Saving The Whales, With Technology
April 12th, 2024
Via The Economist, a look at how new technology can keep whales safe from speeding ships:
On march 3rd a whale calf washed ashore in Georgia, on America’s east coast, bearing slash marks characteristic of a ship’s propeller. Less than a month later another whale, a recent mother, was found floating off the coast of Virginia. Her back was broken from the blunt-force trauma of a ship collision; her calf, missing and still meant to be nursing, is not expected to live. Three deaths within weeks is not good news for the North Atlantic right whales, of which only about 360 remain.
They are dying mainly because of human activity, and they are not alone. Ship collisions threaten whale populations worldwide, killing up to 20,000 individuals annually. With global ocean traffic forecast to rise by at least 240% by 2050, the problem will balloon. But a new movement is using technology to fight back. On April 11th a Californian strike-prevention programme expanded operations across North American waters. Other countries are following suit.
Whale Safe launched in 2020, two years after the number of whales killed by collisions in California reached a record high of 14. Callie Leiphardt, the scientist leading the project at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, says that for every killed whale found, ten more are thought to die unrecorded. That so many were dying despite voluntary speed limits suggested more robust interventions were needed. The team reasoned that by alerting ships to whales, and publicising which shipping companies ignored the speed limit, they might increase compliance and bring down deaths.
Their approach rests on listening for whales underwater using microphone-equipped buoys capable of separating low-frequency whale calls from the ocean’s background noise. Vetted detections are then fed into Whale Safe’s alert tool, alongside sightings and model-based predictions, to tell nearby skippers to slow down. The team then monitors ships’ speeds within established slow zones via a widespread gps-tracking system and awards parent companies marks from a to f, visible online. With this week’s expansion to the east coast, Whale Safe will now assess companies across all slow-speed zones in North America.
How many whales have been saved is hard to say. But since Whale Safe first launched, Californian collisions seem to be decreasing: only four were reported in 2022, compared with 11 the year before. In the Santa Barbara channel, a collision hotspot, the proportion of ships that slow down has also been rising—from 46% in 2019 to 63.5% in 2023.
The idea is also catching on elsewhere. In 2022 Chile moored its first acoustic buoy to alert ships to blue, sei, humpback and southern-right whales. That same year Greek researchers published the results of a trial using buoys to detect sperm whales in the Mediterranean and to pinpoint their location in three dimensions, informed by work on the black boxes of lost planes. Another European project, led by a consortium of ngos and naval companies, is developing detection boxes that use thermal and infrared cameras, alongside other sensors, to help ships spot whales early.
For Mark Baumgartner at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who pioneered the use of acoustic buoys, the real solution lies in changing ships’ behaviour. After all, spotting a whale is useful only if the ship is moving slowly enough to react. This is why Canada has expanded mandatory speed restrictions to ever more areas where right whales live; America is considering doing the same. The International Maritime Organisation, a un agency, created a “Particularly Sensitive Sea Area” in the north-western Mediterranean last summer, the first such area explicitly created to mitigate ship strikes. Several companies are now rerouting ships away from sperm-whale habitats there. Similar efforts are under way in Sri Lanka and New Zealand.
It will not all be plain sailing. Some overlap between ships and whales is inevitable in busy ports. What’s more, slow container ships can still kill whales, as can smaller boats. Many coastal communities, whose economies rely on their ports and harbours, often resist stricter measures, such as mandatory speed limits or no-go areas. With all that in mind, it is easy to feel pessimistic on behalf of a species like the North Atlantic right whale. But like all whales that used to be hunted for meat and blubber, it has bounced back from the brink of extinction before. According to Dr Baumgartner, “Everyone that works on right whales has hope.”
,
Read More »
Wearables For The Wild and An Internet of Animals: How Tracking Animal Movements May Save The Planet
February 23rd, 2024Courtesy of MIT Technology Review, a report on how researchers have been dreaming of an Internet of Animals and are now getting closer to monitoring 100,000 creatures—and revealing hidden facets of our shared world:
There was something strange about the way the sharks were moving between the islands of the Bahamas.
Tiger sharks tend to hug the shoreline, explains marine biologist Austin Gallagher, but when he began tagging the 1,000-pound animals with satellite transmitters in 2016, he discovered that these predators turned away from it, toward two ancient underwater hills made of sand and coral fragments that stretch out 300 miles toward Cuba. They were spending a lot of time “crisscrossing, making highly tortuous, convoluted movements” to be near them, Gallagher says.
It wasn’t immediately clear what attracted sharks to the area: while satellite images clearly showed the subsea terrain, they didn’t pick up anything out of the ordinary. It was only when Gallagher and his colleagues attached 360-degree cameras to the animals that they were able to confirm what they were so drawn to: vast, previously unseen seagrass meadows—a biodiverse habitat that offered a smorgasbord of prey.
The discovery did more than solve a minor mystery of animal behavior. Using the data they gathered from the sharks, the researchers were able to map an expanse of seagrass stretching across 93,000 square kilometers of Caribbean seabed—extending the total known global seagrass coverage by more than 40%, according to a study Gallagher’s team published in 2022. This revelation could have huge implications for efforts to protect threatened marine ecosystems—seagrass meadows are a nursery for one-fifth of key fish stocks and habitats for endangered marine species—and also for all of us above the waves, as seagrasses can capture carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests.
Animals have long been able to offer unique insights about the natural world around us, acting as organic sensors picking up phenomena that remain invisible to humans. More than 100 years ago, leeches signaled storms ahead by slithering out of the water; canaries warned of looming catastrophe in coal mines until the 1980s; and mollusks that close when exposed to toxic substances are still used to trigger alarms in municipal water systems in Minneapolis and Poland.
These days, we have more insight into animal behavior than ever before thanks to sensor tags, which have helped researchers answer key questions about globe-spanning migrations and the sometimes hard-to-reach places animals visit along the way. In turn, tagged animals have increasingly become partners in scientific discovery and planetary monitoring.
But the data we gather from these animals still adds up to only a relatively narrow slice of the whole picture. Results are often confined to silos, and for many years tags were big and expensive, suitable only for a handful of animal species—like tiger sharks—that are powerful (or large) enough to transport them.
This is beginning to change. Researchers are asking: What will we find if we follow even the smallest animals? What if we could monitor a sample of all the world’s wildlife to see how different species’ lives intersect? What could we learn from a big-data system of animal movement, continuously monitoring how creatures big and small adapt to the world around us? It may be, some researchers believe, a vital tool in the effort to save our increasingly crisis-plagued planet.
Wearables for the wild
Just a few years ago, a project called ICARUS seemed ready to start answering the big questions about animal movement.A team led by Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in southern Germany and a pioneer in the field, launched a new generation of affordable and lightweight GPS sensors that could be worn by animals as small as songbirds, fish, and rodents.
These Fitbits for wild creatures, to use Wikelski’s analogy, could produce live location data accurate to a few meters and simultaneously allow scientists to monitor animals’ heart rates, body heat, and sudden movements, plus the temperature, humidity, and air pressure in their surroundings. The signals they transmitted would be received by a three-meter antenna affixed to the International Space Station—the result of a €50 million investment from the German Aerospace Centre and the Russian Space Agency—and beamed down to a data bank on Earth, producing a map of the animals’ paths in close to real time as they crisscrossed the globe.
Wikelski and his peers hoped the project, formally the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, would provide insights about a much wider variety of animals than they’d previously been able to track. It also aimed to show proof of concept for Wikelski’s dream of the past several decades: the Internet of Animals—a big-data system that monitors and analyzes animal behavior to help us understand the planet and predict the future of the environment.
Researchers have been laying the groundwork for years, connecting disparate data sets on animal movement, the environment, and weather and analyzing them with the help of AI and automated analytics. But Wikelski had his sights on something even grander and more comprehensive: a dashboard in which 100,000 sensor-tagged animals could be simultaneously monitored as near-real-time data flowed in from Earth-imaging satellites and ground-based sources.
By bringing together each of these snapshots of animals’ lives, we might begin to understand the forces that are shaping life across the planet. The project had the potential to help us better understand and conserve the world’s most vulnerable species, showing how animals are responding to the challenges of climate change and ecosystem loss. It also promised another way to monitor the Earth itself during a period of increasing instability, transforming our animal co-inhabitants into sentinels of a changing world.
When ICARUS first went into space in 2018, it was widely celebrated in the press. Yet what should have been a moment of glory for Wikelski and the field of animal ecology instead became a test of his will. The ICARUS antenna first went down for a year because of a technical issue; it went back up but was only just out of testing in February 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine halted the project altogether.
Wikelski and his peers, though, have used the time since to innovate and evangelize. They now envision a more complete and technologically advanced version of the Internet of Animals than the one they hoped to build even just a few years ago, thanks to innovations in tracking technologies and AI and satellite systems. They have made even smaller and cheaper sensors and found a new, more affordable way to work in space with microsatellites called CubeSats. Their efforts have even gotten NASA to invest its time and resources into the possibility of building the Internet of Animals.
Now Wikelski and his collaborators are again on the verge, with an experimental CubeSat successfully transmitting data as part of a testing phase that started last June. If all goes as planned, another fully operational ICARUS CubeSat will begin collecting data next year, with more launches to follow.
The potential benefits of this system are extraordinary and still not yet fully understood, says Scott Yanco, a researcher in movement ecology at the University of Michigan. Perhaps it could help prevent mountain lion attacks or warn about a zoonotic disease about to make a jump to humans. It could alert researchers of behavioral changes that seem to happen in some animals before earthquakes, a phenomenon Wikelski has studied, and determine what conditions tell boobies in the Indo-Pacific to lay fewer eggs in years before strong El Niños or signal to weaver birds in the Niger Delta to build their nests higher up before floods.
“You can talk to 100 scientists about this,” Yanco says, “and they’re all going to give you a different answer of what they’re interested in.”
But first, a lot still needs to go right.
Animals as sentinels
When I first spoke with Wikelski, in early 2022, ICARUS was live, tracking 46 species from the ISS 400 kilometers overhead. Wearing a pair of square-rimmed glasses and speaking in a German accent with a tone of unfailing urgency, he was excited to tell me about a tagged blackbird who made a 1,000-or-so-kilometer crossing from Belarus to Albania.That was actually pretty routine, Wikelski said, but almost everything else he had been seeing over the past year of road-testing had been stranger than expected. White storks were crossing back and forth over the Sahara five times a season, without apparent reason. Cuckoos, which are tree-dwelling birds ill suited to long periods at sea, were making uninterrupted journeys from India to the Horn of Africa. “Now, any time you look, totally novel aspects appear, and novel connections appear across continents,” he told me.
This could have been a mystifying mess. But for Wikelski, it was “beautiful data.”
The practice of tagging animals to monitor their movements has been used for more than 100 years, though it began with a stroke of luck. In the 1820s, a hunter in a village in central Africa threw a 30-inch spear that lodged itself nonfatally in the neck of a white stork. This became what might have been the world’s first tag on a wild animal, says Yanco: the bird somehow flew back to Germany in the spring, helping settle the mystery of where storks disappeared to in the winter.
By the 1890s, scientists had started tracking wild birds with bands fitted around their legs—but 49 out of every 50 ring-tagged birds were never seen again. Starting in the 1960s, thousands of birds received very-high-frequency radio tags known as “pingers,” but these were only powerful enough to broadcast a few kilometers. To capture the data, researchers had to embark on cartoonish chase scenes, in which tagged birds were pursued by an oversize homing antenna pointed out the roof of a car, plane, or hang-glider.
Wikelski tried all three. During a stint at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the mid-’90s, he was studying thrushes and would gun an Oldsmobile around the Midwest at over 70 miles per hour. He’d set off as the songbirds got going at around 2 a.m., which tended to draw the attention of local police. Wikelski found that contrary to the conventional wisdom, thrushes used just 29% of their energy on their overnight migrations, less than they expended hunting and sheltering during stopovers. But the hassle of his process, which also entailed capturing and recapturing birds to weigh them, convinced Wikelski that, among other things, he needed better tools.
Thinking bigger (and higher)
It was not immediately clear that the solution to Wikelski’s problems would be in space, though the idea of tracking animals via satellite had been explored decades before his Oldsmobile experiments.In fact, NASA invented space-based animal tracking back in 1970 when it strapped a transmitter collar the weight of two bowling balls around the neck of Monique the Space Elk, a local news celebrity at the time. (Monique was actually two elks: the anointed Monique, who wore a dummy collar for testing and press photos, and another, who accidentally caught a misfired tranquilizer dart and subsequently got the satellite transmitter collar.) After the Moniques met untimely deaths—one from starvation, the other at the hands of a hunter—the project went dormant too.
But its research lived on in Argos, a weather monitoring system established in 1978 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the French space agency. It pioneered a way to track a tagged animal’s location by beaming up a short stream of analog data and measuring wave compression—the so-called Doppler shift—as a polar-orbiting satellite zoomed overhead at thousands of miles an hour. But this captured locations to only a few hundred meters, at best, and typically required a clear line of sight between tag and satellite—a challenge when working with animals below the canopy of rainforests, for instance.
Wikelski worked extensively with Argos but found that the technology didn’t enable him to capture the highly detailed whole-life data he craved. By the late ’90s, he was on an island in Panama, exploring an alternative approach that followed hundreds of animals from 38 species, including small mammals and insects.
Using six long-distance radio towers, Wikelski and Roland Kays, now the director of the Biodiversity Laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, started to develop the Automated Radio Telemetry System (ARTS), a radio collar tracking system that could penetrate thick canopy. Crucially, ARTS revealed interactions between species—for example, how predatory ocelots support the island’s palm trees by eating large quantities of rabbit-like agoutis, after the rodents bury palm seeds underground as a snack for later. The researchers also found that despite what everyone believed, many of the animal inhabitants don’t remain on the island year-round, but frequently travel to the mainland. Kays and Wikelski had demonstrated in microcosm the kinds of insights that fine-grained multispecies tracking could provide even in challenging environments.
But Wikelski was frustrated that he couldn’t follow animals off the map. “If we don’t know the fate of an animal, we will never be able to really do good biology,” he says. The only solution would be to have a map with no edge.
This was around the time that GPS trackers became small enough to be used in animal tags. While radio tags like those used by Argos estimated location by transmitting signals to receivers, GPS systems like those in cars download data from three or more satellites to triangulate location precisely.
Wikelski became a man possessed by the idea of using this technology to create a truly global animal monitoring system. He envisioned digital tags that could capture GPS data throughout the day and upload packets of data to satellites that would periodically pass overhead. This idea would generate both excitement and a lot of skepticism. Peers told Wikelski that his dream system was unrealistic and unworkable.
At the turn of the millennium, he took a position at Princeton with the notion that the institutional pedigree might earn an audience for his “crazy” idea. Not long after he arrived, the chief of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory came for a talk, and Wikelski asked whether the agency would benefit from a satellite system that could track birds. “He looked at me as if I came from a different planet,” Wikelski remembers. Still, he got a meeting with NASA—though he says he was laughed out of the building. By this time, the agency had apparently forgotten all about Monique.
Undeterred, in 2002 Wikelski launched ICARUS, a half-joke (for fans of Greek mythology) at his own immodest ambitions. It aimed to use digital GPS tags and satellites that would relay the information to a data center on Earth nearly as instantly as the ARTS system had.
Wikelski’s big ideas continued to run into big doubts. “At the time, people told us technology-wise, it will never work,” he says. Even 10 years ago, when Wikelski was making proposals to space agencies, he was told to avoid digital tech altogether in favor of tried-and-tested Argos-style communication. “Don’t go digital!” he recalls people telling him. “This is completely impossible! You have to do it analog.”
Moving away from the fringe
In the two decades since ICARUS was established, the scientific community has caught up, thanks to developments in consumer tech. The Internet of Things made two-way digital communications with small devices viable, while lithium batteries have shrunk to sizes that more animals can carry and smartphones have made low-cost GPS and accelerometers increasingly available.“We’re going from where we couldn’t really track most vertebrate species on the planet to flipping it. We’re now able to track most things,” says Yanco, emphasizing that this is possible “to varying degrees of accuracy and resolution.”
The other key advance has been in data systems, and in particular the growth of Movebank, a central repository of animal tracking data that was developed from Wikelski’s ARTS system. Movebank brings together terrestrial-animal tracking data from various streams, including location data from the Argos system and from new high-res digital satellites, like ICARUS’s antenna on the ISS. (There are also plans to incorporate CubeSat data.) To date, it has collected 6 billion data points from more than 1,400 species, tracking animals’ full life cycles in ways that Wikelski once could only dream about. It is now a key part of the plumbing of the animal internet.
The field also had some practical successes, which in turn allowed it to marshal additional resources. In 2016 in London, for instance, where air pollution was responsible for nearly 10,000 human deaths a year, researchers from Imperial College and the tech startup Plume Labs released 10 racing pigeons equipped with sensors for nitrogen dioxide and ozone emissions from traffic. Daily updates (tweeted out by the Pigeon Air Patrol account) showed how taking a pigeon’s path through the neighborhoods revealed pollution hot spots that weather stations missed.
Diego Ellis Soto, a NASA research fellow and a Yale PhD candidate studying animal ecology, highlights an experiment from 2018: flocks of storks were outfitted with high-resolution GPS collars to monitor the air movements they encountered over the open ocean. Tagged storks were able to capture live data on turbulence, which can be notoriously hard for airlines to predict.
Among the critical roles for these animal sensors was one that was once considered eccentric: predicting weather and the world’s fast-changing climate patterns. Animals equipped with temperature and pressure sensors essentially act as free-roaming weather buoys that can beam out readings from areas underserved by weather stations, including polar regions, small islands, and much of the Global South. Satellites struggle to measure many environmental variables, including ocean temperatures, which can also be prohibitively expensive for drones to collect. “Eighty percent of all measurements in Antarctica of sea surface temperature are collected by elephant seals, and not by robots or icebreakers,” Ellis Soto says. “These seals can just swim underneath the ice and [do] stuff that robots can’t do.” The seals are now tagged yearly, and the data they collect helps refine weather models that predict El Niño and sea-level rise.
When the ICARUS antenna was installed on the ISS in August 2018, it seemed poised to unlock even more capabilities and discoveries. In the antenna’s short life, the project recorded the movements of bats, birds, and antelope in near-real time, from Alaska to the islands of Papua New Guinea, and transferred the data to Movebank. But when the experiment ground to a premature halt, Wikelski knew he’d have to do something different, and he concocted a plan by which ICARUS could continue—whether it could rely on a major space agency or not.
Another shot
Rather than a system of major satellites, the new incarnation of ICARUS will run on CubeSats: low-cost, off-the-shelf microsatellites launched into low Earth orbit (around the same height as the ISS) for around $800,000, meaning even developing nations that harbor space ambitions can be part of the project. CubeSats also offer the benefit of truly global coverage; the ISS’s orbital path means it can’t pick up signals from polar regions further north than southern Sweden or further south than the tip of Chile.There’s currently one ICARUS CubeSat in testing, having launched into orbit last summer. If all goes well, a CubeSat funded by the Max Planck Society, in collaboration with the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, will launch next April, followed by another in winter 2025, and—they’re hoping—another in 2026. Each further addition allows the tags to upload once more per day, increasing the temporal resolution and bringing the system closer to truly real-time tracking.
Outfitting even small animals with lightweight, inexpensive GPS sensors, like the one on this blackbird, and monitoring how they move around the world could provide insights into the global effects of climate change.
Wikelski and his partners have also rededicated themselves to making even smaller tags. They’re close to the goal of getting them down to three grams, which would in theory make it possible to track more than half of mammal species and around two-fifths of birds, plus hundreds of species of crocodiles, turtles, and lizards. ICARUS’s tags are also now cheaper (costing just $150) and smarter. ICARUS developed AI-on-chip systems that can reduce the energy use by orders of magnitude to cut down on the size of batteries, Wikelski explains. There are also new tags being tested by scientists from the University of Copenhagen and Wikelski’s institute at Max Planck that harvest energy from animal movements, like a self-winding wristwatch. Finally, these new ICARUS sensors can also be reprogrammed remotely, thanks to their two-way Internet of Things–style communications. A new ecosystem of tag makers—professional and DIY—is further driving down prices, open-sourcing innovation, and allowing experimentation.
Still, not everyone has bought into ICARUS. Critics question the costs compared with those of existing terrestrial monitoring initiatives like MOTUS, a national Canadian bird conservation program that uses a network of 750 receiving towers. Others argue that researchers can make better use of the thousands of animals already tracked by Argos, which is upgrading to more accurate tags and is also set to launch a series of CubeSats. The total cost of a fully realized ICARUS system—100,000 animals at any one time, some of which die or disappear as new ones are tagged—is around $10 million to $15 million a year. “If you’re thinking about how to tag a moose or bighorn sheep, you might need to hire a helicopter and the whole team and the vet,” says Ellis Soto, who has long collaborated with Wikelski. “So the costs can be extremely, extremely limiting.”
But, proponents argue, the initiative would beget a lot more information than other Earth-imaging space missions and be significantly cheaper than sending humans or drones to collect data from remote locations like polar ice sheets. Wikelski also emphasizes that no one entity will bear the cost. He is working with local communities in Bhutan, South Africa, Thailand, China, Russia, and Nigeria and gets requests from people across the world who want to connect tags to ICARUS. With cheap satellites and cheap tags, he sees a route to scale.
Even as ICARUS explores a grassroots future, one of the biggest changes since the initial launch is the backing Internet of Animals technology has received from the biggest giant in the field: NASA. The agency is now two years into a five-year project to explore how it might get more involved in building out such a system. “We’re very much focused on developing future mission concepts that will come after the current set of ICARUS missions,” says Ryan Pavlick, a researcher in remote sensing of biodiversity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2024, this will mean “architecture studies” that aim to understand what technical systems might meet the animal-tracking needs of stakeholders including NOAA, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the United States Geological Survey.
While NASA’s project aims to deliver benefits for the American people, a fully realized Internet of Animals would necessarily be global and interspecies. When we spoke in November 2023, Wikelski had just got off the phone discussing how ICARUS can help monitor the global “deal for nature” established by the UN’s COP15 biodiversity conference, whose targets include reducing extinction rates by a factor of 10.
Jill Deppe, who leads the National Audubon Society’s Migratory Bird Initiative, has boundless enthusiasm for how an Internet of Animals could affect organizations like hers. For a century, Audubon has watched migratory birds disappear on journeys to Chile or Colombia. A system that could tell us where birds are dying across the entire Western Hemisphere would allow Audubon to precisely target investments in habitat protection and efforts to address threats, she says.
“Our on-the-ground conservation work is all done on a local scale,” says Deppe. For migratory birds, ICARUS can link these isolated moments into a storyline that spans continents: “How do all of those factors and processes interact? And what does that mean for the birds’ survival?”
Movebank’s live-updating dashboard also makes more dynamic conservation action possible. Beaches can be closed as exhausted shorebirds land, wind farms can halt turbines as bats migrate through, and conservation-conscious farmers—who already aim to flood fields or drain them at times that suit migrating flocks—can do so with real knowledge.
In return, will animals really help us see the future of the planet’s climate?
No one is suggesting that animals take over from the system of satellites, weather stations, balloons, and ocean buoys that currently feed into meteorologists’ complex models. Yet technology that complements these dependable data streams, that captures the ever-changing biological signals of seals, storks, sharks, and other species, is already starting to fill in gaps in our knowledge. Once considered cryptic signs from the fates, or harbingers of doom, their behaviors are messages that have only just begun to show us ways to live on a changing planet.
,
Read More »
Tidal: Alphabet X’s New Effort to Protect The Oceans
November 3rd, 2023Via MIT Technology Review, a look at a previously unreported Alphabet X program to use cameras, computer vision, and machine learning to track the carbon stored in the biomass of the oceans:
In late September, Bianca Bahman snorkeled above a seagrass meadow off the western coast of Flores, a scorpion-shaped volcanic island in eastern Indonesia. As she flutter-kicked over the green seabed, Bahman steered an underwater camera suspended on a pair of small pontoons.
The stereoscopic camera captures high-resolution footage from two slightly different angles, creating a three-dimensional map of the ribbon-shaped leaves sprouting from the seafloor.
Bahman is a project manager for Tidal, whose team wants to use these cameras, along with computer vision and machine learning, to get a better understanding of life beneath the oceans. Tidal has used the same camera system to monitor fish in aquafarms off the coast of Norway for several years.
Now, MIT Technology Review can report, Tidal hopes its system can help preserve and restore the world’s seagrass beds, accelerating efforts to harness the oceans to suck up and store away far more carbon dioxide.
Tidal is a project within Alphabet’s X division, the so-called moonshot factory. Its mission is to improve our understanding of underwater ecosystems in order to inform and incentivize efforts to protect the oceans amid mounting threats from pollution, overfishing, ocean acidification, and global warming.
Its tools “can unlock areas that are desperately needed in the ocean world,” Bahman says.
Studies suggest the oceans could pull down a sizable share of the billions of additional tons of carbon dioxide that may need to be scrubbed from the atmosphere each year to keep temperatures in check by midcentury. But making that happen will require restoring coastal ecosystems, growing more seaweed, adding nutrients to stimulate plankton growth, or similar interventions.
Tidal decided to focus initially on seagrass because it’s a fast-growing plant that’s particularly effective at absorbing carbon dioxide from shallow waters. These coastal meadows might be able to suck up much more if communities, companies, or nonprofits take steps to expand them.
But scientists have only a rudimentary understanding of how much carbon seagrass sequesters, and how big a role the plant plays in regulating the climate. Without that knowledge and affordable ways to verify that restoration efforts actually store away more carbon, it will be tricky to track climate progress and build credible carbon credit marketplaces that would pay for such practices.
Tidal hopes to crack the problem by developing models and algorithms that translate the three-dimensional maps of seagrass it captures into reliable estimates of the carbon held below. If it works, automated versions of Tidal’s data-harvesting technology could provide that missing verification tool. This could help kick-start and lend credibility to marine-based carbon credit projects and markets, helping to restore ocean ecosystems and slow climate change.
The team envisions creating autonomous versions of its tools, possibly in the form of swimming robots equipped with its cameras, that can remotely monitor coastlines and estimate the growth or loss of biomass.
“If we can quantify and measure these systems, we can then drive investment to protect and conserve them,” says Neil Davé, the general manager of Tidal.
Still, some scientists are skeptical that Tidal’s technology will be able to accurately estimate shifting carbon levels in distant corners of the globe, among other challenges. Indeed, nature-based carbon credits have faced growing criticism: studies and reporting find that such efforts can overestimate climate benefits, create environmental risks, or present environmental justice concerns.
Davé acknowledges that they don’t know how well it will work yet. But he says that’s precisely what the Tidal team went to Indonesia, along with a group of Australian scientists, to try to find out.
Google launched what was then called Google X in early 2010, with a mandate to go after big, hard, even zany ideas that could produce the next Google.
This research division took over the self-driving-car project now known as Waymo. It developed the Google Brain machine-learning tools that power YouTube recommendations, Google Translate, and numerous other core products of its parent company. And it gave the world the Google Glass augmented-reality headset (whether the world wanted it or not). There were even short-lived flirtations with things like space elevators and teleportation.
X pursued climate-related projects from the start, but has had a very mixed track record in this area to date.
It acquired Makani, an effort to capture wind energy from large, looping kites, but the company shut down in 2020. It also pursued a project to produce carbon-neutral fuels from seawater, dubbed Foghorn, but abandoned the effort after finding it’d be too hard to match the cost of gasoline.
The two official climate “graduates” still operating are Malta, a spinout that relies on molten salt to store energy for the grid in the form of heat, and Dandelion Energy, which taps into geothermal energy to heat and cool homes. Both, however, remain relatively small and are still striving to gain traction in their respective markets.
After 12 years, X has yet to deliver a breakout success in climate or clean tech. The question is whether shifting strategies at X, and the current crop of climate-related efforts like Tidal, will improve that track record.
Astro Teller, the head of X, told MIT Technology Review that the division “pushed hard on radical innovation” at first. But it has since gradually turned up the “rigor dials” in lots of ways, he says, focusing more on the feasibility of the ideas it pursued.
The earlier X climate efforts were generally high-risk, hardware-heavy projects that directly addressed energy technologies and climate emissions, producing electricity, fuels, and storage in novel ways.
There are some clear differences in the climate projects that X is publicly known to be pursuing now. The two aside from Tidal are Mineral, which is using solar-panel-equipped robots and machine learning to improve agricultural practices, and Tapestry, which is developing ways to simulate, predict, and optimize the management of electricity grids.
With Tidal, Mineral, and Tapestry, X is creating tools to ensure that industries can do more to address environmental dangers and that ecosystems can survive in a hotter, harsher world. It’s also leaning heavily in to its parent company’s areas of strength, drawing on Alphabet’s robotics expertise as well as its ability to derive insights from massive amounts of data using artificial intelligence.
Such efforts might seem less transformative than, say, flying wind turbines—less moonshot, more enabling technology.
But while Teller allows that their new thinking may “be changing the character of the things that you see at X today,” he pushes back against the suggestion that the problems it’s pursuing aren’t as hard, big, or important as in the past.
“I don’t know that Tidal has to apologize for some sort of scope problem,” he says.
“Humanity needs the oceans and is killing off the oceans,” he adds. “We have to find a way to get more value from the ocean for humanity, while simultaneously regenerating the oceans instead of continuing to deplete them. And that’s just not going to happen unless we find a way to get automation into the oceans.”
A better protein source
Tidal, founded in 2018, grew out of informal conversations at X about the mounting threats to the oceans and the lack of knowledge required to address them, Davé says.“The goal was overly simplistic: save the oceans, save the world,” he says. “But it was based on the understanding that the oceans are critical to humanity, but probably the most neglected or misused resource we have.”
They decided to begin by focusing on a single application: aquaculture, which relies on land-based tanks, sheltered bays, or open ocean pens to raise fish, shellfish, seaweed, and more. Today, these practices produce just over half the fish consumed by humans. But the more they’re used, the more they might ease the commercial pressures to overfish, the emissions from fishing fleets, and the environmental impact of trawling.
Tidal believed it could provide tools that would allow aquafarmers to monitor their fish in a more affordable way, spot signs of problems earlier, and optimize their processes to ensure better health and faster growth, at lower cost.
The researchers developed and tested a variety of prototypes for underwater camera systems. They also began training computer vision software, which can identify objects and attributes within footage. To get it started, they used goldfish in a kiddie pool.
For the last five years, they’ve been stress-testing their tools in the harsh conditions of the North Sea, through a partnership with the Norwegian seafood company Mowi.
During a Zoom call, Davé pulled up a black-and-white video of the chaos that ensues at feeding time, when salmon compete to gobble up the food dropped into the pen. It’s impossible for the naked eye to draw much meaning from the scene. But the computer vision software tags each fish with tiny colored boxes as it identifies individuals swimming through the frame, or captures them opening their mouths to feed.
Davé says fish farms can use that data in real time, even in an automated way. For instance, they might stop dropping food into the pen when the fish cease feeding.
The cameras and software can perceive other important information as well, including how much the fish weigh, whether they have reached sexual maturity, and whether they show any signs of health problems. They can detect spinal deformities, bacterial infections, and the presence of parasites known as sea lice, which are often too tiny for the human eye to see.
“We knew from the early days that aquaculture would be us getting our feet wet, so to speak,” says Grace Young, Tidal’s scientific lead. “We knew it would be a stepping stone into working on other hard problems.”
Confident that it’s created one viable commercial application, Tidal is now turning its attention to gathering information about natural ocean ecosystems.
“Now is a big moment for us,” she adds, “because we’re able to see how the tools that we built can apply and make a difference in other ocean industries.”
Restoring our coasts
Seagrasses form thick meadows that can run thousands of miles along shallow coastlines, covering up to about 0.2% of the world’s ocean floors. They provide nutrients and habitat to marine populations, filter pollution, and protect coastlines.The plants are photosynthetic, producing the food they need from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide dissolved in ocean waters. They store carbon in their biomass and deliver it into the seabed sediments. They also help capture and bury the carbon in other organic matter that floats past.
Globally, seagrass beds may sequester as much as 8.5 billion tons of organic carbon in seafloor sediments and, to a much, much smaller degree, in their biomass. On the high end, these meadows draw down and store away about 110 million additional tons each year.
But estimates of the total range and carbon uptake rates of seagrass vary widely. A key reason is that there is no cheap and easy way to map the planet’s extensive coastlines. Only about 60% of seagrass meadows have been surveyed in US waters, with “varying degrees of accuracy because of difficulties in remote sensing of underwater habitat,” according to a National Academies study.
” ”
The seagrass meadows along Waecicu Beach in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia.Whatever their full expanse, though, we know they are shrinking. Development, overfishing, and pollution are all destroying coastal ecosystems, which also include carbon-sucking habitats like mangrove forests and salt marshes. Draining and excavating these shallow biological communities releases hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year. Meanwhile, climate change itself is making ocean waters warmer, more acidic, and deeper, placing greater strains on many of the species.
Nations could help halt or reverse these trends by converting developed shorelines back into natural ones, actively managing and restoring wetlands and seagrass meadows, or planting them in new areas where they may do better as ocean levels rise.
Such work, however, would be wildly expensive. The question is who would pay for it, particularly if it comes at the expense of lucrative coastal development.
The main possibility is that companies or governments could create market incentives to support preservation and restoration by awarding credits for the additional carbon that seagrass, mangroves, and salt marshes take up and store away. Tens of billions of dollars’ worth of carbon credits are likely to be traded in voluntary markets in the coming decades, by some estimates.
The carbon market registry Verra has already developed a methodology for calculating the carbon credits earned through such work. At least one seagrass project has applied to earn credits: a long-running effort by the Nature Conservancy’s Virginia chapter to plant eelgrass around the Virginia Barrier Islands.
But some marine scientists and carbon market experts argue that there need to be more rigorous ways to ensure that these efforts are removing as much carbon as they claim. Otherwise, we risk allowing people or businesses to buy and sell carbon credits without meaningfully helping the climate.
Diving in
Tidal began exploring whether its tools could be used for seagrass late last year, as a growing body of studies underscored the need for carbon removal and highlighted the potential role of ocean-based approaches.“We started to double-click and read a lot of studies,” Davé says. “And found out, ‘Wow, we do have some technology we’ve developed that could be applicable here.’”
The team eventually held a series of conversations with researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), an Australian government science agency that has long used drones, satellites, acoustic positioning systems, and other equipment to survey coral reefs, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows across the Indo-Pacific.
Seagrass is particularly difficult to map on large scales because in satellite images it’s difficult to distinguish from other dark spots in shallow waters, says Andy Steven, a marine scientist who oversees coastal research efforts at CSIRO.
“The world needs to move to being able to map and then measure change on a far more frequent basis,” Steven says. “I see the Tidal technology being part of an arsenal of methods that help us rapidly survey, process, and deliver information to decision makers on the time frames that are needed. It is addressing a really fundamental issue.”
CSIRO agreed to help Tidal test how well its system works. They collaborated on an earlier field trial off the coast of Fiji this summer and on the subsequent experiment this September in Indonesia. The latter country’s thousands of islands boast one of the world’s largest and most diverse expanses of seagrass meadows.
For the first effort, Tidal opted to couple its software with an off-the-shelf autonomous underwater vehicle equipped with a basic camera. The hope was that if the researchers could scan meadows using standard hardware, their general approach would be more widely accessible.
It didn’t work. The seagrass was taller and the tides were lower than expected. The thruster and rudder quickly got clogged up with seaweed, forcing the team to stop every few minutes, Bahman says.
After a brainstorming whiteboard session, the Tidal team decided to take its own camera system, turn it face down, and put it on a float that could be pulled along by a boat. The so-called Hammersled is equipped with fins to keep it moving straight and a set of ropes and cleats that allow the researchers to dip the camera deeper into the water.
Tidal’s researchers test out the “Hammersled” at a pool in the middle of Alphabet’s campus in Sunnyvale, California, by pulling it over patches of plastic seagrass.
The system worked well enough during a few tests in a large pool in the middle of Alphabet’s campus in Sunnyvale, California, where team members pulled it by hand over patches of plastic seagrass on the bottom.
The bigger test, however, is whether Tidal can translate its maps into an accurate estimate of the carbon seagrass holds and buries in the seafloor.
‘We’ve got it’
After Steven and his colleagues arrived in Labuan Bajo, on the western tip of Flores, they rented a 14-cabin liveaboard, the Sea Safari VII, and began sailing around the islands. They launched surveillance drones from the deck to search for promising seagrass beds to study, prioritizing sites with many different species to help train Tidal’s models and algorithms for the wide variability that occurs in the natural world.Once the CSIRO researchers selected, measured, tagged, filmed, and photographed their 100-meter transects, the Tidal team passed through.
They used a little Indonesian fishing boat to pull along the Hammersled. Bahman, software engineer Hector Yee, and other staffers took turns jumping into the water with goggles and flippers to clasp a pontoon and keep the camera pointed straight as they crisscrossed the test area.
Once the process was complete, the CSIRO researchers used spades, peat borers, and other tools to pull up the seagrass and deep sediments from one-meter square study plots.
Back on the main island, the Australian scientists used makeshift ovens, including some created from hair dryers, to dry out the plant materials and sediments. Then they ground them up and deposited them into hundreds of plastic bags, carefully marked to denote different locations and depths.
In the months to come, they’ll analyze the carbon content in each batch at their labs in Adelaide, determining the total amount in each plot.
“If our algorithm takes a look at the data we gathered before they took the core samples and comes up with the same answer, then we’ve got it,” says Terry Smith, a solutions engineer with Tidal.
Open questions
Not everyone, however, is convinced that seagrass is a particularly promising path for carbon removal, or one whose climate benefits we’ll be able to accurately assess.Among the suite of approaches to carbon removal that the National Academies has explored in its studies, those focusing on coastal ecosystems rank near the bottom in terms of the potential to scale them up. That’s largely because these ecosystems can only exist as narrow bands along shorelines, and there’s considerable competition with human activity.
“We need to do everything we can to preserve seagrass,” says Isaac Santos, a professor of marine biogeochemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, because of the valuable roles these plants play in protecting coasts, marine biodiversity, and more.
“But on the big question—Are they going to save us from climate change?—the answer is straightforward: No,” he says. “They don’t have enough area to sequester enough carbon to make a big impact.”
Accurately determining the net carbon and climate impact from seagrass restoration is also problematic, as studies have highlighted.
Carbon sequestration varies dramatically in these coastal meadows, depending on the location, the season, the mix of species, and how much gets gobbled up by fish and other marine creatures. The carbon in seafloor sediments can also leak into the surrounding waters, where some is dissolved and effectively remains in the ocean for millennia, and some may escape back out into the atmosphere. In addition, coastal ecosystems produce methane and nitrous oxide, potent greenhouse gases that would need to be factored into any estimate of overall climate impact.
Finally, the vast, vast majority of the carbon in seagrass beds is buried in the seafloor, not in the plant material that Tidal intends to measure.
“And we also know that the correlation between biomass and sediment carbon is not straight forward,” Santos said in an email. “Hence, any approach based on biomass only will require all sorts of validations,” to ensure that it actually provides reliable estimates of stored carbon.
An essay in The Conversation late last month highlighted another concern: environmental justice. The authors, Sonja Klinsky of Arizona State University and Terre Satterfield of the University of British Columbia, stressed that the local communities most affected by such projects should have considerable say in them. Some coastal towns may not want to turn their active harbor back into, say, a salt marsh.
“Much of the global population lives near the ocean,” they wrote, and some interventions “might impinge on places that support jobs and communities” and provide significant amounts of food.
Unlocking the secrets
Addressing the scientific questions will require better understanding of coastline ecosystems. CSIRO’s Steven says he hopes that Tidal’s technology will provide easier ways to conduct the necessary studies. “It’s absolutely a challenge,” he says. “But you’ve got to start somewhere.”As for the environmental justice concerns, Tidal stresses that these nature-based approaches to carbon removal potentially provide multiple benefits to natural ecosystems and local communities. They could, for instance, help to sustain fishery populations. Tidal is also working with CSIRO to train local communities in Fiji and Indonesia, including university students, to help them participate directly in carbon markets.
“Ultimately, our vision is to provide these communities with tools to be able to manage, protect, and repopulate these local systems locally,” Davé said in an email.
So what’s next for Tidal?
It will still take months for the Australian team to complete its analysis of the seagrass and sediments. Whatever they find, the teams plan to continue conducting field experiments to refine the models and algorithms and make sure they provide accurate carbon estimates across a variety of seagrass types in different regions and conditions.
For instance, Tidal may look to partner with other research groups focused on the Bahamas, another major seagrass region.
If it does ultimately work well, Tidal believes, its suite of tools could also support other ocean-based approaches to carbon removal, including growing more seaweed and restoring mangrove forests.
Davé says he can envision a variety of potential business models, including providing carbon measurement, reporting, and verification as a service to offsets registries or organizations carrying out restoration work. They might also create autonomous robotic systems that plant seagrass with little human involvement.
Even if the systems don’t provide reliable enough carbon estimates, Tidal believes its efforts will still aid scientific efforts to understand crucial ocean ecosystems, and support international efforts to protect them. That could include monitoring the well-being of coral reefs, which are gravely threatened by warming waters, Davé says.
It may not sound like a moonshot in the way that X originally conceived of the concept. It’s certainly no space elevator.
But by building tools that a variety of organizations could use in a variety of ways to unlock the secrets of Earth’s critical and fragile ecosystems, Tidal may be demonstrating a new way to take on really hard problems.
,
Read More »
A Listening Network To Detect Nuclear Bomb Tests Found Blue Whales Instead
October 3rd, 2023Via BBC, an article on how a listening built to detect nuclear bomb tests found blue whales instead:
Since the 1990s, a global network of sensors has listened for unauthorised nuclear detonations. But as Richard Fisher discovers, its creation has led to unanticipated upsides for science – such as identifying a previously unknown pod of pygmy blue whales.
For generations, the creatures swam through the ocean without crossing paths with any human beings. Some of them grew to 24m (80ft) long and weighed 90 tonnes. But if these enormous animals did encounter any boats, those meetings went unrecorded. Until recently, we didn’t even know they were there: a pod of pygmy blue whales in the Indian Ocean.
Their discovery in 2021 was all the more striking because of how they were found. We wouldn’t have come across them if it wasn’t for nuclear weapons.
What have atomic bombs got to do with a pod of whales? The answer lies in a global network of sensors, placed in some of the world’s most remote locations. Since the 1990s, its operators in a control room in Vienna, Austria have been listening for rogue nuclear tests. But as the years have passed, their network has also picked up many other sounds and rumblings throughout the ocean, ground and atmosphere – and that’s now proving a surprising boon to science.
The story of how the blue whales were found can be traced all the way back to the 1940s, when human beings discovered they could unlock the terrible power of the atom. After the US Trinity test and the bombing of Japan, decades of instability and fear followed, as nations raced to build their own arsenals and test ever-more powerful weapons.
After 50 years, many governments accepted that transparency was needed. If nuclear escalation was to be avoided, the world needed a way to know if any rogue nation or actor was conducting unauthorised tests. Only then could they trust one another.
So, in the 1990s, a number of nations signed and ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), including the UK and many Western European nuclear powers. A few did not, including China, India and the US. While these hold-outs meant the treaty failed to come into force, the process did create a global norm against testing. And crucially, it also led to the establishment of a network capable of hearing, sniffing or sensing a nuclear detonation anywhere on Earth.
With sensors all over the world, the International Monitoring System – run by the CTBT Organisation in Vienna – has been operating ever since, growing to more than 300 facilities worldwide that can detect the sound, shockwaves and radioactive materials of nuclear explosions. This includes more than 120 seismic stations, 11 hydro-acoustic microphones in the oceans, 60 “infrasound” stations that pick up very low-frequency inaudible noise, and 80 detectors of radioactive particles or gases.
Many facilities can be found in quiet, relatively undisturbed locations. The US, for example, operates a station on Wake Island in the Pacific, one of the world’s most isolated atolls. Others can be found in Antarctica. However, a few are a little closer to civilisation, such as the seismic array in the village of Lajitas in Texas – 650km (400 miles) west of San Antonio – or the radionuclide station in Sacramento, California. (Here’s a map of all of them.)
Their widespread distribution means that if there’s a nuclear detonation somewhere on Earth, the operators of the Vienna control room will know, says Xyoli Perez Campos, director of the International Monitoring System division [IMS] of the CTBTO in Austria. “Wherever it happens, we have the technologies to cover it,” she says. “If there is an underground nuclear test, then we have the seismic technology to catch it. If the nuclear testing is underwater, then we have the hydro-acoustic stations. If testing happens in the atmosphere, then we have the infrasound. And the radionuclide stations allow us to distinguish if there was a nuclear component; that’s the smoking gun.”
Indeed, when North Korea conducted nuclear weapons tests in the 2000s and 2010s, various seismic sensors in the IMS picked up the waves from the blasts, and analysis of radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere confirmed it. The network has also sensed large non-nuclear blasts, like the enormous explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020, or the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption in January 2022.
The non-nuclear explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020 produced infrasound and seismic waves that could be detected from far away (Credit: Getty Images)
The non-nuclear explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020 produced infrasound and seismic waves that could be detected from far away (Credit: Getty Images)Recently, however, the IMS nuclear network has uncovered much more than big bangs. Over the past decade or so, as scientific access to the data has opened up, researchers have turned to the IMS to sense events that might otherwise go unnoticed. That includes the songs of whales, but also much more.
In June, hundreds of these scientists met at a conference in Vienna to share their findings. Researchers from Germany showed how the network’s hydro-acoustic sensors can monitor noise caused by shipping, a team from Japan presented findings about how they’d used the IMS to study submarine volcanic activity, and a Brazilian researcher spoke about the infrasound generated by the aurora borealis and aurora australis.
Others described efforts to detect the crash of avalanching glaciers from afar – building on previous research that deployed the network to keep tabs on calving icebergs in Antarctica.
The physicist Elizabeth Silber of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico even demonstrated how the IMS’s detectors had picked up an “Earth-grazing fireball” – a meteoroid larger than 10cm (4in) that generated shockwaves as it struck the atmosphere on 22 September 2020.
As for the pygmy blue whales – a tropical subspecies of blue whale – they were discovered when researchers in Australia decided to listen a little closer to ocean sounds using the IMS’s hydro-acoustic network.
In 2021, bioacoustician Emmanuelle Leroy at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, and colleagues analysed the songs of various whale populations in the central Indian ocean. A few years prior, a new song had been noticed, known as the “Chagos song”, or “Diego Garcia Downsweep”, named after the place it was detected: the Diego Garcia atoll in the Chagos archipelago.
At the time, five blue whale pods were known in the Indian Ocean, along with populations of Omura’s whales. But it wasn’t clear which group the Chagos song belonged to. Scientists know that each pod has strongly personalised calls, which means they can be sorted into “acoustic populations”, and this one did not match.
Leroy and colleagues realised that the IMS network would allow them to study the Chagos song over almost two decades, at various locations in the ocean, ranging from Sri Lanka to Western Australia. Their analysis concluded that the Chagos song must belong to an entirely new population of pygmy blue whales.
Finding this new pod was a significant piece of good news, not least because pygmy blue whales are so rare. In the 20th Century, blue whales were hunted close to extinction, from an estimated 239,000 in the 1920s to a low of around 360 in 1973.
When the architects of the IMS built their detection network, they did so hoping that the world would be a little safer. “What is really amazing for me is that these smart people decided that nuclear testing is a hazard for humanity, and not only did they write a treaty saying let’s stop it, but they came up with the technologies to monitor it. That is putting science and technology into good use for humanity,” says Perez Campos.
But even with that foresight, the network’s founders probably did not anticipate all of the IMS’s uses today. Its 300-plus stations have evolved into the ultimate planetary listening network. Right now, at remote locations all over the world, sensors are monitoring humanity and nature for sounds and rumbles that might otherwise go unnoticed – and that includes a family of whales singing a unique song. We might not be able to see this elusive pod, but they can nonetheless be heard.
,
Read More »
Oceans To Get Better Protection With Connected Underwater Technology
June 15th, 2023Via the EU’s Horizon Innovation Magazine, a look at how – amid rising sea levels, plastics pollution and overfishing – the emerging Internet of Underwater Things will vastly expand knowledge about the world’s seas.
Imagine seals swimming in the sea with electronic tags that send real-time water data to scientists back in their laboratories. Or archaeologists near a coast being automatically alerted when a diver trespasses on a precious shipwreck.
Such scenarios are becoming possible as a result of underwater connected technologies, which can help monitor and protect the world’s oceans. They can also shed light on the many remaining mysteries of the sea.
New frontier
‘A lot of funding has been provided to companies and institutions exploring space, but we have oceans around us that we have not explored,’ said Vladimir Djapic, innovation associate at the EU-funded TEUTA project.
Around 70% of the Earth is covered by oceans and more than four-fifths of them have never been mapped, explored or even seen by humans.
The Internet of Underwater Things, or IoUT, is a network of smart, interconnected sensors and devices to make communicating in the sea easier. It contrasts with the Internet of Things, or IoT, covering everything from smart phones to devices that allow people to switch on home heating remotely,
TEUTA ran from October 2020 through March 2022. It helped a Croatian company, H20 Robotics, develop and sell lightweight low-cost acoustic devices and robotic platforms for underwater wireless networks.
‘With a limited number of underwater network installations before, we could only explore limited coastal areas,’ said Djapic, who is chief executive officer of Zagreb-based H20 Robotics.
Advances in underwater technologies are expected to transform many sectors including marine biology, environmental monitoring, construction and geology.
Whale-like ways
TEUTA developed acoustic technology, which mimics the way whales and dolphins communicate.
Acoustic waves, unlike radio or optical communication ones, travel long distances underwater regardless of whether it is murky or clear.
Remote sensors, measuring tools, detection systems or cameras set up at an underwater site gather data then sent to a buoy on the surface. The buoy in turn sends the information wirelessly back to base, via the cloud, without the need for communication cables.
One focus area is improving communications between divers and land-based colleagues, according to Djapic.
‘For example, a diver working in underwater construction can send a message to a supervisor and request additional help or tools or similar,’ said Djapic.
Improved underwater communications will help connect land and sea, © H2O ROBOTICS, 2023Improved underwater communications will help connect land and sea, © H2O ROBOTICS, 2023
Scientists also stand to benefit by, for example, being able to remotely turn on a water-quality measuring device installed on the seabed from their labs.
For their part, archaeologists could use the technology to help protect vulnerable underwater sites with intruder-detection technology installed in remote locations.
Indeed, TEUTA technology will support another EU-backed project, TECTONIC, seeking to improve the documentation and protection of underwater cultural heritage at three pilot sites.
The sites are the Capo Rizzuto Marine Protected Area in southern Italy, the submerged ancient harbour of Aegina in Greece’s Saronic Gulf and a shipwreck site in the Deseado estuary in Argentina.
Other possibilities such as underwater agriculture or mining could also open up, according to Djapic.
For public agencies or non-governmental organisations that monitor water quality, the technology could replace the need for researchers to go and collect samples physically and deliver them to the lab.
While TEUTA gave a boost to fledgling underwater communication technologies, more work needs to be done in marketing them and ensuring they are used more widely, according to Djapic.
‘It all needs to be analysed,’ he said. ‘Our technology enables the measuring of environmental parameters.’
Sensors and samplers
Meanwhile, in Italy, a team of researchers is pursuing a new approach to ocean-data collection by using sensors and samplers that could be integrated into existing observatories and platforms.
This would enable the gathering of vast amounts of information useful for, as an example, the proposed European Digital Twin of the Ocean announced in February 2022. The twin will be a real-time digital replica of the ocean integrating both historical and live data.
By developing a new generation of marine technologies, the EU-funded NAUTILOS project will gather previously inaccessible information and improve understanding of physical, chemical and biological changes in oceans.
Running for four years through September 2024, the project is coordinated by Gabriele Pieri of the Rome-based National Research Council.
‘Our proposal set out to fill a gap in the observation of oceans,’ said Pieri. ‘They are the largest habitats on Earth, but the least observed ones because of the difficulties in on-site observation and the costs of monitoring.’
NAUTILOS technology is already being tested in the Baltic and the Mediterranean seas, including the Aegean and Adriatic.
Sensors can, for example, measure levels of chlorophyll-A and dissolved oxygen in the water. These are important indicators of water quality and, by extension, of the presence of fish, helping protect their stocks.
Sensors and samplers collecting information about the concentration of microplastics in the water also expand understanding of the impact of human-generated pollution on the oceans.
Helping flippers and hands
One of the NAUTILOS partners, France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), has even recruited some unlikely teammates: seals.
Swimming off the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, these sea creatures have been tagged with sensors that record valuable data about the animals themselves and their habitats.
The NAUTILOS team, made up of research institutions and companies, is developing more than a dozen types of sensors and samplers. These include remote sensing technologies and microplastics detectors.
The project is keen to demonstrate that the new tools can work with existing and future platforms and easily switch between them.
The tools are relatively cheap, can be deployed quickly and work in conjunction with other equipment, offering many advantages. For example, a sensor can be mounted on an autonomous underwater vehicle and then moved to a fixed buoy.
Citizen science is an important part of NAUTILOS, which works with volunteers organising campaigns around ocean plastics, for example, as well as with scuba-diving associations whose members can test new technologies and offer feedback.
The team has also developed a smartphone app for divers to upload photos of underwater flora or fauna that can be assessed by researchers.
‘The interest in citizen science has really surprised me,’ said Pieri. ‘A lot of people are willing to help improve the life of the sea.’
,
Read More »
Tracking Whales As They Cruise The Arctic
May 11th, 2023Via Terra Daily, an article on how researchers were able to simultaneously tracking multiple whales using fiber-optic cables in the Arctic, off the coast of Svalbard:
Fibre-optic cables line the coasts of the continents and criss-cross the oceans, carrying signals that are the backbone of communication in the modern world. While their main job is telecommunications, researchers have been exploring ways to use this giant network to eavesdrop on everything from storms to earthquakes to whales.
Now, working with two nearly parallel fibre-optic telecommunications cables off the Norwegian arctic archipelago of Svalbard, researchers have been able to estimate the positions and tracks of eight fin whales along a section of the cable – for five hours.“This work demonstrates how we were able to simultaneously locate and follow these whales over an 1800 km2 area – with relatively low infrastructure investment,” said Martin Landro, head of the Centre for Geophysical Forecasting at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and one of the members of the team that did the work.
Transforming fibre cables into hydrophones
The system the researchers used for this work is called Distributed Acoustic Sensing, or DAS. DAS uses an instrument called an interrogator to send laser pulses into a fibre-optic system and records the returning light pulses, essentially turning the cables into a series of hydrophones.
Landro and his colleagues first began to explore the ability of DAS to record underwater vibrations and sounds in the waters off Svalbard in June 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, they collected 40 days of recordings and roughly 250 terabytes of data. From these data, researchers were able to identify more than 800 whale songs and calls.
The researchers have built on this early work to expand their ability to identify different whale species and to conduct real time recording from the fibre optic cables in Svalbard.
For this latest effort, published in Frontiers of Marine Science, the researchers had access to two, nearly parallel 250 km long fibre-optic cables that extend from Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Svalbard, to Ny-Alesund, a research outpost to the northwest. The paired cables allowed the researchers to localize the whales with an accuracy of roughly 100 metres, within an area of roughly 1800 km2.
“This shows that the two fibre cables are a very effective means of monitoring whales in the Arctic,” Landro said.
A melting Arctic
As a Norwegian territory in the high arctic, Svalbard offers Landro and other researchers an important base from which to study this changing ecosystem.
Recent research predicts that the Arctic could be ice free in the summer as early as 2035, which could increase shipping and cruise ship traffic across the top of the globe.
As one small example, as many as 35 cruise ships and additional smaller expedition ships are expected to transport up to 75,000 people to Longyearbyen and surroundings in 2023, according to Visit Svalbard.
Could reduce ship strike risk
Whales are already changing the way they use the Arctic and Antarctic as feeding grounds, with some research showing that fin whales have begun spending time year-round in Arctic regions. That means increased ship traffic in these areas can also increase the likelihood of ship strikes. The use of the existing fibre-optic cable network and DAS could help reduce this possibility, the researchers said.
“The capabilities demonstrated here establish the potential for a near-real-time whale tracking capability that could be applied anywhere in the world where there are whales and fiber-optic cables,” the researchers wrote. “Coupled with ship detection, using a similar approach ….a real-time collision avoidance system could be developed to reduce ship strikes.”
This development comes at a time when NORDUnet, the Nordic Gateway for Research and Innovation and the Nordic NRENs have begun a number of initiatives to investigate and plan the first submarine fibre-optic cable system between Europe, Asia, and North America to secure a shorter route through the Arctic Ocean. The effort is called Polar Connect.
If such an initiative is realized, “it would open far greater areas for us to follow whale movements in the Arctic,” Landro said.
,
Read More »