have a graduate student this year
who we're gonna be talking to,
they come to URI and get trained.
Get used to being on camera, learn how to use
the technology, and then they go out to sea
and they're the ones that are seeing all those questions
that are coming in from the website, moderating the Q and A
with the scientists and the engineers,
and they're also doing the live interactions
with the museums and aquariums.
So now we're trying to bring all these programs
together into
10 to 20 or so.
This year we're starting with two
because you got to start somewhere, different communities.
So rather than just having a scattershot of people
from all over the place,
really focusing on a small group of communities
and implementing all of our programs there.
So you would bring out students, educators, professors,
out to the ship,
they'd be a part of the team,
they wear the uniform like everybody else.
They go to the Inner Space Center
and get trained ahead of time,
and then they become our,
what we're calling our Corps of Exploration.
So this is sort of a play on Lewis and Clark's
Corps of Discovery.
That was the group of people that,
when the Louisiana Purchase happened,
got sent out to find out
what in the world did we just buy.
And so now we have this team that's continuously growing
and everybody has, we have Nautilus uniforms,
everybody's a part of the team, because when you put
that teacher in the uniform,
the same shirt that Bob Ballard's wearing,
or that I am wearing or that any of the scientists
and engineers is wearing, it makes them a part of the team
and really a hero and a role model in their student's eyes.
And role modeling is very very important for us.
Showing kids that they can be a part of the team,
that they can see their own face 20 or 30 years out
on the ship.
This isn't clicking, oh there we go.
So those are the students, and those are the educators
that are a part of our live streaming from the ship.
They're a part of the programing into the schools,
into the afterschool programs, into the museums,
and we feature them in all of our programs
so that they can be the faces
for really their own communities.
And you start to build up
this team, so you have, you know, one year,
a whole group goes out,
they come back into their own communities.
They're the heroes and role models
for the next group of students, and you start to build it up
and build it up and build it up.
And so this is our newest initiative
is building these communities of exploration and education
and I don't know, maybe we can drum up something
here in Boston.
Cambridge, sorry.
So, and again, really the goal is to show the kids
that they can be a part of the team,
that there are other people that look just like them
that are scientists, that are engineers,
that are these amazing explorers,
and that they can do it too.
So thank you very much.
(audience applauding)
-: Thank you Katy.
That was pretty awesome.
I think you already know this,
but I was diving yesterday off of Gloucester, with my--
-: I got to benefit from his diving.
-: Yeah, face in the kelp, hunting lobster and
it was a lot less glamorous than this, but--
-: Yeah, this is a lot more civilized.
You have a bathroom and tea and coffee and things.
-: But, so first I wanted to figure out,
I mean it seems like you do a lot of things, right?
And how do you decide what you're doing.
I mean, so I guess there's two questions sort of,
to think about it kind of as a protocol stack,
it feels like you are a layer with a lot of different people
working with you to explore different things.
How do you decide who to work with
and like what sort of things you do, don't do.
-: Like in terms of the science and the exploration?
-: Yeah, like what sorts of sites you would go to.
I mean, how does that get decided?
-: So I mentioned that we're gonna be having a workshop
this December, we had a similar one
about a year and a half ago on the Caribbean.
And so we brought together about 50 or so scientists from
mostly the US, we had a few international
in Barbados and Trinidad, and Venezuela actually,
that came and, well first what we did
was we split everybody up according to their disciplines.
So we had all the geologists in one room,
all the biologists in one room,
all the archeologists in one room,
and told them to make a map of the places
that they would go.
And so they did that and we brought them back
and overlaid them all and it turned out
that there were about six places that overlapped,
and so would be interesting for a lot of different reasons.
And then we split everybody up again
based on those locations and said
okay narrow it down even further
and identify the really high priority target areas.
And so out of that we have a map of 20 places.
And then we also have an advisory board.
So we have a science advisory board that we then work with
to determine what our field schedule is going to be
for any given year.
-: And how do those scientists get into your network?
-: They submit white papers.
So right now are going through the process
of reviewing the white papers for the Pacific workshop.
And we got about almost 80 I think.
So, and that gets sent out to all the oceanographic
institutions and universities,
so we'll whittle that number down from the 80 or so
white papers that we got and choose the ones
based on potential for exploration,
multidisciplinary nature.
You know, we don't want the one person that wants to pick up
20 rocks in this one square foot.
That's not what we're about.
-: And so as chief scientists, I mean, are you focused
mainly on the science like that, or the science of the ship
and the robots, or all of it, or--
-: All of the above.
-: Yeah.
-: And how, I mean, like what is, what are the areas
where you innovate in terms of science.
I mean, what's the research of this?
Like is it the sensors or the controls or everything?
I mean, I'm just curious, what are the things
that you're hoping to tackle to make this,
your operation even better?
-: Sure, actually one of the things that,
well there are a couple of different areas,
one is the hardware.
The ROVs are great.
But in the future, autonomous systems
are becoming more and more prevalent
and they're significantly more efficient
for surveying the sea floor, like doing broad area surveys.
So down the line it'd be great to get a couple of AVs,
either building them ourselves or
getting ones that are already tested and true.
And another way is more in the data realm.
Now we're pushing all this data, all this video,
back to shore and hoping that people will be able to
look at it and digest it and really participate
in the expeditions in a meaningful way.
And so trying to figure out what's at least
the minimum amount of information that a scientist needs
to have in front of them to be able to participate
and make decisions and really be a part of the expeditions.
So that's one of our biggest challenges right now.
Like we're pretty good at getting everything to shore,
but then what do we do with it?
-: I see, that's interesting,
but that's mostly at Rhode Island
where you spend most of your time when you're on shore?
-: Yes.
-: That's the hub of that part. -: That's the hub
but the idea would be that you'd be able to have
a exploration command console or some online tool
or some other way to distribute it even further.
So we don't have to have people physically in Rhode Island,
you could be at your, in your house,
at your home institution, wherever.
-: And, 'cause a lot of how the Media Lab
interacts with people is they give us data
and our kids play with it, you know.
I think that that,
you're right, I mean I think that the interface
of having people discover things
that you might not have discovered by accessing the data
and what that interface looks like
I think is really important.
And I think is underfunded by the government as well.
And I think you were talking about your STEM
and your outreach, you know,
I think it's also really interesting to see, to think about,
who might have an interesting application,
'cause they're not necessarily the--
-: Oh, there could be tons of different
interesting applications, not just the few scientists
that currently use our data now.
-: Yeah, I was, this morning I was,
it sounds like I'm playing all the time,
but just these last few days.
So this morning I spent a day in my kitchen
designing and then assembling DNA
because-- -: From the lobsters
you caught yesterday?
-: No, no this was from a kit that we got.
But what's interesting is the DIY bio movement
is really moving and
because in government and in corporations,
I mean, this is a pretty safe process,
but since it's classified as a, you know,
as recombinant DNA, all the processes you have to do
if you do it inside of an academic institution,
it's just very high.
But if you look at iGEM for instance,
which spun out of the Media Lab,
they have high school and college kids
designing their own life and creating it.
And it's really interesting the extent to which
when you go into the sort of the street,
you will find a lot of really interesting stuff going on
that is harder to do in these large institutions.
And I know you've been also doing
work with the biology, but it would be interesting to see if
you have the sort of, 'cause to me the STEM education stuff
I think is great, but I think that traditional educators
still tend to focus on, you know,
broadcasting information to kids
so they get the scores right in the tests.
But I feel like a lot of times getting kids,
and you do this too, but getting them engaged in a project,
getting them thinking and owning it
helps them learn more, and--
-: Absolutely, we'd love to be able to build
some sort of way for them to actually
dive into the data themselves and do projects on it
and have it be more experiential than just like
we're on a boat and this is what we're doing.
You know, have it more interactive in that way
so they can explore it themselves.
-: But you have students who come and actually build things
and modules for the ROVs.
-: We have a little bit in the past.
Since we're on a university campus
we've had some of the undergrads at URI
that have built a few different things.
And so that was really the inspiration for the new,
the engineering design challenge
that we're just gonna be starting up this year,
and hopefully be able to bring that to more universities.
-: Right, so that outreach, I mean do you, like,
so you've never done like a data hackathon
or something like that around your data?
-: No, that would be awesome.
-: That'd be fun, that's maybe something we could do here.
-: We've got a lot of data.
-: Yeah.
That's good, we have a lot of storage.
-: And brains.
-: It's funny, yeah, brains too, that helps.
No it's just funny, it turns out that
when you do big data science
it pays to actually own your own computers again.
It's funny, 'cause everything want to the cloud
but now when you actually want to crunch
lots of data very fast, it's cheaper to buy the machines.
So it's very funny this year
just because I'm an administrator I see these things,
I see the investment in iron going back up again.
So there's the getting people to work on data,
so I mean if you, what are the other challenges
that you have right now
other than sort of exposing your data and
getting it--
-: Other challenges?
-: Yeah, or things that you're focused on.
-: Well, right now just running an expedition.
'Cause, I mean that's a major challenge in and of itself.
We have four months, four to six months a year
of the ship being at sea and moving 250 to 300 people
on and off the ship as it's moving from port to port
in a dozen different countries.
So that's always--
-: And how much of your team is actually--
-: And running a ship.
-: How much of your team is actually on the ship versus
shore-- -: Versus on shore?
Well 31 are the science and operations team.
So at any given time they are 31 of them.
And we have a lot more people on shore now
than on the ship at any given time.
-: So it's sort of like a space station though,
'cause like a lot of different people set up experiments
and they go and I guess that's why
you call it inner space, but.
-: Yeah, I actually don't like that term, but (laughs)
but that's just me.
-: And how much, I'm just curious,
how much like climate change related work do you
focus on, how many of your scientists are focused on
collecting data for or thinking about?
-: Some are.
Not a significant number,
but especially in places like Kick 'em Jenny and Kolumbo,
the volcanoes where you have the very high rates of CO2.
Those are sort of natural experiments in, you know,
ocean acidification and what happens
when large amount of CO2 are dissolved in the water.
But we go to so many different places all the time
that it's not as though we're getting
a really long time series in any one place.
-: Yeah, that's interesting.
I mean, just because just looking at your program,
I'm being very selfish, I think climate change
is one of the biggest things we need to address
in our generation and I think one of the biggest problems
is people don't think about it or know it.
I mean, I think there's a statistic that like
65 or 75% of people believe in climate change
but when you ask people to rank them--
-: That many?
-: Yeah actually, it's way higher than Congress.
So I think Congress is around half that believe in it.
And Congress isn't funding any work in climate change.
But what's interesting is that when you ask people
to rank it in terms of priority it ends up in the teens.
So it's not in the top 10 of priorities.
And I think that one of the key things is to get
kids especially, but also anybody,
to start thinking about how important it is.
And to me the ocean is a really important place
to look for impact and for data.
But anything you can do on climate change would be great.
-: Well we're collecting a lot of data
and it certainly could be used
for any number of different applications.
-: That's interesting.
-: Every time we do a dive the vehicles,
in addition to just being able to pick up physical samples,
we're also collecting salinity, temperature, oxygen.
There are a lot of other oceanographic parameters
that are being collected
every time the vehicle is in the water.
-: And do you, I mean are you,
is your job just coordinating the whole thing
or do you have areas where you jump in
and are working on research on the sites themselves?
-: Not as much as I'd like to.
Yeah.
-: Sort of kind of like me.
-: Yeah.
When you're signing off for computers
I'm signing peoples' travels.
-: Interesting, and how do you find the schools and,
I mean, you do outreach, how are you picking
and how are you finding the schools,
or do they just find you from the website
and things like that?
-: Well the communities actually have stemmed from
just giving talks in different places.
So myself and Bob Ballard, who I work with, you know,
he'll go give National Geographic talks or whatever
and then people come up and say,
hey we want to do that here.
And then we go look for sponsors and make it happen.
-: Very cool.
And are we gonna be tying into your friends,
or you'll let us know when we--
-: They'll let us know, one minute.
-: One minute, okay.
Well why don't you tell us what we're doing
before they start then.
-: Oh, great.
So we're gonna be connecting live to the Nautilus,
which is out in the Gulf of Mexico right now.
They are on the project where they're looking at
the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
on the corals and other animals that live on the sea floor.
So I believe that the two people we're gonna have on camera,
one is JP Belmonte, who is a graduate student
at UNC Wilmington, so University of North Carolina.
And also Amanda Demopoulos who is a geologist with the USGS,
the US Geological Survey.
So she has been very involved with this research
for several years.
JP is one of our newbies who's been out
just for the past couple of weeks.
-: Very cool.
I see my biohackers are here.
It's fun being a newbie too, I mean, do you get to actually
go in and play and learn a lot as you're helping?
-: Oh yeah, I'm on a plane in a week to go out there.
-: To go out there? -: Yeah.
-: That's really cool.
And when you, like, find these wrecks like the one
that you showed that's 20,000 years old or something,
I mean, I think you were saying you beamed people in
or they participate by remote presence, but
I mean, is it that they tend to find you and ask
or you already know that they're gonna do this, or I mean,
how much of it is, how do you curate the people who get to
actually control the robot,
or do they not control the robot?
-: No, they don't control the robot from shore
and you tuning in to the website or if you have internet too
we have multicast that goes out to a bunch of universities.
And so you're watching that and we also have like a,
basically an IM chat so that if you're on shore
you can log into that
and be communicating with the watch leader.
So one of the more senior scientists
is a part of every watch and they're the ones
that are calling the shots on the watch.
So we'll have maybe a dozen people
from all different universities around the country
tuning in and saying hey that sponge looks interesting
you want to pick it up, and then the watch leader
having better situational awareness than people on shore
will say oh yeah we can totally do that
or no we can't because the tide just changed
and the ship's getting swept offsite.
-: Right.
-: And so then the watch leader will communicate
whatever they want to do to the pilots
and then the pilots and the navigator talks to the bridge
so the people on the bridge are making sure
we're not gonna run into a island or something.
And so it's a whole sort of chain of communication
to actually get something done.
-: Right.
And what are you gonna see right now in the next,
when you're out there, what are your next destinations?
-: When I go out is with the 60 Minutes film crew,
so we're gonna be doing a segment
on the half of the United States that lies underwater.
So little did you know, half of our country
is actually underwater.
And so they're interested in all sorts of different things.
The natural, so we're gonna be looking at brine pools
and chemosynthetic communities
living off the natural oil and gas
coming out of the sea floor in the Gulf
and we'll probably also be looking at
a couple of shipwrecks too, so we can have both
the natural and the cultural side of things.
-: Very cool.
And like, I knew a little bit about chemosynthetic stuff
but it seems like there's a lot of it down there, I mean--
-: Well that's certainly the highlights
'cause it's more exciting to look at than the mud.
-: And how much do we know about natural chemosynthetic life?
And I mean, 'cause I just have biohacking
in my head right now, I mean how much can we learn about it
to then use it to do things like controlling methane
and stuff like that.
-: There's a lot that's still being learned about them,
I mean they were just discovered
a little more than 30 years ago for the first time.
We learned that all life on Earth wasn't based on the sun.
And so yeah, it's a very very active field of research.
You know, discovering new ecosystems
and new organisms all the time.
-: And, I mean, it terms of disciplines
where does most of that data go,
like the gene sequencing of these chemosynthetic things,
I mean I'm sure you discover things
that people haven't seen before, right?
-: I'm sure we have and we might not even know it.
-: Interesting. -: Yeah.
Our physical sample and biological samples
are archived at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology
so it's accessible to anybody
that wants to do research on it.
We also work with the Northeastern Ocean Genome Legacy,
they're sort of archiving marine genomic material.
And all of our rock samples and core samples,
so all the geological samples are at a repository
at the University of Rhode Island.
So all of the physical samples that we collect
go out to these places that can be accessed
by anyone who wants to do research on them.
-: So we should grab George Church and go over
and sequence some and (laughs).
-: Definitely. -: Kind of play with it.
-: And if there's anything in particular let me know,
we can maybe pick some up this year.
-: I mean, that to me is like really cool
just to do this kind of end to end
where you have a slightly scrappy group collecting stuff,
putting the data in and then having,
'cause I think iGEM has 2000 people this year
in the competition just hacking biology.
You know, high school and college kids
and like with your example of somebody saying
oh that plane was this and that, or you know,
that you're crowdsourcing information, oh we go.
-: Looks like we're going to the ship.
Sounds like Amanda.
Oh that's a video.
-: So is this, this is also on your website,
or is this just--
-: No, this is done, so there are four video feeds
that come back to shore, three of them
go to the website and the fourth one we use for--
-: Hi I'm Kelly at the Inner Space Center.
-: Can she hear us, hi Kelly.
-: Hi.
-: Can you see us too?
-: I don't think Kelly can-- -: No.
-: Just hearing us.
-: I can just talk to you but I'm sure you guys
can see and hear me, but I can't see you.
-: So this is Kelly, she's at the Inner Space Center,
so she's in Rhode Island right now.
-: Okay.
-: And she's gonna be tossing us off to Amanda and JP,
is that right?
-: I am, so they're on board the ship, so they'll give you
an update and talk to you guys about what they're doing.
-: Fantastic, thanks. -: Cool.
-: Hey there, Amanda and JP, how's it going?
-: Hi. -: Hey Katy, how are you?
-: Great, how are you guys doing?
-: It's going great Katy, how are you guys?
-: There's a little bit of a delay.
-: So how is this feed getting to us?
-: So this is coming, so there's a camera in the studio
and it's being sent via our satellite dish
from the ship back to a land-based station
that goes to the Inner Space Center
and then from the Inner Space Center
just via the internet to here.
-: Oh, so you have, okay, so that's the delay
is the satellite delay.
-: Yeah, it's a satellite delay, yep.
So what are you guys doing out there?
-: Well we have actually been having
a really successful cruise thus far.
This cruise has been funded by ECOGIG,
which is a consortium funded by the Gulf of Mexico
Research Initiative to look at the impacts
of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on deep sea ecosystems.
And the purpose of this particular cruise is to look at
the impact of the spill on deep sea coral communities
in the Gulf.
And so we've been revisiting deep sea corals
that we've been monitoring since the spill,
reexamining these coral communities and identifying
whether there have been any additional impacts
or whether these systems are recovering.
-: Do you wanna ask questions? -: Okay, yeah, so
how did you get involved in this project?
-: You need me to speak louder.
-: Sorry, how did you guys get involved in this project,
how did--
-: So...
Well, I work for the US Geological Survey and
since I joined in 2007 I've been working
on deep sea communities in the Gulf.
And my colleagues, Chuck Fisher,
who is the chief scientist out here on board,
he had been studying deep sea corals in the Gulf of Mexico
as well as our other colleagues
from Temple University and elsewhere.
And so we were in the best position essentially
to address whether there were any major
ecosystem effects of the oil spill
to the deep sea coral communities in particular
because we had some long term information
or background information about these systems
and how they might respond to change.
-: Yep, and as for myself, I am the Science Communicator
on this leg of the,
of this expedition and so luckily enough
my advisor at UNC Chapel Hill is actually part of ECOGIG
so I know a little bit about ECOGIG.
Not to the extent that Amanda over here does,
but I'm on this cruise leg
as the Science Communication Fellow
and it's been a great experience.
-: And what have you found?
I mean, is there anything new or surprising
that you've discovered?
Wonder if they heard me.
-: I think what is fascinating
about these deep sea coral communities is that ultimately
they are kind of slow to respond to change,
whether improve or recover
and so what this group has been doing is
collecting really high resolution images
of the deep sea corals themselves,
and those deep sea coral images will then be digitized
and analyzed meticulously to look at changes
in the coral polyps, whether there's any further decay
or mortality of the corals,
or possible recovery and additional growth.
So really the jury is still out in terms of
whether we've seen any additional changes
since the last time we were here, which was last year,
but really follow up work will require,
will be required in order to assess that.
-: Yeah, and on top of the scientific goals that ECOGIG has
what's wonderful is that we also get to do some exploration
down here and there are parts of the Gulf of Mexico
that haven't been explored,
which is wonderful and it gives us an a lot of opportunities
to be able to discover some neat new species,
some of which we saw just last night and this morning.
Last night we saw a vampire squid and then this morning
we saw a siphonophore, so what a great treat.
-: What's a vampire squid?
Is that it? -: Is that the vampire squid?
Yeah, it is.
They can't see what we're seeing.
-: A cephalopod or squid.
Oh great, yeah, and they have nice highlight video
that was filmed of the vampire squid.
We have Mike Vecchione from the Smithsonian
actually chime in and give us a genus and species name,
so having that immediate response
with the experts on shore-side was really great actually.
-: So do you have like a brain trust that are always on call?
-: Vampyroteuthis infernalis.
-: We have people sign up in advance, because you know,
all the different cruises, people are gonna be interested
in different areas or different objectives, so
people will log in to a little web form
and say I'm interested in Kick 'em Jenny and Cayman,
but not the Gulf of Mexico, for example.
So then we have that list of people,
all their contact information,
their background and their interests,
and then create the logins for them
so that they can log in to the chat,
and that's what Mike Vecchione from the Smithsonian,
he watches a whole lot and he's interested in cephalopods.
So octopus and squid.
And so he's always chiming in when we're,
find something new and we have students or coral experts
but they aren't squid experts,
so they won't necessarily know what we're looking at.
-: That's really interesting and so it's kind of like
you've got every expert in your ear like leading the way.
-: It's fantastic. -: Sort of like Jack Bauer.
-: Especially when we get questions from the website
and we can't answer them.
-: Yeah, that's, so I guess part of the outreach would be
to really figure out sort of
who really interesting experts are,
parse what they would be interested in
so anything that you see you're getting both the crowd
but also people who might have
some really interesting domain expertise.
-: And if people aren't tuned in at, you know,
when we found those tube worms on Eratosthenes Seamount,
we know who the experts are in the world.
So we're able to call them up and say hey, look now.
What do we do, you know, is this totally commonplace
or is this something unique
and we need to collect some samples.
-: I mean, it's kind of neat to think about
what the social network structure is,
especially for real time because, I mean I did a project
where we tried to collect and publish radiation data.
But it was always do you know somebody that knows
high powered analog electronics for the sensor
or do you know how, somebody,
and we were always able to find somebody
who was an expert within a several degrees away,
but we were kind of on a one day to a week time scale.
But it would be kind of interesting if there was a way
to sort of ping somebody who could ping somebody
who could ping somebody who could call somebody
so that you would find somebody who knew
enough about what you--
-: The oceanographic community is pretty small,
so it's-- -: Yeah, that's probably--
-: It's been pretty easy to get ahold of people.
Should we let?
-: Yeah, so I think we could switch to,
are they still connected? -: Yes.
-: So we can, so does any, if anybody has any questions.
-: Yes they are.
-: Oh yeah.
-: We'll get a microphone up to you so--
-: Yeah, we're still here.
-: Okay, we're just gonna wait for a mic
to get to our first question.
-: Hello there.
So this was briefly mentioned but,
so I'm a molecular biologist, I really like genetics
and the toolkits that we have from all this sequencing
and you mentioned you
may collect samples only under certain circumstances?
Or are you planning to have something
that's constantly sniffing to find new species
or like what's the protocol there
because from my perspective,
like all of the genes and genetic material
we can get our hands on is super super valuable.
And so while you're out there,
like why not just get piles of data?
-: Well because it takes time.
Is the mic on?
Because it takes time, and so, you know,
definitely if we see something that we think is unique
or some scientist is tuning in
and they say definitely pick that up, then we do.
But also things like corals are pretty easy to sample,
things like fish are hard 'cause they swim away, so.
So, there are some things that lend themselves more to,
more easily to sampling than others.
Amanda, do you want to chime in on the sampling question?
-: And I'll just follow up with that then.
Sure.
I just wanted to follow up with Katy's comment
that essentially all of the investigators
that have offered interest in these cruises
and upcoming expeditions have provided a wishlist,
if you will, of taxonomic groups that they're
particularly interested in having people on the ship sample,
and the proper protocols for sampling them.
How to handle the samples so that they can be
further identified later on down the line.
So having that wishlist, having the expedition,
or having those investigators identify it
is an essential part of it.
And as far as sampling out on this cruise in particular
we are targeting our collections
of deep sea corals in particular.
We will be, we are primarily imaging only
and doing some collections for biodiversity studies
which will include utilizing molecular techniques
to further identify those species.
But as Katy mentioned, every sample collection takes time
so those sample collections have to be highly targeted.
-: And in addition to the sample collection time
then you've got to deal with it on the ship,
and we only have, you know, a pretty small staff
to be able to deal with it.
But we try to collect representative samples.
If there's something that we've never seen before and
looks like it might be new or, you know, you get from
one sort of area that's full of corals
and then there's some line
and all of a sudden it's all sea pens or,
it's really incredible actually when you go down there
and you're marching along the sea floor and something stops
and then something comes up.
And so just trying to get an idea
of particularly unique things so that we can pick up
representative samples and be able to bring them back.
And then people can take a look at them,
see if they're unique or special
or if they should be studied even further.
But just the time and the intensity
and the being able to preserve it
and then being able to archive it, it's a very long process.
-: And kind of just to jump in on that, I just
have been seeing the cost of
all types of elements of bioengineering,
the cost of sequencing, the costs of assembly,
just going down.
And George will say some pieces are going down
five or six times the speed of Moore's law.
And what that's doing is it's allowing high school kids
and college kids to go to the registry of biological parts
and pick a piece from this and pick a piece from that
and use these huge gene banks to then design things
that do practical things.
And I think that what might be interesting is
as sort of this biohacking emerges as like a hobby
like you used to get a chemistry set when you were a kid,
or a robot, now people are gonna be assembling genes.
Suddenly, exploration and looking for new types of like,
well how does this thing survive, what is the bacteria
that causes methane to turn into energy,
I want that in my new project.
I think we'll create a new reason for kids
to be interested in sort of exploration and--
-: Can you develop a sensor to do that analysis in situ.
-: Yeah, exactly. -: So that we know
and you don't have to wait the, you know,
weeks to months to get the sample up, put it in the archive,
have somebody go access it.
You know, start working on that.
-: It's 'cause I think now that the computer scientists
are getting into the biohacking and sort of organizing it
more like a computer language, it feels like
what the internet did to information.
There's just sort of this ex, to use a biologic,
a Cambrian moment happening right now.
So I think that it's kind of a good time
to try to nudge these communities together
'cause there's so much that we can learn.
So I look forward to doing that.
-: If you have suggestions, we'd love to hear them.
-: Oh and we were talking back stage
and we haven't announced this yet but we'll announce it now,
but I've talked Katy into becoming
a directors fellow at the Media Lab.
So this just means that we'll get more access to her
and she'll get more access to us
and we'll be trying to work on projects,
and genomics I think will be one of the areas
that we definitely want to try to figure out
some specific things to work on, so--
-: Definitely.
-: That's gonna really fun. -: Thanks.
-: I had one question from Twitter that
my team wanted me to ask.
-: Do you have any more questions for the ship?
-: Oh yeah, that's right, we've got the ship people
here still, we don't want to have them standing around.
-: Anybody else?
-: No more, no more ship questions?
-: No more ship questions?
-: What's that out the porthole,
there's like a giant (mumbles).
-: What's out the porthole?
-: It looks like a buoy. -: Is it an oil rig?
-: There are oil rigs out here.
It's the Gulf of Mexico so it's kind of like
a city in the night.
Actually just last night off our port,
I think it was our port side, we were able to see
a really big oil rig just right next to us,
which almost looked like a hotel in Las Vegas
just because of all of the lights that was on it,
that were on it, so yeah there are lots of oil rigs here.
We see some creatures sometimes swimming around.
So a couple of nights ago we were able to see some sharks,
which was amazing.
But yeah, it's quite a scene out here.
-: Yeah, it's interesting working in the Gulf of Mexico.
Usually when I go to sea I really look forward to
the light show in the sky,
the stars that just go on for miles
and then when we come into the Gulf
it's not quite like that.
The light show is at the water's surface
with all of the platforms
and the oil and gas activities around us.
And that's one of the prime reasons
why we're out here actually, so.
It's a really different environment to work in.
But that platform that you see, that structure back there
is over a mile off of our study site.
-: Wow.
And can I just ask a practical question?
How do you get on and off the ship?
-: Well a couple of ways.
One is just to tie up next to a dock
and you walk on and off the ship.
Or use a small boat to go into port.
-: So how are you gonna get, are you gonna, is it gonna dock?
-: We're gonna be tied up in Gulfport, yeah, yeah.
There are some places that we haven't been able to tie up
because the ports were too shallow or something like that,
so that's when we have to use the small boat.
But in general we try to make sure that people
can walk on and off, it's just a lot safer.
-: Very cool.
-: All right, should we let these guys get back to work?
-: Well thank you.
-: Thank you very much Amanda and JP.
-: Sure.
-: And good luck and hopefully--
-: Thank you so much.
-: Bye, or I guess they can't see us.
-: They can't see us, but you can wave at them anyway.
-: So one question from Twitter to you was,
and I don't know if this is your area of expertise,
but could deep sea water pressure be turned into energy?
Do you know is there anybody working on that?
-: Deep sea water pressure?
-: I guess it's thermal more than pressure, right?
-: There are, there's a place in Hawaii
that's working on thermal because it's very cold.
The bottom of the ocean's four degrees Celsius.
-: Right, so there's a differential.
-: Yeah, there's a temperature difference
but I don't think pressure.
-: Yeah.
-: I don't think anyone's doing anything with that.
If it's even possible.
But definitely the thermal gradient between deep water
and surface water.
-: I mean, you probably get access to
a lot of different scientists
sort of thinking about interesting things.
What's the most interesting or couple of most interesting
projects that scientists are working on
that you get excited about.
-: I get excited about everything.
It's hard (laughs).
You know, some of my first expeditions
being to look for shipwrecks,
trying to elucidate ancient trade routes
in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea,
that's always been very exciting.
Obviously we're not doing so much of that,
not being in the area anymore,
but that's always close to my heart.
And then I actually went and did my PhD
in geology and geophysics and looking at volcanoes and,
you know, how volcanic eruptions have impacts
on the sea floor and nearby areas, so, yeah.
Where plate boundaries occur,
either moving toward each other
or moving next to each other,
or moving away from each other, those are always
really interesting places 'cause you have magma chambers
and all sorts of crazy geological processes going on.
-: And there was that recent study or report about
the water layer underneath, what do they call it again?
I forgot the name, that there was a huge body of water
underneath, underground.
Did you see this?
Does anybody here know what I'm talking?
-: Yeah, there's a huge ocean like underneath the...
-: Yeah.
-: Under the mantle, really?
-: Yeah, and the theory was that that--
-: How could it even--
-: Changed the theory on, and some geologists I think
discovered it by doing seismic tests.
But apparently that changed a theory
on where the oceans came from, or something like that.
You haven't seen that? -: I haven't see that.
-: Okay. -: I'll have to look that up.
-: You have to look that up.
'Cause I was curious whether that changed
in any of the theories that, about what's happening now.
But I guess, you know, this is sort of an odd question
but just in terms of your organization, it's a non-profit
and it's affiliated with universities,
but it's mostly funded through
philanthropists and government, is that?
-: Through, yeah, a lot of different funding sources.
Some from the government,
so the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That's actually our biggest grant,
and that's to conduct the expeditions, that's about
three and a half to four million dollars a year.
The Office of Naval Research
for some of the technology development
and STEM education programs.
Apparently the state of STEM education in the United States
right now is a threat to national security,
so the Department of Defense
is investing heavily in STEM education.
And the rest of it from private, corporate, foundation,
a lot of different,
mostly private and corporate sources.
And again, for the STEM education programs
because those companies aren't seeing their employees
coming down the pipeline.
-: Interesting, yeah, I mean, we have a very strong bias
at the Media Lab about educa, I often say that
education is what other people do to you
and learning is what you do to yourself.
And we have a group up there called Lifelong Kindergarten
because we think kindergarten is a great model for learning.
I think it's important, STEM education is important
and some kids are very good at having that sort of
linear progression through education.
I'm biased 'cause I'm a three-time college dropout
and I got kicked out of kindergarten, but
the thing though that I found is I always learned
when I got interested in or excited about something.
And maybe not all kids are that way,
but to me when you have something as exciting
as the work that you're working on
I think that if you can get a kid
to start geeking out on something, they're gonna learn.
And it seems like, yeah.
-: We had one kid a couple years ago, 12 year old,
called himself Lego G whenever he would write in to us
and he would log on first thing in the morning
before he went to school,
his teacher would have Nautilus Live running
in the classroom, and as soon as he got home from school
he'd log on, hey guys, how's it going, what did I miss?
And he built a Lego Nautilus.
During one of my watches we asked,
hey Lego, what are you gonna build next?
And he said, I think a Lego Argus.
So like 20 minutes later, he had gone down to his basement,
built a Lego Argus, took a picture of it, uploaded it
so that we could see it, and
we talked to one of the teacher, or his teacher
was actually one of our educators at sea,
and I talked to her about it, and she said
that he was kind of like one of the borderline kids
but with this he was always in class,
always had his homework done,
was super excited about everything that we were doing.
So it was really encouraging to get stories like that.
-: Yeah, yeah, saving the borderline kids I think
is how we're gonna save the world because--
-: Yeah, the ones that are already getting As
are already getting As, so we're not worried about them.
-: That's interesting, and what are the youngest,
what's the youngest age of kids
that actually get up on the boat?
-: That get on the boat?
14, 15 are ones that go to sea.
Like when we're in port and we do tours of the ship,
then younger ones can come on board,
but when we're out at sea,
I think 15 is our, is the minimum.
-: That's very cool because I do think,
I mean, I've been looking at, you know,
there's a lot of thinking about
when you should learn certain things,
and I know that there are parents who are teaching their
little kids Markov models and, I mean, like they,
it turns out that your brain is actually
really good at certain categories of math
that they actually wait 'til later to teach you.
And sometimes if you can spark a kid's interest
they can learn certain things better when they're young.
And also I think that the physical thing
has a lot to do with it.
Again, I'm biased because I'm very learning through doing
but today when I was playing with the pipettes
it gave me a sort of
a physical representation of the theory.
And it seems like going out on a boat
and seeing the samples being collected--
-: It's very very hands-on, yeah.
-: And then suddenly you want to learn the chemistry
and the math and the biology behind it, and
yeah, and I know it's not that scalable
but I guess the website can help, but.
-: Yeah, and figuring out how we can use what we have
in better, more interacting ways
is really gonna be the key to that, yeah,
the bringing people to sea isn't really scalable
just 'cause you have a limited amount of space on board.
But the kids that do come out, they're standing watches,
they're working with the scientists,
they're dealing with samples in the lab
so they get exposure to the rocks
and the biology and the water chemistry and so
we try to expose them to as wide a range
of experiences as possible.
-: I would suggest, if you haven't already I would,
I mean again, I'm biased 'cause I'm a diving instructor
but a lot of the kids that I teach,
I teach junior high school kids when I used,
before I started having a real job,
but they get obsessed and then you can guide them
to care about the environment and to learn about biology.
'Cause every time you go out and you catalog the fish there,
they come back and now they want to learn more about it.
But it seems like collaborating with that community,
which probably has a larger number of people
who are out there
and they're in the ocean for the first time,
and maybe, you know, even like,
one of the things that I found was great
was just getting kids to focus on cataloging.
So what you do is you say okay, take a picture
of every fish that you see and then come back
and look for it on the internet
and try to figure out, yeah ID it.
And then you get into the community of people
who are obsessed about IDing things and then they become,
and my sister, who's an anthropologist calls it
hanging out, messing around, geeking out.
And what you do is you try to take a social activity
like going scuba diving together and then you let them see
how you're messing around with stuff,
and then if they lock in and geek out
then you've got them, and they go.
And that generation of kids I think could become sort of
this sort of on land and peripheral community for you guys.
Just, it's--
-: It would definitely be a great community to tap into.
-: We've just started doing a lot of ocean works.
You know, we've been doing diving stuff in biomechatronics
and Mary's group is doing a lot of work with corals.
And as you know Ed's interested in the genomics.
And so I think we should create a Media Lab
diving team as well. -: Ocean Group.
-: Ocean Group, yeah.
Yeah, we have an ocean project at MIT as well.
I don't know if we are plugged in to them, we should,
we need to connect to them, but,
but anyway, yeah I think having oceans as a hub of stuff is,
it would be great, so hopefully you can come
and help lead that for us here at the lab.
-: I'll be here.
-: There any more questions?
No.
Okay, well thank you very much Katy,
this was really wonderful--
-: Absolutely, thank you so much for having me.
-: All right, thank you.
(audience applauding)
♪ When I'm watching you watch him ♪