Research aboard E/V Nautilus may assist in the search for extraterrestrial life, as exploration of hydrothermal vent systems informs the design of future science-focused missions across our solar system! In 2018, the SUBSEA (Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog) team launched their first field program, supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, to explore iron-rich hydrothermal vent systems on Lō‘ihi Seamount off Hawai’i.
As the 2018 expedition wrapped up aboard E/V Nautilus, Lead Scientists Dr. Darlene Lim of NASA Ames and Dr. Christopher German of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution shared their insights into the future of ocean worlds research with Lead Science Communication Fellow Jenny Woodman of Proteus Science Communication. Catch up on the team’s findings in this conversation, and learn more about the 2019 SUBSEA expedition to explore Gorda Ridge, an active hydrothermal vent system that departs from the convention of black smoker hydrothermal systems, instead emitting clear fluids from the seafloor.
Much of the ocean remains a mystery, waiting to be explored. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Much of the world’s ocean remains a mystery. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
It is cold and dark. Creatures here have adapted to live and thrive in this environment, but not us. Once you pass the threshold of the aptly-named twilight zone, around 650 feet, there isn’t enough light to fuel photosynthesis. For every 33 feet of depth gained, the pressure increases by 14.5 pounds per square inch or psi; at a certain point, most organisms with gas-filled spaces, like our human lungs, would be crushed. As you continue to travel farther down, the weight of all the water above and around you presses in, making it impossible to pass a certain point without specialized technology. Most humans will never experience these mysterious depths firsthand. With the aid of submersibles, only three people have ever ventured to the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench, seven miles below the surface. The challenges of reaching this hadalpelagic zone make it one of the least studied locations on Earth.
I’ve talked to experts, visited their labs and research centers, and watched them at work–often under challenging circumstances. I’ve been to sea and shared the joys of science and discovery alongside bouts of seasickness, equipment malfunctions, and precious time away from loved ones. Few things I’ve experienced in 46 years on this planet compare to going someplace no human has ever gone before, to seeing this other world that exists right here at home.
Until we get out there and start poking around, we have no idea what we might find, but, according to NOAA, “More than eighty percent of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored.
I’m a writer and an educator. I’m also lucky to be able to say this: I am an ocean explorer.
Having spent the last two summers at sea, observing a wildlife survey in National Marine Sanctuaries on the NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada and supporting robotic exploration of the deep sea aboard Robert Ballard’s Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus, this is what I’ve learned: the Earth’s ocean is vast with many secrets waiting to be discovered.
Just a few months ago, in October, while exploring off the coast of California near Monterey, the E/V Nautilus team was moving their robotic explorer or ROV (which stands for remotely operated vehicle) down the flank of a seamount and out of nowhere they happened upon a brooding site with thousands of octopuses in shimmering water that indicated hydrothermal activity of some sort. No one has ever seen anything on this scale before. This real-life octopus garden is just one example of the discoveries waiting for us in our ocean.
To get a sense of scale of the discoveries still possible, consider the 2010 Census for Marine life. It took a decade to complete and was conducted by 2,700 scientists from over 80 countries, on 540 scientific expeditions, at a cost of $650 million dollars, U.S. They identified over 6,000 potential new species and published more than 2,600 research papers. The project shed light on a variety of ocean science research–from a white shark cafe in the open ocean to enormous microbial mats, “ranked among Earth’s largest masses of life.”
The census represents a monumental bit of discovery. Yet scientists, like Chris German from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), think we’ve only scratched the surface. While off the coast of Hawaii last summer, German pointed to the Pacific Ocean, noting that it covers half of the planet and is “woefully unexplored.” He’s been studying hydrothermal vent systems just along the mid-ocean ridge for 30 years. The mid-ocean ridge is a ribbon-like mountain range that runs through the entire global ocean; it is about ten miles wide and 37 thousand miles long.
German estimates that the oceanic community has made discoveries at a rate of one new species every two weeks during his 30-year career. Even exploring as fast as they can go, they’ve only been able to explore about 20 percent of the mid-ocean ridge in three decades. He and his colleagues see opportunities to expand our capabilities here on Earth with emerging technologies in development for future space missions. Essentially, our drive to reach outer space and other ocean worlds will unearth much in unexplored regions of our ocean.
The oceanic and space communities have a great deal to offer each other–from technology development to protocols and training for remote work in extreme environments. In fact, scientists like Julie Huber believe it is time for the oceanic community to be more like NASA. Huber is an expert in marine chemistry and geochemistry at WHOI. Her work examines microbial communities in the deep ocean and, in the not-so-distant future, on other planets.
Huber argues: if NASA can land a scientific laboratory on Mars, then we should be able to do the same here on Earth. Sending scientific vessels to sea or space is no small feat. Ship time and space launches are costly and hard to come by. However, advances in marine robotics, such as Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s (MBARI) environmental sample processor (ESP) make it possible to do much more with less. When loaded onto an autonomous underwater vehicle, the ESP is a lab-in-a-can, collecting samples and processing them in situ for near real-time oceanographic monitoring. Huber advocates for developing new technologies, similar to MBARI’s ESP, that would allow for analysis of microbes in extreme environments like the deep ocean.
Huber is part of a program called NASA SUBSEA, which stands for Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog. The SUBSEA team members come from NASA, NOAA, the Ocean Exploration Trust, and several academic centers, including WHOI and Idaho State University.
In August and September, I served as the lead science communication fellow on board the E/V Nautilus during the NASA SUBSEA expedition to the Lōi`hi Seamount off the coast of Hawaii. The SUBSEA team is planning for future remote deep-space exploration of Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus as well as crewed missions to Mars and our own moon.
Robotic dives at Lōi`hi offered the opportunity to practice and develop protocols for future missions because today’s ocean explorers work remotely, using tools and methods that will serve space exploration. Someday, when we reach distant ocean worlds, we will deploy robots and explore from the safety of a command center here on Earth, a spaceship, or some other location like a base on the moon or an asteroid.
In order to prepare for those future missions, NASA and their partners gathered a science team at the Inner Space Center at University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. This team remotely directed our operations on the E/V Nautilus while we were in Hawaii, serving as “mission control” for the expedition. Experiencing time-delays and technical difficulties will enable NASA and their partners to be better prepared for the challenges of deep space exploration.
Conditions at Lōi`hi, which is an active underwater volcano, are similar to what scientists believe exist on these other moons in our solar system.Lōi`hi was selected because the lower temperatures (about 390 degrees F) at these hydrothermal vent sites, called white smokers, are similar to temperatures detected by the Cassini spacecraft at Europa. Using ROVs, we collected rock and water samples so astrobiologists in Huber’s lab at WHOI and geologists from Idaho State could determine what sorts of rock and water interactions are taking place.
In places where sunlight doesn’t reach, there is no photosynthesis for food production. So, organisms like the microbes we observed and collected at Lōi`hi are make a living off of chemical reactions. Scientists are studying these reactions in order to model what could be happening on other planets.
Darlene Lim on board the E/V Nautilus in 2018. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
To Darlene Lim, NASA Geobiologist and principal investigator for the SUBSEA program, the impetus to explore is an insatiable curiosity about what might be waiting out there. Lim has spent the better part of her career running teams and research in extreme environments on Earth, using them as analogs for future exploration elsewhere in our solar system and beyond.
“We have a sample size of one,” said Lim. “We know that this planet is habitable; we know it is full of life, but what else is out there?”
She adds that we have, at our fingertips, the opportunity to go and in situ understand whether or not life is beyond this planet in our solar system. She smiles and becomes animated when she talks about exploration, making her enthusiasm highly contagious. It’s hard not to get excited about answering questions humans have been asking for all of our brief history on Earth. “What an exciting endeavor that I think we should to take the opportunity to stretch out and accomplish,” said Lim.
But what will it be like when we actually get to one of these remote, distant places in our solar system? Will we find life?
Europa Image Credit: NASA
Imagine you’re flying over an ocean world, not Earth but another. Maybe this is Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. It is cold and inhospitable. But, scientists know there is an iron core, a rocky mantle, and a salty ocean. How do they know this?
Take a look at the composite image below. There are plumes of water vapor at about 7 o’clock. To identify these plumes, scientists used Hubble’s imaging spectrograph, an instrument which acts like a prism revealing a sort of wavelength fingerprint of the object being observed; this fingerprint makes identification possible. Using this instrument, they were able to capture the silhouette of Europa as it passed in front of Jupiter and identify these plumes of water vapor, rising over 62 miles above the surface. These data aligned with previous observations from Cassini flyovers of Europa and they indicate the presence of an ocean and geologic activity worthy of exploration.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center
When we do get to Europa, there will be no humans on the mission. In the coming years, we are going to overcome incredible engineering obstacles in order to land robotic explorers on a distant icy moon, over 390 million miles from home.
According to German, experts think we can get there by 2033. Then, once we’ve landed on the surface of Europa, it will take another two years to drill ten to fifteen miles through the ice in order to eventually make our way to the ocean floor and transmit images home to Earth–images that these scientists hope will include hydrothermal vents and microbial mats.
Lim said it generally takes 18 to 24 months to be able to draw meaningful conclusions from the fieldwork that took place at Lōi`hi, but she says everything is on track. This means I can’t really tell you exactly what was learned last summer, just yet, but I can attempt to convey why the work is so cool. While we were still at sea, I asked Lim and German why would we should travel 390 million miles to find tiny microbes.
“Any time that humanity has extended itself in that way, along comes other developments. Think social developments–the way we think about ourselves, we organize ourselves, what we think is palatable in terms of the way we treat other people,” said Lim. “It kind of comes hand-in-hand with the ability to think about what is beyond us.”
To German, 390 million miles, when considered alongside the vastness of space, isn’t really that far to travel at all.
“Rather perversely, what’s really exciting about it is only having to go 390 million miles for what we can do is ridiculously close to home,” said German. “And that’s completely new thing in the last decade.”
He goes on to explain that when we thought of looking for life elsewhere in the universe, we traditionally thought about looking for planets with liquid water on the surface and the kind of life forms that we understand from photosynthesis, the dominant form of life on our own planet.
To German, the current generation of ocean exploration work has revolutionized our view of what it takes to make planet habitable. The discovery of seafloor hot springs and cold seeps like those found along the California Borderlands have offered what German describes as a “panoply of different kinds of habitable environments that are often independent of sunlight.”
He’s quick to point out that on our own planet, we know that single-celled life was the only thing in town for the first two to three billion years of our history. “If an alien had ever come searching for life on our planet, there’s a two-to-one chance that all they would have found was an ocean full of microbial life and a barren landscape,” said German.
German believes that we could find microbial life in one or more of about half a dozen candidates in our solar system, in places with an ocean with geologic activity like Europa. German adds with zeal, “It’s closer to home than human-made robots have already been. We don’t even have to go to the limits of human ambition!”
During the 2019 expedition season, the SUBSEA team will be returning to the E/V Nautilus and diving at the Gorda Ridge in late May and early June–you can follow along from home by watching the live-streamed dives. The ridge is another volcanically active area off the coast of Southern Oregon and Northern California with temperatures and conditions similar to Lōi`hi.
The team will do much of the same science–looking at how the rock and water interactions support microbial communities–but they will also introduce communication breaks to simulate planned and unplanned communication drop offs.
It will be wonderful to see what we learn from this work and subsequent projects. To me, what is truly exciting is that ocean exploration here on Earth will eventually give us the tools to visit other ocean worlds. In return, our drive to explore the universe will allow us to better understand our home planet – to locate majestic underwater mountains, identify new medicinal resources, and discover sea creatures that defy imagination. And, after spending time with scientists like Lim, German and the SUBSEA team, I see that the opportunity to extend ourselves beyond the boundaries of what we currently understand about science, technology, engineering, and even ourselves makes a more-than-compelling case for exploration.
Until we get out there and start poking around, who knows what we will find?
What would your robot look like? On November 10, students were quick to respond–scissors and glue, googly eyes and glitter combined to create outlandish portraits of robots designed to transport humans to dark and unexplored corners of our planet via live-streamed video footage and high speed satellite connections.
Fueled by a never-ending stream of snacks and an absurd amount of M&Ms, 20 high school girls joined me for two days of engineering and ocean exploration from dry land.
As a writer, leading a robotics workshop seemed a daunting task. What on Earth do I know about hydraulic systems and force multipliers? The short answer is: nothing. However, digging a little deeper into my experiences over the last two summers reveals I know a bit more about robots than even I imagined–I know enough to help teenagers learn how we explore the ocean.
Regular readers know that since 2017 I’ve spent over just two months at sea on two different scientific vessels, the NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada and the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus. On the Nautilus, robots or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are the workhorses of ocean exploration. ROVs Argus and Hercules work in tandem to help scientists explore deep sea environments, paleoshorelines, and active underwater volcanoes like the Lōihi Seamount. Argus and Hercules collect data and samples while streaming video to a live audience of scientists and fans.
With these two ROVs, humans are able to explore and study places no one has ever visited before, from the safety and comfort of a ship, a classroom, or even a couch in someone’s home. ROV exploration is helping scientists accomplish a range of vital research programs from managing and protecting National Marine Sanctuaries to planning for future space exploration.
When looking for ways of connecting young girls with career pathways in ocean science, I jumped at the chance to partner with my local ChickTech chapter for their annual kickoff event, ChickTech High School. Founded in 2012, this nonprofit is working to provide a pathway into tech fields high school-aged girls.
The ChickTech conference takes place at Portland State University’s Maseeh College of Engineering. Once a year, the college, usually bustling with overworked college students, is taken over by 150 teenage girls from area high schools. The students have no prior experience with technology and engineering; they are referred by their teachers who are asked to look for students who may have some aptitude for STEM fields in spite of their limited exposure.
Each day opened with breakfast and guest speakers. Saturday’s speaker was Oregon State undergraduate Sienna Kaske who spoke about the challenges she’s experienced navigating predominantly white environments in high school and college. She encouraged the girls to find their own communities—whatever communities match and accept their many identities—and work with others to break down the barriers the will undoubtedly encounter in STEAM fields.
Then, the girls headed off into smaller groups for all-day sessions on topics ranging from writing code for video games to designing and 3-D printing jewelry. I led a workshop titled Exploring an Ocean World (with robots!).
Given my non-technical background, I’m profoundly grateful to Derek Wulff from Pathfinders Design and Technology, for donating wonderful wooden kits for our participants. On the first day, students put together cherry pickers and excavators, which helped them learn about hydraulic systems. On day two, teams worked to build robotic arms, which are similar to the Kraft Predator arm used on the ROV Hercules.
Weekend workshop participants teamed up to build robotic arms while learning about ocean exploration. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman Kaitlyn Becker gave students a tour of her robotics lab at Harvard. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
In between building with the kits, I spent time guiding workshop participants through how explorers are learning about the ocean with sea floor mapping and robotic exploration. Via Google Meetup, we spoke with Ph.D. student Kaitlyn Becker in her Harvard lab to learn about her squishy robot fingers. The next day, we spoke with Mugdha Flores and Kylie Posternack while they were on board E/V Nautilus off the coast of California.
My presentation (which you can view here) included profiles of many of the women I sailed with in 2018, partnered with information about what those women studied when they were in school. My goal was simple: highlight the many pathways to exciting work in STEAM fields while emphasizing the invaluable role women play in ocean exploration and discovery.
On Sunday evening, the workshop ended with a showcase for parents. Students decorated our classroom and walked their parents, siblings, and friends through our activities over the weekend. As they left with their completed kits and newfound enthusiasm, I answered a litany of questions from parents about more workshops and activities to help carry on with what we started here. A quick search for ROV camps in Portland turned up nothing, which left me wondering if this writer may end up running more robotics workshops in the future.
If you’re interested seeing a program like Seaperchin Portland or scheduling a classroom visit for your future ocean explorer, please email us at: editor@proteusscicomm.org
Jenny Woodman, Proteus founder and executive director, is a science writer and educator living in the Pacific Northwest. Follow her on Twitter @JennyWoodman.
Why Does it Matter if Women Work in Technology and Engineering?
By Jenny Woodman
There is a growing mountain of research and initiatives attempting to figure out when and where young girls are being driven out of technology and engineering. The disproportionately low number of girls entering into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM fields, has generated conferences, after-school programs, summer camps, clubs, and non-profit groups like ChickTech.
Only 12 percent of engineers and 25 percent of computer professionals are women. The American Association of University Women looked at data from multiple sources and found that four out of five of the best STEM careers lie in these two disciplines. Women do have stronger representation in other STEM arenas, particularly health-related fields, but engineering and technology careers can be far more lucrative and offer a more diverse range of opportunities for employment. According to U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2016/2017 median annual income for a computer professional is $114,520 and $91,010 for an engineer.
Equal representation also saves time and money when designing new, innovative systems, and when women aren’t in the room some pretty big oversights might occur. When the first voice-recognition programs were being designed, the developers calibrated them to male voices; the unintended result was that the programs literally couldn’t recognize female voices. While this problem initially only impacted luxury car owners, these types of technologies are often brainstormed and iterated in high end products. Then, they go on to be widely used as the technology becomes more affordable and accessible in other important ways like assistive technologies for people with physical impairments.
Failures to consider diverse users isn’t just an inconvenience. Early airbags in automobiles were designed around the dimensions of adult male bodies, and women and children died as a result. Katherine Shaver, reporting for the Washington Post, notes that women and children are far more likely to suffer more serious injuries in a car accident, because smaller bodies aren’t able to withstand the tremendous forces of a crash. It wasn’t until 2003 that the federal government required manufacturers to use shorter female-sized crash dummies in some testing.
Engineering and tech are realms where job growth is projected to be exponential in the coming years. There are approximately 3.6 million computer jobs; by 2024, U.S. Department of Labor predicts 13 percent growth or an additional half million jobs. If our graduation rates continue as they are today, the U.S. may only be able to fill about 30 percent of those spots.
For those of today’s high school students who, they might be looking at unprecedented opportunities – if they possess the right stuff and barriers are removed.
(This is a revised and updated excerpt from Jenny Woodman’s master’s thesis, Stellar Works: Searching for the Lives of Women in Science)
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