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- [00:04]
Samantha Murphy
Four years, 206 days, 18 hours and 30 minutes. That's how long the climate clock gives us. In cities around the world, the clock serves as a reminder for humanity, counting down the minutes humans have to prevent the irreversible damage from climate change. This past October, a team of climate scientists released their 2024 report on the state of climate, and they did not sugarcoat their findings. Not only do we have less time to react to climate change than originally thought, but it's also too late to prevent some of the most catastrophic climate effects. For decades, scientists have worked to slow down this crisis. But what if there was a way to slow it and reverse the damage? What if the answer has been right under our noses the whole time? Or more accurately, below sea level? Yes, the ocean. The vast, unexplored frontier of our planet. The ocean regulates weather, helps cool the Earth, and plays a crucial role in stabilizing our climate. It covers more than two thirds of the Earth's surface, but we've only explored less than 5% of it. To put this into perspective, we know more about Mars, Venus and the dark side of the Moon than our own oceans. But if we could better understand the ocean, could we unlock its power to help fight climate change? Actually, yes. Enter ocean data mapping. This method of studying our ocean tracks everything from sea level rise to marine life movements. It offers scientists a clearer picture of how climate change is transforming our oceans. Collecting ocean data is not an easy task. And the current lack of ocean data explains why scientists and companies around the world are trying to find technologies and tools that can make it more accessible. But new developments have started to give scientists promise, including a tech innovation called the Unmanned Surface Vessel. I'm senior tech correspondent Samantha Murphy. Kelly, this is the next innovation. There's a lot going on in the ocean. It goes beyond the abundance of species and plant life. And the depths of the ocean floor are often inaccessible to humans, largely because of changes in pressure, temperature, light, among many other things. So to understand how the ocean is changing, we need a detailed, real time map of the ocean floor. By studying the ocean floor, scientists can monitor different things, from sea level rise to the movement of marine life.
- [02:39]
Shepard Smith
You know, it's really the backbone of all oceanographic data. You can't. It's the base map on which every other ocean map describing habitat or ocean oceanography or species distribution or anything else, it's the base map that makes it all make sense. And we don't have a good enough basemap.
- [02:58]
Samantha Murphy
Shepard Smith is the Chief Technology Officer at X Ocean, an Irish marine data company that specializes in collecting ocean data through uncrewed survey vessels. He's responsible for the design, construction and maintenance of the vessels. For over 30 years he's been mapping the ocean, mostly on survey ships and offshore research vessels. He was working for the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before he retired, but was pulled back after learning about X Ocean.
- [03:26]
Shepard Smith
Well, you know, I think we're not that we're certainly not the first ones to make a usv, but we've done it successfully at scale in the context of building a whole company around it.
- [03:37]
Samantha Murphy
Xocean was created out of the idea to collect marine data faster, more efficiently and with smaller environmental footprints. Their vessels produce just 11000 of emissions that conventional ships do.
- [03:50]
Shepard Smith
Well, it's clearly a purpose driven company, driven by the opportunity to make a difference in the energy economy. It's really twofold for X Ocean. It's not only how we do it, where our carbon footprint footprint is a fraction of would have been done, used traditionally by the larger ships that I would have served on before, but also the customers that we serve are primarily offshore wind. And that in itself is a huge opportunity to shift the economy more than just our little piece, but to provide sustainable energy for huge, huge sections of the coastal areas that offshore winds supports.
- [04:29]
Samantha Murphy
So a USV is an uncrewed survey vessel. It's an autonomous vessel that can collect data in the ocean. The good thing about it is that it's uncrewed, meaning all personnel, including pilots and surveyors, are safely onshore. This is a huge win for the scientific community, especially those studying the ocean. For years, scientists would have spent weeks, sometimes months on board a crewed vessel trying to collect data.
- [04:54]
Shepard Smith
So our USVs are about four and a half meters long. You know, think of it as roughly the size, size of a car. And we can trailer them. So if we, we can trailer them behind a truck, bring them to a coastal port, put them in the water and they'll go out for safety up to nine or ten days with, with one load of fuel. And they're, they'll be connected, they'll be, there's no one on board, they're, they're uncrewed, but they're connected by satellite communication or in coastal areas, mobile networks to our expert pilots and surveyors who are actually doing the work. They're controlling the vessel, they're controlling the sensors, they're interpreting the data. All the same things that, that a mariner, a pilot or a surveyor would do at sea. They're just doing it from ashore. And those. So our, our boats will go out, do a full swing for nine or nine or ten days, and collect an enormous amount of data, 24 hours a day, and then come back in again either when the weather breaks or when, when they run out of fuel.
- [05:54]
Samantha Murphy
USVs can save time, energy and money, which makes ocean floor mapping all the easier. But why exactly is ocean floor mapping important.
- [06:06]
Shepard Smith
Now? This is important for a lot of reasons, right? For natural resources, for habitat, for tsunami modeling, for storm surge modeling, for habitat protection. Loads of reasons why, you know, every country really does need to understand their own seabed. And in a lot of cases, the size of the seabed holdings of a country in their exclusive economic zone is, can be just as big as the country itself, and in a lot of cases, much bigger.
- [06:33]
Dr. Art Trebanis
And this is fundamental. For so much of our lives, our livelihood, and the health of our planet, we need to better understand our oceans. In a time of climate change and warming conditions in our oceans, it's our oceans that are the fuel for storms, hurricanes, and the like. It's the source of so much food. It's the basis for our transportation and mineral resources. And the list goes on and on and on. And so to manage and to utilize those resources, we need to understand what's there. And that's where we need to start by first having an indication of the condition, the health of the oceans and to know where it's deepest, where it's sandy, where there are shipwrecks, where there are fishing nets, where there are healthy corals.
- [07:25]
Samantha Murphy
That's Dr. Art Trambanas, professor of oceanography and geology at the University of Delaware. He's worked on ocean mapping for decades. In recent years, he's resorted to USVs for research, using them as teaching tools with his students. I asked him why it was so important. We studied the entire ocean bed. He told me it was much bigger than just climate change.
- [07:47]
Dr. Art Trebanis
It's going to help us to understand where sensitive habitats are, where seamounts are located, where there are sand deposits, where there are likely areas for upwelling currents. It's going to improve our ability to mulch, model the oceans and the climate response to the oceans. It's going to help us to track those mobile species, to know where fish and whales and other prey or plankton and everything are located. So it's going to touch upon all those, all those kinds of things. I think we're going to see an increasing use of autonomy in the operation of vessels, and that will contribute towards shipping, moving goods, raw materials, finished Goods around the planet to safety operations from everything from fishing to transportation.
- [08:38]
Samantha Murphy
The ocean has absorbed over 93% of greenhouse gases since the 1970s. Expanding our ocean mapping efforts will help us better understand how these vast waters are responding to weather changes and how we as humans can mitigate the effects.
- [08:53]
Dr. Art Trebanis
We're engaged in this experiment on our planet to see what happens when we subject the atmosphere to historically exceeding levels of greenhouse warming gases. And we need to have as good of information about what's going on with our oceans.
- [09:12]
Samantha Murphy
There's a massive global push called Seabed 2030. Every inch of the ocean floor mapped by 2030. That is a monumental task.
- [09:21]
Dr. Art Trebanis
As of today, we've collectively mapped about 25% of the ocean floor. It's taken all of human history to get up to 25% and we've got to do the other 75% of it.
- [09:32]
Samantha Murphy
But uncrewed survey vessels could really help drive this initiative.
- [09:36]
Shepard Smith
One other thing that's really unique about X Ocean is our boats are really tightly configuration managed. They're nearly identical and so they can really be used interchangeably, which allows us to scale in a way that most ocean mapping operations really can't do. And not only at the phase of our at sea operations, but because of that really tight integration and really consistent way that we handle our data. Our data processing is all centralized in one cloud based processing system that allows us to churn through the data processing very quickly and efficiently and to apply new AI algorithms and batch algorithms and large computing resources to be able to get that done really quickly. And it's just another piece of this sort of unique puzzle that we've put together with xocean. That's really an entirely new way of doing ocean mapping.
- [10:35]
Samantha Murphy
You could Send out multiple USVs as part of a data project, Meaning if you're a scientist that's looking to collect different kinds of data, you can eliminate the need for multiple missions. X Ocean's unique technology allows scientists faster and more convenient access to data. Shepard says X Ocean's vessels are about the size of a car and can be deployed for up to 10 days, collecting crucial without putting human lives at risk. Before USVs, scientists had to be physically out at sea, often for weeks, battling rough conditions and collecting data under time pressure. But robots, they don't tire or need to sleep.
- [11:13]
Dr. Art Trebanis
And one of the things that robots are really good at, in fact, they excel beyond what any human pilot can do is drive nice straight lines. For us, they can go out and do these very beautiful and we get nice straight lines and we get really good looking data. And then once we've done it once, we can tell the robot, great job, way to go, do it again. And so now we can start to look at changes to the environment as well.
- [11:41]
Samantha Murphy
The ocean offers countless types of data to collect and just as many methods to collect it. A signature method of the USV is the mowing the lawn technique. It's what Dr. Trembanis was talking about. Nice straight lines on the ocean bed.
- [11:55]
Shepard Smith
We can steer very, very precisely. We can run the USV at a speed that really is optimized for the resolutions that we need for each of those sensors. You know, all of us have mowed the lawn, right? And we often compare broad scale ocean mapping to mowing the lawn where you go up and you turn around, you come back in a line that's, you know, just adjacent to the one you just did. Now, on a really big ship, it can take half an hour to make that turn at the end of the line where you go up and you have to make a big Williamson turn and you come back to get on the adjacent line. Our USVs are so nimble that we can just turn them on a dime and get right back online within just a couple of minutes.
- [12:38]
Samantha Murphy
Precision is key in ocean mapping, and this is where USVs excel. These robots are accurate, fast and consistent, and they do the dirty work.
- [12:49]
Dr. Art Trebanis
We have a saying that says that really these autonomous boats and all these autonomous systems are good for the four Ds. Those are things, tasks that are dirty, dull, dangerous and daring. And we have a lot of tasks and needs in the marine environment that the research or the monitoring or the exploration part can fall into one of, or sometimes multiple of those categories. So having a robot that you can send out and mow the lawn, do those repeated passes, or stay out in conditions which you might not otherwise want to be out there is a huge enabling technology for us. We're really in the early stages of a revolutionary period of oceanographic and marine environmental research.
- [13:34]
Samantha Murphy
Commercial developments like offshore wind farms have really exploded, especially as a response to renewable energy concerns. USVs can help monitor these infrastructures by helping scientists conduct conversion studies.
- [13:48]
Shepard Smith
And in the early stages of that offshore wind development, the questions are around understanding the suitability of the seabed for development, for where to place the wind turbines themselves. And then later on, we monitor all of that construction to ensure that there's been no erosion or damage from any other ocean activity. The ongoing environmental context in which the those offshore wind farms are operating.
- [14:15]
Samantha Murphy
Shepard Smith told me they don't just sell the uncrewed vessel. They also help scientists create the data. Survey X Ocean delivers critical insights about environmental conditions, the seabed and the subsea bed, which are geological formations under the ocean floor. This helps in developing data surveys that are crucial in offshore wind development. They help inform decision making throughout the project's life cycle. It's part of the reason they've worked so many times with offshore companies looking to commercialize. So the ocean isn't just a source of data to fight climate change. It's also the site where the world is building green solutions. And in a time when climate change is accelerating the rate of hurricanes, real time data collected by usvs could be a valuable asset in understanding how future storms could potentially affect coastal communities.
- [15:05]
Shepard Smith
There have been an enormous increase in the use of remotely operated vessels and aircraft to really help the meteorological agencies better understand hurricanes and be able to predict their path and intensity. The way that the storm surge impacts the coast varies a lot depending on the sort of hydrodynamic models of the coast or hydrodynamic processes at the coast. So the size of the inlets and the waterways and the depth of the water all conspire or work together to modulate that storm surge such that the models that they're able to develop from this bathymetry allowed them to update those hydrodynamic models for the coast in order to improve the storm surge predictions for the for coastal flooding.
- [15:58]
Samantha Murphy
This ability to capture real time data both during and after a storm has profound implications for forecasting and preparedness.
- [16:07]
Dr. Art Trebanis
Having robots that we can send out either right during or immediately before and after storms to capture information that has a direct bearing on our ability to forecast what the impacts are going to be at the shoreline from these storms, or know in the next one where it's going to hit and how intense it will be.
- [16:23]
Samantha Murphy
This field of autonomous marine technology is rapidly growing, but not everyone is convinced that it's the way forward. There are many concerns, like what happens if the robot gets lost.
- [16:34]
Dr. Art Trebanis
Navigating is a big challenge. We need to, you know, when we're dealing with an autonomous surface vessel, we now are part of the traffic on on the water. So you have to build a system that can be aware of itself and its surroundings under all kinds of weather conditions. It might be foggy, could be dark out, you got a storm. So there's a whole host of both challenges on the hardware side and then on knowing the environment around or will.
- [17:02]
Samantha Murphy
It take my job. Many in the science community worry about the impact of automation on employment. But as Dr. Trebanis points out, we need people more than ever in this new age of robotics.
- [17:13]
Dr. Art Trebanis
There's this sort of myth, and it's a pernicious one that says that some of these autonomous systems, these robots, they're coming, they're going to take our jobs. I can tell you, as somebody who spent my career building, operating, fielding, maintaining robots in all the different domain areas, in the air, on the land, on the water, underwater, is that it can't be any further from the truth. We need a tremendous number of people. We need people to design these systems, we need people to build them, we need people to maintain them, we need people to operate them, we need people to process the data and stuff from.
- [17:47]
Samantha Murphy
Shepard Smith said this gap between USV operators and crew is filled by X Ocean. They acknowledged some mariners wanted to work out at sea and also have a life on land. So they offered a route for offshore operatives to come ashore.
- [18:01]
Shepard Smith
We've become a bit less of a sea going people and it's harder and harder to find people that want to spend their career physically at sea. There's a lot of people that will go and it's great, they love it, the sun sets, the camaraderie, everything else. But in the final analysis, they realize that they have things that they want to do ashore too. They want to raise a family, they want to be there with their aging parents, they have hobbies that they can't do when they're at sea all the time. We catch a lot of those people that have a lot of that experience and that passion and expertise and they, they want to stay involved with their maritime careers, but they, but they don't want to go to physically go to sea anymore. And so we're able to use their expertise and keep them engaged and advancing their careers in a very different environment. That's much better work, life balance and.
- [18:52]
Samantha Murphy
Perhaps one of the biggest questions in the science community right now is how to actually power these machines. While X Ocean's vessels primarily rely on solar panels, others operate differently. Some use batteries or fuel cells. At the end of the day, how do we power a car sized robot for 10 days in some of the most challenging conditions on Earth? As this technology evolves, we're entering a new era in ocean exploration. Autonomous systems and AI are transforming our ability to understand the ocean and in turn combat climate change? Through x Ocean and USVs, we have given robots their sea legs and Dr. Trebanis expects they will soon have fins and gills.
- [19:34]
Dr. Art Trebanis
We're at a confluence of not only A revolution of autonomous systems. We're living in this age of robots. But in parallel with that, of course, we have the revolution going on in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We're going to see more examples of smaller autonomous surface vessels and autonomous systems that will do maybe pretty modest tasks, but do them in a repeated sort of way, all the way up to, you know, seeing vessels that might transit the full oceans. Because now we're starting to get into the mode where we're, we're sending these robots out into these different places before and after storms, you know, going into places we haven't mapped before. And now we're sort of drinking from this fire hose of data. And that's where the sort of AI and machine learning part is going, working hand in hand with it. And so I think, I think we're going to see more autonomous systems with greater levels of autonomy.
- [20:31]
Samantha Murphy
USVs are at the forefront of environmental science. As we continue to expand our understanding of how to better respond to the changing climate, USVs are set to become an indispensable tool for scientists and entrepreneurs in shaping strategies for climate resilience.
- [20:48]
Shepard Smith
I do think that X Ocean's Way is the future that USVs have really developed to the point where we can do a lot with a USV that would have required a large, complex ship in the past, but it's really as a complement and as a capacity addition to that larger survey industry.
- [21:08]
Samantha Murphy
Thanks for listening to the Next Innovation. This series was produced by Situation Room Studios and Powered by Enterprise Ireland. Investing in the next wave of innovation. Our executive producer is Christine Barata and our senior producer is Sharon Barreiro. Emily Beeman is our associate producer. Additional production assistance by Global Situation Room. A special thanks by to Shepherd Smith and Dr. Art Trebanis. I'm your host, Samantha Murphy. Kelly. Until next time.