All Categories - Grace Under Pressure

If you watch one talk this #WorldOceanDay...

6/9/2020

May I suggest Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's.

Hailed as one of the most influential marine biologists of our time, she recently co-wrote the Blue New Deal and a suite of other thought and action-provoking work. On a personal note, she is someone I've long admired. She has a rare clarity of thought and engaging way of drawing in disparate perspectives, from fishermen, to surfers, to policy makers, to scientists, to technologists, to caterers, to city dwellers who feel disconnected from nature. We were honored to host her at X, and to release the talk publicly on #WorldOceanDay.

Had this conversation happened a few days before it did, the discussion may have focused solely on ocean climate solutions, Dr. Johnson's area of expertise. Just a few days before recording, however, our country erupted in racial tensions after the injustice of George Floyd's murder that brought to full attention the systematic racism plaguing our country for centuries. While a few days before it may have been awkward to bring up race in this conversation, recent events made it such that it would have been awkward not to bring it up. Dr. Johnson echoed points now in her recently published OpEd: "I'm a black climate expert. Racism derails our efforts to save the planet. Stopping climate change is hard enough, but racism only makes it harder." It's a must-read this #WorldOceanDay.

"Toni Morrison said it best, in a 1975 speech: `The very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.` As a marine biologist and policy nerd, building community around climate solutions is my life’s work. But I’m also a black person in the United States of America. I work on one existential crisis, but these days I can’t concentrate because of another." (Quote from Dr. Johnson's recent OpEd.)

She also explains the "aha" moments that lead to her mission evolving from “figuring out how to use the ocean without using it up” to “building community around climate solutions.”

Dinosaurs? They were like yesterday.

5/9/2020

How I started to understand geological time and appreciate the fossils around us.

Federico Fanti and I in an ancient underwater landscape, the Dolomites in Northern Italy

The museum curator put a rock in my hands. I got the impression I was very lucky to be holding it. It came from behind museum glass. "This is a perfect example of a fossilized reptile footprint! Do you see it?" Federico, my paleontologist professor friend, asked excitedly.

If this was a precious fossil, why were they letting me hold it?! Why didn't anyone seem concerned about me dropping it? My thoughts raced. I looked closely at it. It really did look and feel just like an ordinary rock to me, not unlike the ones found in my garden back in California. My confusion contrasted with Federico and the curator's enthusiasm.

Federico put his fingers on grooves in the rock. "See? This is where the claws and palm were." The museum curator pointed to a diorama with a replica of a donkey-sized iguana. The creature who made this footprint roamed 10 million years before the dinosaurs.

"The dinosaurs were like yesterday," Federico has told me many times.

"Do you see the footprint?", Federico asked again. I was tempted to say "Oh, I see now," and move on. I was tired. It was six o'clock in the morning. We'd literally crossed seven time zones the day before, from the Caribbean to Northern Italy. We came here, to Federico and the production crew's home turf in the Dolomites, Northern Italy, to see "rocks" like the one I was holding in my hand. Ages ago these rocks, as I call them fondly, were part of a vivid underwater coral landscape, similar to the reefs we dove in the Caribbean and that I've studied and admired my whole life. But instead of using SCUBA gear, submarines, or underwater cameras to study these ancient reefs, we were lacing up hiking boots, layering on jackets, and grabbing gear from ski shops.

We came to the Dolomites to tell a different story about coral reefs -- not one of dying and bleaching, but one of resilience. Coral, after all, have survived for 500 million years. On that time scale, we humans have been around for a mere blip in time (200,000 years).

My hand and sunglasses (for scale) near bivalve shell fossils. We had picked a flat spot to sit and have lunch, and it wasn't until sitting there for about an hour that I noticed these! At first, I wasn't convinced that they were fossils.

The Dolomite's marine origin didn't click for me until seeing this fossil -- about the 12th fossil I'd seen that day. Our camera assistant found it while we were trekking through a cow pasture to another site. The shell imprint looks like a shell I might find on the beach today, but it was made when the continents were still Pangaea.

Trading SCUBA gear, submarines, and underwater cameras for hiking gear, still to see coral reefs.

Animation from the film, showing what the landscape would've looked like if we stood there 250M years ago.

I'd been warned that there were fossils everywhere in the Dolomites. I'd walked over countless ones without knowing it. At first, it all looked like rock to me, but as I learned more I saw it all through a different lens. I find that's often the case in life -- the more you know, the more you appreciate and are fascinated by the world around you, even the simplest things.

Back in California, I've continued to see coral in unlikely places. I see it in the façade of a building in an arid suburb of San Francisco where I am quarantined during COVID. Fossils make our planet what it is. Most are not behind museum glass. Some are polished and clear in marble countertops, or in the hands of fossil hunters, but most are ground and crushed up into unrecognizable formats, to pump into our cars, to mix with concrete for new buildings. The fossil fuels we rely upon are exactly that: fossils.

Left: 240M million year old marine fossil from the Dolomites region. Right: Dead coral, likely just a couple decades old, washed up on the beach in Honduras where I did my graduate studies.

Epilogue: Little less than a year after filming, towns in Northern Italy close to where we filmed became the first and hardest hit by COVID in Europe. Our hearts go out to everyone affected.

Our documentary, “The Secret of the Oceans”, premiered in Italy on Christmas Day and showed on the National Geographic Channel in the UK on April 22, Earth Day, after Jane Goodall's special. You can also watch on-demand with a Sky TV subscription (link).

Earth Day 2020: Small Things, Big Changes

4/25/2020

I originally wrote and published the following piece for LinkedIn (here), where it was shared by X - The Moonshot Factory on Earth Day. I originally learned about Dr. Mayor Julia Platt on a scuba trip with friends in Monterey. I think we were all surprised that not only had we not heard of her, but also there was hardly any information about her online! Now I see that part of the problem is her name is sometimes spelled "Platt" and sometimes spelled "Piatt".

On the 50th anniversary of #EarthDay, I was encouraged by a review I read recently in Nature about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal around rebuilding marine life. If climate change can be kept at bay, the authors found, “substantial recovery of the abundance, structure, and function of marine life could be achieved by 2050.” In other words: we still have the chance to restore our ocean — within the span of a single generation.

Our survival depends upon our ocean. It provides half the oxygen we breathe, and helps to feed nearly half the planet. It regulates our climate. It makes our “blue planet” unique. Still, so many of us take it for granted and exploit this irreplaceable resource, from dumping millions of pounds of plastic into it every day to devastating our food supply through overfishing. As an engineer on Tidal, X’s project to protect the ocean and help feed humanity sustainably, I’m deeply passionate about the future of the ocean. How can we act now to restore the ocean’s health for generations? Perhaps we can all learn from the examples of others who sought to bring about small changes that became much bigger.

Pioneering scientist Dr. Julia Platt — an underappreciated embryologist, neurobiologist, and politician — is one of my favorite examples. In the early 1900s, waste from Monterey's canneries was polluting the area's waters and poisoning the local ecosystem. Dr. Platt began by tearing down a fence that violated the town’s charter because it blocked public access to the beach. She then fought to establish a small, protected pocket of the coastline as a refuge for marine life, helping its marine ecosystems recover from overfishing and pollution. While she didn’t succeed against the canning industry, her work set a legal precedent to protect and conserve California’s coast. Monterey is now known for its natural beauty. I often go diving there on weekends: its kelp forests are teeming with otters, and humpback whales frolic nearby. I wonder if Dr. Platt imagined future generations enjoying Monterey’s pristine waters, no longer needing to dodge waste from the canneries.

Everywhere we look, we can see the results of small actions building up to make huge differences. The very first Earth Day, fifty years ago, was a reaction to an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California — at the time, the worst oil spill in American history. More than 20 million Americans, then roughly 10% of the country’s population, participated in teach-ins and gatherings. It led to the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency and a series of policy improvements to protect our waters and planet.

It might seem more difficult today, particularly in these tough times — but if we just look, there’s the results of small actions everywhere, too. From a single school strike, Greta Thunberg’s climate campaign has mobilized a new generation of climate activists. We’ve seen incredible stories of creativity and ingenuity come from people all around the world fighting COVID-19. I only recently read about Selina Juul, the “Food Waste Fighter,” who emigrated from Russia to Denmark at 13, and was shocked by their food waste. She’s since been credited by the Danish government with single-handedly helping the country reduce its food waste by 25% in the last five years.

When it comes to the world around us, change happens over much longer timeframes and more slowly than we would like — especially in the face of problems that seem so dire. It’s easy to get discouraged, but that’s exactly when we need to be most determined. I’m inspired to see how people have all made a big impact in their own way, starting with a locked fence, or a teach-in, or a school strike. As the paper in Nature put it: “Rebuilding marine life represents a doable Grand Challenge for humanity, an ethical obligation, and a smart economic objective to achieve a sustainable future.” Let’s each do what we can, no matter how little it might seem.

Secret of the Oceans - UK Premiere On Earth Day

4/20/2020

The documentary I filmed last summer, The Secret of the Oceans (Il Segreto Degli Oceani in Italian), will be on National Geographic channel in the UK on Earth Day (April 22), right after Jane Goodall's special! Our story looks at reefs from 200M+ years ago to today -- from friends' homes in the Caribbean, Italy, Tanzania, and back to mine in Washington D.C.

If you've a Sky TV subscription, you can also view the film on demand here.

Resonant Reefs: why closing your eyes might help you see the answer

12/16/2019

With two fellow researchers diving in the Red Sea 2015. All this gear let us dive to 100m, deeper than most recreational limits, but still barely scratching the ocean’s surface. (Credit: Thinking Deep Expedition)

"Dad, why do we have two nostrils?"

My colleague received this question from his four-year old. Kids ask the best questions — the kinds of questions that led me to my current work. Some animals gain a directional sense of smell from their two nostrils. That's why dogs can uncover hidden clues for police, find truffles in the woods, and become oddly distracted sniffing things otherwise uninteresting to us. We’re only getting a fraction of the sensory inputs that they are.

As a diver and ocean engineer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how animals perceive a part of the world mostly inaccessible to humans without the aid of technology: the ocean. This vast place that covers most of the Earth’s surface and upon which our life depends is hard for us to comprehend. Its average depth of 3,688 meters is 4x our tallest skyscraper and deeper than any mammal can survive. Most of it is pitch black, and the pressure could crush an army tank. WiFi, GPS, and nearly all the electromagnetic waves we increasingly rely upon do not work, and salt water kills electronics. Yet, many animals manage to thrive in the ocean.

Gordon et al.'s recent paper in Nature Communications reminded me of one of the many biases we have as humans when we’re sensing the world. Whereas dogs rely upon their strong sense of smell, most of us depend heavily on sight to understand the world around us. We ask, "What does that look like?" and "Do you see what I mean?". If I told you about a new place, you would probably want to see photos of it. If I only gave you headphones to listen to its sound, you would probably be frustrated. Yet, most marine animals never know what their environment looks like. They only know how it feels, sounds, or smells. Fish can school tightly because their lateral line sensors detect pressure and flow, detecting minute changes in their environment long before seeing anything. Famously, sharks can detect a drop of blood a mile away.

By avoiding our bias towards human perception, the researchers came up with a novel solution. They demonstrated that broadcasting healthy sounds of a coral reef can lure fish back to a degraded reef and help revive its ecosystem. They are careful to note that this will not reverse the plight of our reefs, and it certainly is not a magic cure for the ocean’s ills, but it is an important tool for reviving reefs that are so essential to the ocean’s health while we work to solve the existential problem of excess carbon that threatens planetary life. It made me wonder what other solutions we are missing when we look at problems from a human-centric perspective. What could we learn if we learned to think less like us, and more like the animals that thrive beneath the waves?

Originally published on LinkedIn, shared by X, The Moonshot Factory. It's been reposted on Twitter and Facebook.

The Alien Outcroppings Known As The Farallons

11/1/2019

Image: South Farallon Islands Courtesy NOAA

A friend of mine had been talking about the Farallon Islands for months and months. I didn’t really know what they were until I moved to San Francisco.

About 30 miles west of the Golden Gate bridge, the Farallons jet out of the water, seemingly the only blip on an endless horizon of the Pacific. We spotted them 3 hours into our boat ride from San Francisco. From far away, they looked like a cathedral perched on the horizon. Mariners also refer to the islands as Devil's Teeth islands (the title of Susan Casey's marvelous book), because of its many treacherous underwater shoals. It is also easily hidden by the Bay area's famous fog.

We were cruising about 3 hours before we saw the Farallons, jetting above the blue from the endless horizon. They looked like a fuzzy cathedral from far away, rising out of the waves. Image: Jeff Gunn, Flikr (CC BY 2.0)

I visited the islands with friends on a diving reconnaissance mission in October. We could not step foot on the island (only a dozen or so are given permission to do so as part of the permanent station there - eight researchers live on the islands). It's estimated only a few hundred people have ever dove there, so this was a unique and exciting opportunity.

October, or “Sharktober”, is when great whites swarm around the islands, hoping to pick seals off the island at high tide. I imagined seeing dorsal fins skimming above the surface, but exaggerated media portrayals drove my imagination. We did not see fins as all, nor do those who visit regularly. The sharks mostly stay below the surface. From Shark Stewards' website: Sharks have swum the oceans for over 400 million years, helping to shape and maintain the health and balance of marine species and ocean ecosystems. Sharks have survived the five great extinction events, including the last which caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. For all this time, sharks were the top predators in the ocean. Until Now.

Friends organizing the trip had gone out with Shark Stewards, an organization whose mission is to restore ocean health by saving sharks from overfishing and the shark fin trade, and protecting critical marine habitat through the establishment of marine protected areas and shark sanctuaries. The work of "Shark Girl Maddison" (Instagram: @sharkgirlmadison) with Project Hiu is also very commendable and worth supporting in this regard. You can dive from boats that are turning from shark-catching boats to boats for recreation and tourism. A lot of folks propose this idea but it is a hard one to actually make happen. Change happens over generations.

Another reason I wanted to see the Farallons was because of its geological story. I caught the geology bug from fellow Pisces VI submarine scientist Prof. Aida Farough and fellow National Geographic Explorer Federico Fanti while we were filming a documentary about fossilized coral this summer. Short recap of the geology from Insta story:

The actual day of our dives felt like a dream. Arriving at the marina while it was still dark at 5am, we disembarked with the sun rising behind us, shimmering through the Golden Gate. Propoises glided in the water around us. After three hours on the water we saw the Farallons majestically rising from the ocean.

Five flavors of sunset captured on our sail to and from the Farallons. The whole journey felt like a dream because we arrived at the dock before the sun rose, the sun rising behind us as we sailed, and then we were coming with the sun setting behind us, back at the dock by dark.

Our dive ended up being very short due to conditions and equipment failures. This was all my footage and as you can tell it's not the greatest (might even be motion-sickness enduring). We saw urchins and sea stars at the bottom in the murky, green, low-visibility water.

Pisces VI Submarine Unveiling IN Kansas

8/11/2019

Flying San Francisco to Kansas, I looked out the airplane window to see vast fields of square-cut farmland. "What a great place for a submarine...", I thought tongue-in-cheek. Scott Waters clearly thought differently. Friend and the sub's owner, he has been drawing submarines since he was a little kid. I’ve seen the drawings and heard the stories from his parents as proof. He pulled an incredible team together to refurbish the Pisces VI submarine with the vision of making deep sea exploration more accessible.

In June we unveiled the submarine in Salinas, Kansas, Scott's hometown and where the team has been working for 2+ years. Hundreds of people (including 17 of my family members!) witnessed a tarp dramatically pulled away to reveal the bright-green beauty and reveled in her story.

In the 1970s and 80s, Pisces VI was used for research expeditions, including a 1987 National Geographic expedition with William Beebe (Link to NYT article), and for contracts with oil and gas companies, surveying and laying pipelines. Her sister submarines, Pisces IV and V, are still active out of Hawaii. Pisces VI, however, was mothballed in a warehouse after the Cold War. Mothballed until Scott Waters purchased it. More on the back story in these Kansas City news articles:

After a refit, she is now ready for sea trials, which the team is conducting in Vancouver Canada alongside Aquatica submarines (who launched ScUber in Australia earlier this year!). Aquatica's chief pilot is fellow National Geographic Explorer Erika Bergman. She piloted Fabien Cousteau and Richard Branson to the bottom of the Blue Hole earlier this year! We're lucky to have one of Pisces VI's original technicians and pilots as Crew Chief for the project, Vance Bradley. The team also includes engineers who have built other submarines (River Dolfi, Steve McQueen), excellent mechanics (Carl Boyer, Ryan Brax Johnson), an Emmy-award winning media specialist (Mick Kaczorowski), and airline pilot (Ben Fosse). More on the crew here!

Transforming Pisces VI into a modern, state-of-the-art deep sea research vessel is a monumental effort from a team of dedicated volunteers. Although the sub is now "unveiled", our work has just begun. The goal is to revolutionize ocean science by making deep sea exploration more accessible and affordable to the broader scientific community. We're sifting through prospective research projects, each with the potential to unlock the mysteries of the ocean and further its conservation. I'll post more on upcoming expeditions over the next several years.

Letter from my little cousin to his friend after the submarine unveiling. A few years ago the main questions I got from kids were about sharks and if I was scared. Now I'm more often asked about Octonauts, a TV show featuring eight animals that live and explore underwater. It's a welcome change. I'm always excited to see kids fascinated by ocean creatures!

Carl and Elijah installing fairings on the Pisces VI submarine inside the Kansas workshop.

Pisces VI crew at the unveiling event -- Missing our Professors, Anni Djurhuus and Aida Farough!

One of the highlights of the event for me was finally meeting an incredible marine geologist I'd only previously met over the phone, Professor Aida Farough from Kansas State University. She had just landed from a trans-Atlantic flight and was super excited to get back to her office because another researcher sent her boxes of rocks. If someone sent me boxes of rocks I'd think they were pulling a prank! But not Professor Farough, who studies minerals and microbes on the ocean floor that reveal the origins on life on Earth. Last year she spent three weeks aboard the research vessel Atlantis off the coast of California, where she dove in the submarine Alvin to a depth of 2,500 meters (1.5 miles).

I'm psyched to welcome Aida on the Pisces VI team as Science Advisor!

Professor Aida Farough with submarine pilot Jefferson Grau 1.5 miles below the ocean's surface. If you're wondering why the lights are red it's because red light lets us keep our night vision while still seeing instrument panels. This is useful when the ocean scenery is dark.

Stay tuned for more updates! Follow the Pisces VI submarine on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/piscessub/).

Montserrat, Active Volcano/Paradise

7/23/2019

Federico and I arrived in Monsterrat! There are twelve Italian film makers with us, so we are quite the circus. The image below (my eyes closed) shows our 900+ lbs of luggage. Nearly all of it is camera gear, underwater housings, rebreathers and SCUBA kit. Famed underwater videographer Michael Pitts and his assistant Jon Chambers came with two Inspiration rebreathers, a RED camera with underwater housing, and two oxygen cylinders, which accounted for 20 of the bags. It’s a lot of “stuff”, but the footage will be stunning and nothing like what has been captured here before.

Producer Edoardo by our gear at the ferry port, headed from Antigua to Montserrat.

Standing with 900+ lbs of gear; nearly all camera equipment, rebreathers, and SCUBA kit.

Thankfully the Trident drone from Sofar Ocean (formerly OpenROV) was the easiest item to bring over. It fit into the backpack I carried onto the plane and placed under the seat. I thought the drone might get some strange looks at airport security, but the TSA agent in San Francisco recognized it as an underwater drone and then told me about dives they did in Monterey! Antigua airport security was fine about it too. By the end of this journey I’ll have taken it through airport security in five different countries and I don’t expect any problems.

Montserrat's black volcanic sand.

Trident underwater drone on the beach.

We saw the part of the island covered in ash and pyroclastic flow during the volcanic eruptions between 1995 and 2010. Federico, a professor of palaeontology and geology, was awe struck because we were seeing a situation similar (geologically speaking) to what was happening in his home region, the Dolomites in Italy, 200 million years ago. I learned that it’s incorrect to call the flow from Montserrat’s volcano “lava.” The correct term is “pyroclastic flow” (rocks spewed from the volcano). During explosions, ash turned day to night from the ask. The sand on the beaches is still dark black, and the island has grown larger. We talked to Montserratians who were on the island during the explosions, some of whom still own houses buried under the flow.

Amazingly, corals once completely covered in the flow are already starting to regrow through the ash. The corals, like the people of the island, are incredibly resilient.

Because the volcano is still considered active, the former Director (now seismologist) of the Montserrat Volcano Observatory, Rod Stewart, was with us at all times while we were in the buried city of Plymouth, an area that would be in immediate danger if the volcano erupted again. That said, this was a very low-risk activity. It would be more likely that one of us would get a bad wasp sting (Jack Spaniard wasps like to make nests under broad leaves, beware!). Thankfully no filmmakers or explorers were harmed in the course of these events.

Veta Wade and I on boat with Andy from SCUBA Montserrat. We are motoring towards the buried reefs off Plymouth.

Video: Windy Day filming atop St George's Hill, Montserrat

Answering kid's questions at the island's first the island’s first STEAM Festival, organized by Veta's organization Fish N' Fins.

Video: Film crew atop St George's Hill, Montserrat

A friend and incredible Montserratian woman, Veta Wade, will be in the documentary sharing the story of the island. She runs a non-profit organization, called ‘Fish ‘N Fins’ that teaches kids to swim, snorkel, and protect the ocean and it’s reefs. She invited me to share stories (and have a dance off!) with them at the island’s first STEAM Festival. I was floored with their enthusiasm! The local news wrote about it here.

Every other sentence, a kid flew up their arm with a question or remark. I got some common questions, “How did the door work in underwater habitat? Did you see sharks?” Plus some questions I’d never think of — One came up to me urgently and pulled on my shirt to ask “Is hot chocolate your favorite drink?” (Turns out she saw hot chocolate packets in one of the videos of the underwater habitat. Very observant!). Another pointed to a strange shadow I’d never noticed in an image and asked “Are those snail eyes?!” Another asked if I could lift the Goliath grouper out of the water, and I said “No they are 300 lbs! I couldn’t hug it if I wanted to!” A boy who looked about six years old asked if I could bring the submarine to the island. I said if he can pick out some dives spots to study we can try to organize it!

Director Michele Melani guides Federico and I atop George's Hill, Montserrat. Behind us is the volcano, slightly hidden in the clouds. You can see that path the volcanic material took as it erupted.

This is was the fourth floor of a building in Plymouth. Pyroclastic flow wrapped around the building's foundation. Many draw parallels with Plymouth and Pompeii. The eruptions on Montserrat killed 19 people and lasted over a decade, from 95 to 2010. Much of the island evacuated during that time, but the many owners of the buildings in Plymouth still live and work on the island. Some are still paying off mortgages on the properties.

This is what it takes for it to look and sound like four people are on a boat! This plus a second boat (where this photo was taken from) with the two drone operators, the director, and producers!

Federico and I see the town of Plymouth, now covered by pyroclastic flow from the volcano. You see the path the flow took through the town into the ocean. 90% of the material ended up underwater.

The crew stands in front of the Soufrière Hills volcano. Seismologist from the Montserrat Volcano Observatory, Rod Stewart (in the yellow vest), was with us at all times while we were in the buried city, an area that would be in immediate danger if the volcano erupted again.

There was a beautiful vibrant coral reef nearby but geologist Professor Fanti was most fascinated by the sand. For real though the sand was fascinating and I could probably spend a whole dive staring at it. You can see little black spots in it from the volcanic activity. Some of it is extremely fine powder.

A movie called “Wendy” directed by Benh Zeitlin was filmed on the island last year. I’m looking forward to seeing it. Apparently it was not only filmed here, but Montserrat inspired the writer. From IMDB: "Set on a mysterious island where aging and time have come unglued, Zeitlin's mythological story tells the tale of two children from different worlds fighting to maintain their grip on freedom and joy."

Stay tuned for more and please comment if you’ve questions.

WORLD OF WONDERS: SOLD OUT EVENT WITH SOUTH CAROLINA AQUARIUM

3/31/2019

This month I visited the South Carolina Aquarium for the first time. I was on a panel with four fascinating people: friend and fellow aquanaut Fabien Cousteau, NOAA expedition coordinator Dr Daniel Wagner, shark expert Dr David Ebert, and science communicator/space enthusiast Dr Nadia Drake. We talked with a sold out crowd about the weird and wonderful things in the ocean.

Of course my favorite part was getting to meet everyone, both my fellow panelists and guests at the event. A theme of the evening, and of the Aquarium's work in general, is how much there is to learn from your own backyard. Dr Wagner reminded us that just last year (in 2018!) researchers discovered a vast coral reef just about 160 miles off the coast of where we were seated for the panel (NBC article about discovery). Dr Ebert found and named new shark species in his backyard of Monterey Bay, California. I thought Monterey Bay must be one of the best understood marine areas because it's had an excellent research center there for decades. Apparently we still have a lot to learn even there! I find that motivating and exciting.

The South Carolina Aquarium runs an impressive set of events and activities that inspire conservation of the natural world. Several people I met at the event were pushing for limits on plastic pollution in the city and its surrounding suburbs. A few days before this event, Charleston County approved a ban on plastic bags and foam packaging. There was concern that the state might invalidate the ban, however (local news article). Several Charlestonians I met were also looking for ways to protest against the seismic testing planned off their waters (and all along the east coast), as this is known to harm whales and other marine life. There is grave cause for concern. Unfortunately it seems the testing is slated to continue. I wish I could get ahold of the environmental assessment report for this activity; if anyone has leads please contact me or contact below. Those on land might not notice, but those underwater will.

"Those on land might not notice, but those underwater will."

On stage during panel next to friend and fellow aquanaut Fabien Cousteau.

From left to right: Dr Daniel Wagner, Dr Dave Ebert, Dr Nadia Drake, Fabien Cousteau, and me.

Aquarium Highlights

Here are bits from what I learned while touring the Aquarium, copied from my Instagram story.

It’s illegal to have captive marine mammals in South Carolina. Instead this Aquarium encourages people to see the wild dolphins in the harbor. The Georgia Aquarium still has a captive whale shark, which I do not support. The aquarium has an impressive amount of medical equipment to help rescued turtles. The equipment was donated from nearby hospitals as they upgraded their tools. I thought this was a great way of giving new life to old tools that otherwise go to waste.

For live updates follow, Instagram @gracecalvertyoung!

BBC Innovators of Tomorrow

12/10/2018

I'm happy to share this video collaboration with BBC News and Hyundai! View the full 90 second piece at http://www.bbc.com/storyworks/future/innovators-of-tomorrow/tidal-change (only visible in USA at the moment).

In the video, I explain some of my PhD research. Plus you'll see footage we captured on dives in Monterey Bay, California.. Huge thanks to my dive buddy Billy Snook, the BBC team, and The Hydrous for letting me share some of their stunning 3D models! Stills from the video below.

Ocean engineer Grace Young’s love for the sea drives her innovative work.

For American ocean engineer Grace Young, one of the 14 world-changers named 2017 National Geographic Emerging Explorers, ocean conservation is a cause that needs to be pursued with fierce immediacy.

The Marshall Scholar from MIT is right. The ocean accounts for $1.5 trillion of the global economy every year, with the livelihood of around 10 percent of citizens worldwide dependent on it. Factors such as overfishing, acidification, pollution, and climate change are rearing their unpretty heads, making the marine ecosystem vulnerable. The world is waking up to this hard fact – the UN held its first ocean conference last year. In 2018, the Commonwealth Blue Charter on Ocean Action has been put in place to focus on actions including protecting coral reefs, handling ocean plastics, and restoring the mangrove.

“Quite simply if we don’t know or understand the problems, we can’t fix them,” says Young. “As an ocean engineer my passion is developing technologies to be able to understand, explore and find solutions for the challenges the ocean’s ecosystem is facing.”

... read the full article at http://www.bbc.com/storyworks/future/innovators-of-tomorrow/tidal-change

CERN for the Planet: Part 1

8/24/2018

Last spring I returned to CERN for its first-ever alumni event, cleverly titled First Collisions. I led a discussion with fellow alumni about how the CERN community can solve problems facing our planet and answer big questions about our ocean. I proposed a “CERN for the planet”, which extended the “CERN for the ocean” idea from my 2015 TIME op-ed. The notion is that we’ve big environmental problems that require highly focused collaborative science to solve, and the ocean’s biggest problems are planet-wide. Not only is CERN a useful model, but its infrastructure and community of scientists can address the urgent mega-problems facing our planet.

More than the opportunity to speak, I valued the chance to springboard ideas with fellow alumni and connect with old and new friends. I also spent a morning with the women in technology group, where I shared about how CERN shaped my career (that talk online here).

“For physics enthusiasts like me, CERN more than rivals Disney World,” I wrote before my first trip to the multi-billion dollar facility as a high schooler (that blog at cern2010.wordpress.com).

My first trip to CERN at age 17, the summer before starting at MIT. Friend Zeren and I were among six students who won a trip to CERN at the Intel International Science Fair.

What is CERN and Why Care?

Based in Geneva, CERN is a unique, multinational research organization that studies the fundamental physics of our universe, pushes technological boundaries, trains countless scientists and engineers, and facilitates dialogue among nations through science. While it employs ~2,500 full-time scientist, engineers, and staff, its treasure trove of equipment and laboratory space is available to more than 11,000 scientists from 100 countries [source].

To understand CERN’s goals and why people (not just particle physicists!) are so excited about it, I recommend watching Professor Brian Cox’s 2008 TED talk next time you’ve 18 minutes. Additionally, this excellent slew of New York Times articles and this Vanity Fair article explain CERN through engaging stories and accessible language.

CERN has also become famous for being the birthplace of the World Wide Web, inventing cloud computing, featuring in Dan Brown’s Angels and Daemons, and getting fear-mongers worried about a black hole over Switzerland. It runs a particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) along with other one-of-a-kind experiments.

CERN and its community comprise thousands of multinational, multidisciplinary scientists. We care about CERN because it demonstrates the power of collaborative science on a massive scale to solve big problems, promotes high-level dialogue among nations through the medium of science, and informs global policymakers on urgent scientific issues.

"The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe."
-- Kurt Andersen for Vanity Fair

“People think CERN is huge,” said an accelerator physicist during my first trip to CERN. He continued, “but it is minuscule on the size of the universe, which is what we are studying.”

The Power of MultiNational Science

CERN has 22 member countries, but hosts collaborating scientists from 100+ countries. In practice this means many different languages spoken in the cafeteria. Researchers must navigate not only their subject matter, but also cultural, language, and scheduling barriers.

The technical challenge of sharing resources between geographically-spaced researchers spurred CERN to invent cloud-computing, technology that is now ubiquitous in data management and applications. CERN did so out of necessity, so that it could effectively use computing power spread across it’s many collaborating universities and countries around the world.

In the same 10 seconds I’ve had someone hold up a fork and ask me “what is the name for this again?,” and then “what is supersymmetry?” English isn’t the first language for many. People aren’t afraid to ask for clarification. In addition to helping work though the language, this forces collaborators to think intentionally about their choice of words and iterate how to communicate it. I find that after a few days I unconsciously communicate in simpler language, a good habit for scientists to develop.

For these reasons and others, CERN is also seen as a peacekeeping tool. A new experiment (both scientific and political), called SESAME , is copying CERN in the Middle East. Researchers from eight middle eastern are working side-by-side to answer fundamental questions about our universe. Post-WWII, CERN was a safe place for multinational dialogue through the medium of science where scientist from adversary nations worked side-by-side (see Sixty Years of Science for Peace). It provided and organizational framework for scientists to work across borders to achieve common goals for the common good.

Consequently, CERN does much more than answer questions about particle physics; it represents a paradigm for collaborative science on a massive scale solving big technological problems while promoting international comity.

The CERN auditorium is a bit like the UN: there are headphones with language translation and microphones at each seat.

The L.H.C at CERN collides particles at 99.9999991% the speed of light. That’s roughly 3 MILLION times faster than the top speed of a Ferarri.

... To be continued! 

CERN alumna turned deep-sea explorer (CERN Symmetry Magazine)
Spotlight on CERN Alumni - Meet Grace C. Young (CERN Symmetry Magazine)

Deep Sea Submarine & National Geographic Italy

8/20/2018

Copied from Deep Sea Submarine Pisces VI Facebook Page.

Any Italian speakers? Chief Scientist Grace talked to National Geographic Italy about goals for P6. The auto-translation is a bit iffy, but you get the gist. Let us know if you've project ideas!

Full article here.

Original (Italian):
Uno dei progetti più affascinanti ai quali partecipa è il sottomarino Pisces VI, un veicolo per l’esplorazione e la ricerca oceanografiche che, in futuro, potrebbe permettere a sempre più persone di visitare gli oceani. E non parliamo solo di ricercatori ma di curiosi, studenti, di qualsiasi cittadino ne abbia interesse. Di cosa si tratta e soprattutto, quanto manca ai primi viaggi?
Faremo i primi test in mare nella primavera del 2019 e l’idea di fondo è una: rendere democratico l’accesso agli oceani. Vogliamo che tutti possano fare un viaggio su un sottomarino, se vogliono farlo, e senza la necessità di spendere somme enormi. Perché quando arrivi sul posto e ti rendi conto di che mondo magico siano gli oceani, è allora che aumenta il tuo interesse e avviene il cambiamento. È allora che cambiamo come specie. Condividere il mondo sottomarino è la chiave perché lo si voglia proteggere, proprio come ha fatto Sylvia Earle, pioniera dell’esplorazione degli oceani che, condividendo con noi le sue storie, li ha resi accessibili.

Con progetti come Pisces VI si aprirà una nuova era per l’ecoturismo, probabilmente.
Sì, è quella la strada. Oggi ancora molte persone pensano che l’unico modo per trarre profitto dagli oceani sia sfruttarli, pescare. Uccidere gli squali, le razze, tutte le specie che portano guadagno. In realtà, per quanto, rapido si tratta di un guadagno minimo e non sostenibile. Io non posso certo giudicare, per moltissime persone si tratta del modo in cui si mantengono, ma esiste un modello di business alternativo che potrebbe far vincere entrambe le parti. Se invece di uccidere le razze incoraggiamo i turisti a venire in visita e vederle nel loro habitat, ecco che attiriamo una diversa fonte di guadagno. Senza distruggere gli oceani.

Based on Google Translate to English:
One of the most fascinating projects in which you participate is the submarine Pisces VI, a vehicle for exploration and oceanographic research that, in the future, could allow more and more people to visit the oceans. And we are not just talking about researchers but about the curious, students, of any citizen who is interested. What is it and above all, how much is missing from the first trips?
We will do the first tests at sea in the spring of 2019. The basic idea is this one: to make access to the oceans democratic. We want everyone to take a trip on a submarine, if they want to do it, and without the need to spend huge sums. Because when you get to the place and you realize what a magical world the oceans are, that's when your interest increases and change happens. It is then that we change as a species. Sharing the underwater world is the key to protecting it, just as Sylvia Earle, a pioneer of ocean exploration, has made sharing her stories with us, making them accessible.

With projects like Pisces VI a new era for ecotourism will open, probably.
Yes, that's the idea. Today many people still think that the only way to profit from the oceans is to exploit them, to fish. Killing sharks, whales, and rays. Or torturing for entertainment. In reality, however rapid, it is a minimum and non-sustainable gain. I certainly cannot judge. For many people it is the way they've operated for a century. But there is an alternative business model that could win both sides. If instead of killing other species, we encourage tourists to visit and see their habitat. We are attracting a different source of income without destroying the oceans.

... click here for full story.

Quick Stop in the Eternal City with National Geographic

5/2/2018

It’s not everyday I get to use the words “quick” and “eternal” in the same phrase.

Earlier this month I flew part-way around the world from San Francisco to Rome to give a keynote address at the second-ever National Geographic Science Festival (or rather Festival Scienze). My talk, titled “Unseen Oceans,” focused on some of the underwater imaging systems I’ve developed that help us see the ocean in ways we haven’t before: e.g., the ultra-high speed camera we used on Mission 31 and the fish-tracking camera system I helped develop for NOAA. I also talked about how my ballet training and appreciation of the arts give me a unique perspective on science and engineering. My goal when speaking to the student audience was to show how all sorts of people can get into this career (ballerinas! midwesterners!) and help solve problems facing our ocean and planet.

The week prior I gave a similar talk at National Geographic Headquarters in Washington, DC, though it wasn't the same. My instinct is to mix it up every time because I learn more that way, plus it’s more fun to tell new stories. I hadn’t quite expected how different it would feel giving the talk to an Italian audience. For one, when I test drove the talk with two Italians (thanks fellow explorers Federico Fanti and Marcello Calisti), we realized that I should modify a few cultural references unlikely translate. To name a few: “RVs” are not a thing in Italy. “Camper van,” okay. I describe Aquarius, the undersea science habitat, as "a mix between an RV and a space station." In addition, many Italians aren't likely to instantly know Ohio/Michigan aren't near the ocean. For the student talk, the meaning of "snow day" doesn't translate well, but "school canceled because of weather" makes sense. Movie star Adrian Grenier, in one of my stories, translates. Doc Edgerton's iconic milk drop photo, which I use to describe high speed photography, is also not so recognizable to a young audience.

With those modified, I thought it’d be fairly smooth sailing. But then there was an aspect with consequences I didn’t anticipate. It was my first time giving a talk where the majority of the audience was listening via live translation in headphones. I’ve been fortunate to listen to talks presented like like this at CERN, the United Nations, and the International Maritime Organization, and I always think it’s cool. As a speaker though, I like to feed off the audience’s energy (yeah like a vampire), and ideally look at faces so I can adapt to confusion, boredom, or whatnot. I enjoy it when the talk feels like a dialogue with the audience. With a mostly foreign audience listening via translation, this aspect was very different. A NatGeo freelancer reminded me that jokes and many phrases simply don’t translate. At every pause I heard loudly the audio translations. For the last 2/3 of the talk I spoke at the same pace but with more dedicated pause between sentences so translation could match. My friend Katya, who has translated between Russian and English, is familiar with this and wisely recommended meeting with the translators beforehand, so we could run through the talk and they’d know what words might be awkward. Pro tip! Now I know!

Talking about the Goliath Grouper underneath the Aquarius habitat

These elements made the talk somewhat of a challenge as my first experience being translated real-time, but I learned so much. Students had excellent follow-up questions, both afterwards and then through the contact page on my blog.

Chatting with students. Students at left already got their school to stop using single-use plastics in the cafeteria!

My favorite time was chatting with students afterwards. Three 4th grade students told me about their ocean plastic project. The one boy introduced themselves confidently “We are explorers, and we are doing this project on plastic pollution.” They had already successfully campaigned for their school to replace one-use plastics in the cafeteria with reusable material, and the school made the change! I was impressed and inspired!

Federico mobbed by students as soon as he stepped outside. He's an Italian dinosaur-researcher/explorer/fossil finder - you’d have thought he was a movie star!

Keynote at the National Geographic Science Festival.

The CEO of Sky, Jeremy Darroch, said “One question I’m sure every business is asking with now is: How do I stay relevant to young people?” Sky is sponsoring Ocean Rescue, a multifaceted initiative that includes a marketing campaign geared towards reducing single use plastics. As a company, it has pledged to eliminate single-use plastics from their business and supply chain by 2020. You can follow along with their pledge using #PassOnPlastic.

Standing on carpet made from recycled fishing nets with friend Katya. The whale sculpture is beautiful, but sad -- made from plastic bottles found on beaches.

We had a great evening with Joel Sartore’s work, especially interacting with artificial reality animals in the exhibit. Video at left shows us playing with virtual reality seal in the Photo Ark exhibit. That's Sylvia Earle to my left! It was so fun! As a plus, it aligned with the the vision that my team and I presented two years ago for Future of SeaWorld at the International Business Ethics Competition (blog post here).

Tour of Aquarius now with Italian subtitles!

*Courtesy of Dr. Federico Fanti in the wee hours of the morning before my talk.

Join Me in DC April 10, 2018

3/28/2018

Please join! I look forward to sharing stories, and even more I look forward to hearing everyone's questions! I'll give updates that I haven't posted on blog yet.

Here is the event link [expired]:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/dc/events/extreme-ocean-exploring-deep/
See you there!

The student session is SOLD OUT!

MEDIA

Thanks On Tap magazine for the spread (online here and print below):

Also, Washingtonian magazine also listed the event in it's column "things to do in DC this week (April 9-11)" (here): TUESDAY, APRIL 10 MUSEUMS Ocean engineer Grace Young develops underwater technology to improve ocean exploration, including underwater robots and camera systems for recording fish populations. She will be at the National Geographic Museum discussing the marine life images she’s encountered and the technologies she’s working on creating.

update

Thanks to all who came out!! It was a packed house!

Here Be Dragons LIVE

3/21/2018

Hello! All the talks from the "Here be Dragons" event at the MIT Media Lab last month are now online! You can watch all of them, including mine, at this link. I discuss how big data can answer big questions and how these models can apply to problems facing the ocean, touching on trends observed from my doctoral research, NASA's Frontier Development Lab and CERN's openLab.

Video^ Speaking in the "Deep Data" session at "Here be Dragons", MIT Media Lab.

Talk highlights:

"If you don't come in with a predefined problem, then there is this unfortunate phenomenon where engineers just make up problems to solve. I hate seeing this, especially in the ocean space, where there are so many genuine, pressing problems to solve."

"I've shared some success stories of how big data has been used to solve big problems. These models are ready for us to use, we just need to know what our big question is."

Huge thanks to Dr Katy Croft Bell for leading the Open Ocean Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, and to her and her team for organizing this fantastic event. Thanks also to Professor Dava Newman for the wonderful introduction to my talk! Newman was a role model for me while I was at MIT. She is former Deputy Administrator of NASA.

Also special thanks to Victoria and Stephen White who let me crash their Sustainable Sea Products International booth at the Boston Seafood Expo the following week. The Whites have several amazing innovative businesses geared toward sustainable and scalable aquaculture with the potential to take massive pressure off the oceans now (learn more here). They're also well on their way to achieving sustainable US-based chitin production from shrimp shells.

2018 Updates

1/22/2018

My Thesis: I've submitted my PhD thesis! Titled "Three Dimensional Modelling of Coral Reefs for Structural Complexity Analysis," the thesis examines the correlation between reef structural complexity and ecosystem health.

For my thesis, I developed a new technique for creating and analyzing 3D models of underwater scenes using computer vision and machine learning. The methods are already being used by researchers in Indonesia, Madagascar, Bonaire, Cuba, Honduras, and the Maldives. I've published part of the research, and have five related publications nearing submission or under review. I hope the research will make a significant impact in our understanding of the ocean.

Ocean and Space Collaboration: I postponed submitting my thesis by two months to work in a NASA artificial intelligence accelerator last summer in California (blog post here). It was a chance to apply my knowledge of 3D modeling underwater ocean scenes to the challenge of 3D modelling near-earth asteroids. It was a fantastic opportunity that not only augmented the last chapter of my PhD thesis, but also allowed me to grow personally and professionally.

Our team of four engineers at NASA's Frontier Development Lab used a range of machine learning techniques to automate asteroid 3D modelling. My team's results were well-received by NASA's Planetary Defense community and the tool my team developed will be implemented this year at the Arecibo Observatory to help track near-earth asteroids.

Upcoming Events: While waiting for my PhD defense in March or April, I've committed to a few speaking events, listed below.

Jan 27-31 - NatGeo in London: I'll be attending NatGeo's first-ever London Explorer’s Festival. I'll share updates about current and upcoming projects with the NatGeo community, and we'll celebrate with Jane Goodall the release of her critically-acclaimed film (read more here & find a screening near you).

Washington, DC, April 10 at 7:30PM^
General Admission

Washington, DC, April 10 10AM^ Student Matinee

Celebrating thesis submission.^

Feb 3 - CERN Speech in Geneva: I’ll be speaking at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, about the “CERN for the Ocean” idea I presented in this 2015 TIME op-ed. The idea that has morphed into the a broader “CERN for the Planet.” More about my connection to CERN in previous blog post "Return to CERN."
Feb 6-8 - Marine Technology Society presentations in New Orleans: I’ll be speaking in New Orleans at the Underwater Interventions conference hosted by the Marine Technology Society. With the Pisces VI submarine team, we will share updates from the build. Additionally, I'll present my thesis work on 3D modelling underwater scenes. I've attended this conference almost every year since I was 19!
Feb 13 - Classroom Outreach: I’ll be hosting a live classroom session with NatGeo’s "Exploring By the Seat of Your Pants." Any classroom can sign up for free here! This session will be from our submarine workshop in Salina, Kansas, with the Pisces VI deep-sea submarine. Follow that project on Facebook and Instagram; also previous blog post "Submarines in Kansas? Yes! Pisces VI to Bring Deep Sea Research to the Masses."
Feb 26-27 - MIT Media Lab: I'm thrilled that Katy Croff Bell is launching the Open Ocean Initiative at MIT Media Lab. It will "design and deploy new ways to understand the ocean and connect people to it, empowering a global community of explorers." I'll be at one of the first events "Here Be Dragons" in Boston this February. Most of the talks will be live streamed from MIT or the New England Aquarium. More information here.
April 10 - Join me for "Extreme Oceans" Presentations in DC (a Student Matinee at 10AM, and a General Admission at 7:30PM): I’ll be speaking at NatGeo Headquarters in Washington D.C. about why I care so much about the ocean, how my interests developed, and more broadly about the future of our ocean, the technology and policies we need, and how everyone can get involved. I'll give both a students-only matinee and an evening talk open to the public. Tickets are available here through NatGeo. Friend Anand Varma (who did the awesome slo-mo story of on hummingbirds you might've seen!) will be speaking a few days later on April 13.

NatIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Interview About conducting Research, Living Underwater, and STAYING CONNECTED DURING Fieldwork

11/20/2017

I recently did a phone interview with National Geographic's Jonathan Manning. It's now featured on the front page of National Georaphic's UK website. Excerpts below and full interview here.

What are you currently exploring?
I’m working on several projects while finishing up my PhD at Oxford. My thesis is focused on 3D mapping coral reefs and the correlation between reef structure and the health of its ecosystem. I’m monitoring the structural complexity of the reef, how it changes over time and how fish interact with the 3D structure. It’s an inter-disciplinary project involving zoology and engineering that requires a lot of time underwater studying the reefs off the coast of Honduras. I’m also helping to rebuild a deep-sea research sub, Pisces VI, that will allow us to discover more deep-sea species and better understand how ocean ecosystems function. Finally, I’ve just started a project developing new technology to enable us to genetically analyse sea creatures in their natural environment; this project is in its very early stages though.

What’s so fascinating about coral reefs?
Coral reefs are the mega-cities of the ocean. They host as much as 25% of all marine life, but they cover less than 1% of the ocean floor. One of the reasons they are able to do that is because they have this gorgeous structural complexity that creates niches for species to hide from predators or weather storms and a great surface area for a diversity of creatures to feed on.

Grace dances outside Aquarius, her underwater home for 15 days during Mission 31. Photo: Fabien Cousteau - Mission 31.

How much of your study involves fieldwork?
I spend three months of the year doing fieldwork and the rest doing data analysis or developing testing technologies here in Oxford.

Where do you conduct your fieldwork?
My doctoral thesis is based on a fairly remote island called Utila, in the Caribbean, a couple of hours by boat from mainland Honduras. There are only about 4,000 people who live there, and there’s just one main road on the island – you could take a golf buggy around the island in a day. We have a field station there that’s been operational for about a decade, operated by a conservation group, Operation Wallacea. We chose the site because it’s been monitored for several years so we have a baseline.

It sounds like paradise!
Not quite - it’s like a glorified weight loss camp! We’re busy every day. I’m up at 7am, I grab breakfast of rice and beans at the dive centre, then put on dive gear and do three or four dives per day, each about an hour underwater. I never dive alone. I always have at least one dive buddy, usually a research assistant. We set up experiments and collect data. Last summer I did a lot of heavy lifting. We had a series of concrete tiles underwater that we were growing coral on – we had to put them down and then bring them back to the surface. Each tile weighed 2.5 kilograms (5 pounds) and there were 200 of them – that’s half a ton! I come back from fieldwork in the best shape of my life!

Grace enjoys a cup of tea with Fabien Cousteau, while living underwater for more than a fortnight.

How do you keep in touch with friends and family when you’re on Utila?
It’s not easy. I’m often working in areas with limited to no internet or mail services, so the typical means of communicating with loved ones aren’t available. Recently I’ve started to write and exchange a bunch of letters with close friends before I leave. We can read them each week I’m away and so stay in each other’s thoughts. I also periodically treat myself to an internet connection – although this sometimes requires literally walking across the island. That’s a serious commitment to sending a text message!

Do you miss important news?
I remember coming out of the water after a dive and someone told us that Britain had left the EU. I wasn’t sure I had heard right, but I had several more hours of diving that day, so I couldn’t confirm it. Because the internet is so spotty on the island, we rely on word of mouth for news. You cannot surf the news as normal. When I’m away people joke, “have you been under a rock?,” and I reply, “no, I’ve been underwater.” On the plus side, being offline and away from everything allows me to really focus on my research. Also, I try to compensate for the isolation by reading more books and longer form works.

Have you even been in danger?
People often ask me this – weren’t you scared of living underwater? Of diving with sharks? Of sailing across the ocean? Of diving at night? The list goes on; but really, everything I’ve done is safe. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. Before an expedition we do risk assessments to think through every emergency situation and determine how we should respond. The danger really isn’t from sea creatures so much as it’s from carelessness,. Overall I’m probably in more danger walking across the street in Oxford.

Where would you most like to be right now?
I’m always happiest on or in the water; but I try to live in the moment, so I’m very happy here in Oxford – although I miss the ocean.

Which luxuries do you sneak into your luggage before every trip?
I always wear my Doxa dive watch, which I got on a previous expedition, called Mission 31, when we lived underwater for 15 days in the Aquarius habitat. The watch has an iconic orange face.

... read the rest at http://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conservation/2017/11/underwater-explorer

Other News

I'm in the December issue of National Geographic Magazine! Did you read it?

Land-Based Tech Project via MIT

10/16/2017

Drug overdoses now kill more Americans than guns.

Last year I took on a side project to support fellow MIT alumni and learn some things from a different field. Five of us, with one alumni mentor, created an app to help rapidly deliver the antidote to an opioid overdose (Naloxone) to those who need it. You could call it the Uber for Naloxone. It was a different experience for me, in part because I hadn't worked on applications before and also because the five of us never once met in the same room (a few of us had known each other before though). We coordinated over Google Hangouts and email across four time zones, spanning California to England! There were some late nights working on this project from Kansas and at the SailFuture house, but it was worth it.

Our submission to the government-sponsored hackathon was recognized in this article from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additionally, team leader Ben Taylor is continuing this work with his company LedgerDomain.

"FDA also congratulates Team MIT on their app concept, NalNow, which the judges recognized as a second high-performing submission. Team MIT receives an honorable mention as the team with the second-highest score in the Competition. Team MIT is represented by Dr. Hattie Chung, Grace Young, Sinchan Banerjee, Rodrigo Ipince and Emily Zhao. View the NalNow app video here: http://bit.ly/nalnow_video." -- FDA blog

LedgerDomain announcement October 2017:

Greetings!

Writing to share our LedgerDomain launch news and thank everyone for their help while we were in stealth mode. Nineteen months ago, we decided that blockchain would drive the fourth wave in accounting. We set to work using blockchain to build safe spaces where participants across enterprises could transact and share sensitive information. 40,000 lines of code later, we are ready to share the good news.

WHY BLOCKCHAIN? Blockchain's cryptographic safeguards have enabled cryptocurrencies like bitcoin to be transferred by strangers globally. These same techniques shall enable global enterprises to transact across the firewall. Additionally, blockchain's structure has the potential for users to confidentially analyze their own granular historical data.

SAFE SPACES On Wall Street, we have continuous auctions in safe spaces called trading platforms. LedgerDomain was founded to deliver safe spaces for sensitive transactions to the Global 2000.

Our first step to test use cases was to sponsor the sterling effort by TeamMIT, which finished second in the FDA challenge last Fall with NalNow (bit.ly/nalnow_video). Most viewers had no clue that NalNow contemplated a blockchain on the backend; we wouldn't have it any other way.

OUR SOLUTION Our target customers are typically global in scope, exchanging high value goods & services, operating in over a hundred countries, and are highly regulated. Based on their feedback, we have initially focused on blockchain platforms that are cryptocurrency free, and chose Hyperledger, a Linux Foundation project, as our technology core. Cryptocurrencies are on our roadmap, but to quote Orson Welles, "no wine before its time".

Our first demo moved a stream of hypothetical pill bottles marked with 2D barcodes through the pharmaceutical supply chain. Our smart contracts controlled the flow of the bottles while our Selvedge blockchain orchestration server powered the client experience, managing user access & privileges while provisioning system resources on the fly.

CURRENT MILESTONE Our goal is to make the blockchain seamless and invisible to our users, enabling them to enjoy its benefits without the mental overhead. We are ready to pilot at scale now while readying Selvedge V1.1 for those clients who scale in ludicrous mode.

I'd like to recognize & thank my partners, Dr. Victor Dods, Dr. Gabe Hare & Dr. Aaron Smith; as well as our amazing TeamMIT members, Hattie, Emily, Sinchan, Rodrigo & Grace; those advising behind the scenes, including Max, Will, Tim, Jeremy, Chris & Adrian; as well as those in the real world, including Michael, Mike, Steve, Angeliki, Chad, Ted, Eric, Thierry, JB, Vinay, Marcelino, Larry, Ruey, Jeff, Faye, Ansel, Damian, Michelle, Kevin, Neil, Dan, Kate, Ron, David, Anju, Anthony & Rose.

For more information about the opioid epidemic I recommend the documentary "Prescription for Change" featuring Macklemore and President Obama. It's free on Youtube (here). The more I learned, the more I realized how many people I know whom have been affected by this epidemic. It put me in awe and respect of how fragile our chemical balances are as humans.

Ocean Exploration -- in Times Square!

10/13/2017

Last week I hopped across the pond for the opening of National Geographic’s first immersive entertainment experience. “Ocean Odyssey” in Times Square draws visitors under the sea to experience ocean life thanks to clever videography, staging, virtual and artificial reality. Virtual explorers witness a battle between Humbolt squid, get lost in a kelp forest, and see a whale leap from the depths to feed on a school of fish. They can also play quiz games that show how they can improve the ocean.

Pictures tell the story best. More information about how you can visit the exhibit is in the Act Now page of this blog. Your ticket purchase supports the National Geographic Society’s great work!

"Our oceans are our life support system ..." G.C.Young

Virtual turtle!

My face in the explorer's hall!

Stepping in virtual sea grass.

Playing with virtual reality seals that mimic your movements - reminds me of my real dives with seals in the UK's Farne Islands.

Fluorescent models of coral that you can touch.

My friend Bizzy and I lost in kelp forest mirror maze.

On the reef with fellow NatGeo Explorer, cave diver Jenny Adler Owen.

PROGRESS

Last year I was in Boston with three other Oxford grad students presenting a new business model for SeaWorld that entertained with virtual and artificial reality instead of captive cetacean. Visitors could have the sensations of travelling with dolphins miles in the ocean, seeing whales breach right in front of them, and experiencing the ocean from the perspective of a stingray in the wild. Our presentation won the 2016 International Business Ethics Competition; see past blog post "The Future of SeaWorld Won 2016 International Business Ethics Competition!"

I'm so glad that National Geographic has done it! Hopefully this is a trend that catches on.

No more! Experience marine animals up-close as they are in nature with virtual and artificial reality; it's cooler and kinder. Image from The Onion.

Other Update from Yellow Rectangle

Attention teachers! On Tuesday October 17th, your classroom can join me and fellow ocean engineer Shah Selbe in a hangout! Register here. The hangout is organised by National Geographic Education. More helpful links:

View teacher's guide here: https://goo.gl/MDxnAZ

From QUANTUM Physics to Ocean ENGINEERING

10/2/2017

"It was CERN's high-powered global community of scientists congregated in one beautiful place to solve big problems that was a magnet for me." -- Grace C. Young

CERN's Symmetry publication recently published an interview I did with them a few weeks ago. Excerpts are below, and you can read the full interview at ww.symmetrymagazine.org/article/cern-alumna-turned-deep-sea-explorer

"Grace C. Young is fascinated by fundamental questions about realms both quantum and undersea."

Each summer, the international research laboratory CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, welcomes dozens of students to work alongside seasoned scientists on cutting-edge particle physics research. Many of these students will pursue physics research in graduate school, but some find themselves applying the lessons they learned at CERN to new domains.

In 2011, MIT undergraduate Grace Young was one of these CERN summer students.
Like many young adults, Young didn’t know what career path she wanted to pursue. “I tried all the majors,” Young says. “Physics, engineering, architecture, math, computer science. Separately, I always loved both the ocean and building things; it wasn’t until I learned about ocean engineering that I knew I had found my calling.”

Today, Young is completing her PhD in ocean engineering at the University of Oxford and is chief scientist for the deep-sea submarine Pisces VI. She develops technology for ocean research and in 2014 lived underwater for 15 days. During a recent visit to CERN, Young spoke with Symmetry writer Sarah Charley about the journey that led her from fundamental physics back to her first love, the ocean.

As a junior in high school you competed in Intel’s International Science Fair and won a trip to CERN. What was your project?

GY: A classmate and I worked in a quantum physics lab at University of Maryland. We designed and built several devices, called particle traps, that had potential applications for quantum computing. We soldered wires onto the mirror inside a flashlight to create a bowl-shaped electric field and then applied alternating current to repeatedly flip the field, which made tiny charged particles hover in mid-air.

We were really jumping into the deep end on quantum physics; it was kind of amazing that it worked! Winning a trip to CERN was a dream come true. It was a transformative experience that had a huge impact on my career path.

You then came back to CERN as a freshman at MIT. What is it about CERN and particle physics that made you want to return?

GY: My peek inside CERN the previous year sparked an interest that drove me to apply for the Openlab internship [a technology development collaboration between CERN scientists and members of companies or research institutes].

Although I learned a lot from my assignment, my interest and affinity for CERN derives from the community of researchers from diverse backgrounds and disciplines from all over the world. It was CERN's high-powered global community of scientists congregated in one beautiful place to solve big problems that was a magnet for me.

You say you’ve always loved the ocean. What is it about the ocean that inspires you?

GY: I’ve loved being by the water since I was born. I find it very humbling, standing on the shore and having the waves breaking at my feet.

This huge body of water differentiates our planet from other rocks in space, yet so little is known about it. The more time I spent on or in the water, either sailing or diving, the more I began taking a deeper interest in marine life and the essential role the ocean plays in sustaining life as we know it on Earth.

What does an ocean engineer actually do?

GY: One big reason that we’ve only explored 5 percent of the ocean is because the deep sea is so forbidding for humans. We simply don't have the biology to see or communicate underwater, much less exist for more than a few minutes just below surface.

But all this is changing with better underwater imaging, sensors and robotic technologies. As an ocean engineer, I design and build things such as robotic submersibles, which can monitor the health of fisheries in marine sanctuaries, track endangered species and create 3-D maps of underwater ice shelves. These tools, combined with data collected during field research, enable me and my colleagues to explore the ocean and monitor the human impact on its fragile ecosystems.

I also design new eco-seawalls and artificial coral reefs to protect coastlines from rising sea levels and storm surges while reviving essential marine ecosystems.

What questions are you hoping to answer during your career as an ocean engineer and researcher?

GY: How does the ocean support so much biodiversity? More than 70 percent of our planet is covered by water, producing more than half the oxygen we breathe, storing more carbon dioxide than all terrestrial plant life and feeding billions of humans. And yet 95 percent of our ocean remains unexplored and essentially unknown.

The problem we are facing today is that we are destroying so many of the ocean’s ecosystems before we even know they exist. We can learn a lot about how to stay alive and thrive by studying the oceanic habitats, leading to unforeseeable discoveries and scientific advancements.

What are some of your big goals with this work?

GY: We face big existential ocean-related problems, and I'd like to help develop solutions for them. Overfishing, acidification, pollution and warming temperatures are destroying the ocean’s ecosystems and affecting humans by diminishing a vital food supply, shifting weather patterns and accelerating sea-level rise. Quite simply, if we don't know or understand the problems, we can't fix them.

Have you found any unexpected overlaps between the research at CERN and the research on a submarine?

GY: Vision isn’t a good way to see the underwater world. The ocean is pitch black in most of its volume, and the creatures don’t rely on vision. They feel currents with their skin, use sound and can read the chemicals in the water to smell food. It would make sense for humans to use sensors that do that same thing.

Physicists faced this same challenge and found other ways to characterize subatomic particles and the celestial bodies without relying on vision. Ocean sciences are moving in this same direction.

What do you think ocean researchers and particle physicists can learn from each other?

GY: I think we already know it: That is, we can only solve big problems by working together. I'm convinced that only by working together across disciplines, ethnicities and nationalities can we survive as a species.

Of course, the physical sciences are integral to everything related to ocean engineering, but it's really CERN's problem-solving methodology that's most inspiring and applicable. CERN was created to solve big problems by combining the best of human learning irrespective of nationality, ethnicity or discipline. Our Pisces VI deep sea submarine team is multidisciplinary, multinational and—just like CERN—it's focused on exploring the unknown that's essential to life as we know it.

Read more about my recent visit to CERN in my blog post, "Return to CERN."
I look forward to presenting at CERN's alumni event in February.

Return to CERN

9/29/2017

Update

My interview from time at CERN just published in Symmetry magazine. Excerpt below.

CERN alumna turned deep-sea explorer

S: What do you think ocean researchers and particle physicists can learn from each other?
GY: I think we already know it: That is, we can only solve big problems by working together. I'm convinced that only by working together across disciplines, ethnicities and nationalities can we survive as a species. Of course, the physical sciences are integral to everything related to ocean engineering, but it's really CERN's problem-solving methodology that's most inspiring and applicable. CERN was created to solve big problems by combining the best of human learning irrespective of nationality, ethnicity or discipline. Our Pisces VI deep sea submarine team is multidisciplinary, multinational and—just like CERN—it's focused on exploring the unknown that's essential to life as we know it.

Full article here. It's also on the Facebook page for the Pisces VI submarine (here).

Last week I was delighted to return to CERN for a short trip (and break from thesis writing). In front of the Globe, CERN's alumni team and I filmed an interview for CERN's newly launched alumni network. I'll post the video once it's live. Rachel Bray and I chatted about my time there, including my first visit as an INTEL Science Fair winner followed by an internship in CERN openlab, and then my transition from physics into ocean engineering (how it's not such a weird transition!). We also gave a plug for my talk in February at CERN's first-ever alumni conference, where I'll tackle the subject, ‘What is the role of scientists in building a sustainable future for the planet?’ Spoiler alert: I'll focus on the big questions a CERN-for-the-ocean could answer! (My 2014 op-ed for TIME explains more fully my vision for a CERN-for-the-ocean.)

My first-ever blog titled, "CERN-Intel 2010 Special Award Winners' Trip," chronicles my first visit to CERN as a thrilled 17-year old physics student living her dream of a one-week immersion at CERN. It covers every detail of the trip, from notes on each speakers and activities to what we ate for breakfast.

I'm thankful for CERN's supportive community, its dedication to pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, and its pioneering model that has demonstrated how cooperative, interdisciplinary, multinational pulbic-private research can succeed in solving big problems and achieving monumental results (e.g., invention of World Wide Web and Grid Computing, confirmation of Higgs boson, are just a few examples). In fact, the night before my interview I met another alumna who wrote the first code for CERNdocs that became a central node in the "vague but exciting" project now known as the World Wide Web.

In my interview, rather than focus on specific problems and solutions, I tried to highlight open-ended research questions---the type of large-scale questions CERN has so well addressed. I was thinking, 'What is the equivalent for the ocean of confirming the Higgs boson?' For me there are two big, unanswered questions: (1) How does the ocean support so much biodiversity? (Also: Why does it? What are all those unique creatures and their purposes anyways? (2) How does it regulate weather/atmosphere on our planet? Our window of opportunity for answering these questions is closing, as we are losing biodiversity and the ocean is increasingly unable to provide the ecosystem functions we depend upon; but again, it's possible to focus on the big, exciting questions without harping on the doom and gloom.

Notes/text from my interview are below.

Tell us who you are. I'm an ocean engineer, just now completing my doctorate at University of Oxford. I work on technologies that help us better understand our ocean.

What have you done since CERN? This summer I joined 23 other scientists from around the world for an artificial intelligence accelerator at NASA’s Frontier Development Lab in California. It reminded me a lot of CERN – on a much smaller scale. It was a public-private, interdisciplinary initiative that brought together scientists from different backgrounds to focus on solving discreet problems in a short period of time. My team focused on using artificial intelligence to create 3D models of asteroids.

Depiction of CERN's vast amounts of data (300 TB!) from ScienceAlert.com

What unique experience did you take away from CERN? CERN had a huge impact on my development as a scientist and engineer. My experience was truly transformative. My first experience was when I was age 17. A classmate and I won a week-long trip to CERN from the Intel Science Fair for a physics project. It was a dream come true; I'd read so much about CERN. I'm still incredibly thankful to Wolfgang Von Rueden for organizing that trip and becoming a mentor. A year later, CERN’s openlab took a chance on a first-year MIT student and let me into its summer internship program. I got to work with phenomenal people and write software to help physicists (perform Dalitz analysis within the ROOT data analysis framework).

Although I veered away from physics into ocean engineering (I like to sail and I love the water), CERN taught me many things that I often think back to. One is the genuine power in community. It's not just about putting capable people in the same place -- it's about having those people, from diverse disciplines work together to solve discrete problems, and work towards a common purpose. Another thing it taught me is that fundamental science pursued for the sake of science (or art) spawns innovation.

The night before the interview I met another alumna. She wrote the first code for CERNdocs, which became a central node in the "vague but exciting" project now known as the World Wide Web.

Even my visitor's badge to CERN reinforced its core purpose. I thought the text on the badge aptly described CERN's mission and motivation. It read:

What is the Universe made of? Where did it come from, where it is going and why does it behave the way it does? At CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers and probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constitutes of matter - the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.

What value do you see in the CERN alumni network? I see the alumni network as a potentially powerful tool. Of course it's a great way to stay in touch with friends, make new ones, and enhance career connections. Its greatest value, however, may be in harnessing the power of our great community to solve big problems like CERN proper does. Alumni know the value of cooperation and the power of working across disciplines, across cultures, public-private sectors, and that's a powerful thing.

What’s next for you? I'd like to create a CERN-for-the-ocean. Right now we don't understand how the ocean works -- how it holds so much biodiversity, how it maintains weather, sequesters so much carbon. At the same time it faces big problems including overfishing, pollution, acidification and warming. These require technical and policy solutions. I'd like to copy CERN's model for research and innovation and apply it to the equivalent for the ocean of confirming the Higgs boson.

ANOTHER NOTE ON POSITIVE MESSAGES

Humpback whale off New York City!

While in Geneva, I stumbled across this well-written, cautiously optimistic piece by Carl Safina for National Geographic about how the waters off of New York are changing for the better. I found it inspiring, and it made me extra-excited to attend the opening of NatGeo's Ocean Odyssey next month! More about that on the Act Now page!

From Safina's article:

This is a new and improved, revitalized coast, returning to abundance, where everything has plenty to eat and big things linger all summer getting fat and staying relaxed. Whales are spending summers where no one remembers seeing them before; fish eating birds are doing better than anyone can remember, sharks are rebounding along the East Coast as nowhere else in the world, and high-value fish such as striped bass and bluefish have plenty to eat. Osprey pairs have been raising healthy broods of three chicks and many mornings this summer it took them a few minutes to find and catch a fish as the sky was getting light. Often they’d delivered breakfast to their chicks even before time the sun cleared the horizon.

Summer at NASA - Update

8/4/2017

So far so good! My previous blog post explains why I'm at NASA this summer. In short, I'm still 'Team Ocean' (of course!), but the 3D shape modelling techniques developed for my PhD on coral reefs have direct application for NASA's research on near-Earth asteroids (and vise versa). It's been a fantastic collaboration. Here are more details about what we're doing and why.

What We'RE Doing and Why

<- Explaining our work during a Facebook live event for SETI (here on Facebook; it's been viewed by >30k!).

NASA's Frontier Development Lab (FDL) is an experimental tool in NASA’s innovation portfolio that emphasizes artificial intelligence, inter-disciplinary approaches, rapid iteration, and teamwork to produce significant breakthroughs useful to the space program.

This summer, four of us at NASA FDL are creating 3D models of asteroids. Our core team comprises two planetary scientists (Agata Rozek and Sean Marshall), two machine learning engineers (Adam Cobb and me), plus mentors from both disciplines (Chedy Raissi, Michael Busch, and Yarin Gal). We’re creating the 3D models from radar data. It's a difficult computational problem, but knowing an asteroid’s 3D shape helps us predict its future trajectory (/whether it will collide with Earth!).

The formal introduction to our problem reads as follows:

Delay-Doppler radar imaging is a powerful technique to characterize the trajectories, shapes, and spin states of near-Earth asteroids and has yielded detailed models of dozens of objects. Since the 1990s, delay-Doppler images have been analyzed using the SHAPE software developed originally by R. S. Hudson and S. J. Ostro [1, 2]. SHAPE normally performs sequential single-parameter fitting. Recently, multiple-parameter fitting algorithms have been shown to more efficiently invert delay-Doppler data sets, thus decreasing runtime while improving accuracy [3]. However, reconstructing asteroid shapes and spins from radar data is still, like many inverse problems, a computationally intensive task that requires extensive human oversight. The FDL 2016 team explored two new techniques to better automate delay-Doppler shape modeling: Bayesian optimization [4] and deep generative models [5]. The FDL 2017 team is refining that work and exploring new directions for more quickly and accurately generating 3D models of near-Earth asteroids from delay-Doppler images.

It took me a bit to understand exactly what our goals and motivations were. The most common questions my friends ask are, “What are you doing?” and “Why?” My short answer: We're generating 3D models of asteroids from radar data so that we can better determine asteroids' physical properties and orbital trajectories. There are over 16,000 known near-Earth objects, and on average 35 new ones each week. It's too much data to keep up with without sophisticated data analysis techniques, so we're using machine learning to speed up and automate the process of generating 3D models from radar data of asteroids.

Still #TeamOcean

I'm also interested in the task of 3D modelling asteroids because the techniques can be applied to 3D modelling coral reefs, the topic of my thesis, as further discussed in my first post about NASA.

Preliminary Results

1

Result 1A: Delay-Dopler images (example above) are converted into 3D models of asteroids (example at right).

Result 1B: Last year a team trained a neural network to generate 3D asteroid shapes in the form of voxels (cube-like 3D pixels). We've developed triangular meshes from those voxels, and have smoothed the 3D shapes so that they better resemble asteroids. We'll be feeding a set of synthetic radar shapes into a deep neural network to train the network. For more details, stay tuned for our presentation on August 17th in Silicon Valley.

2	Result 2: We wrote a script that that finds signals in sets of delay-Doppler radar images. This quickens pre-processing of the data. The script intelligently masks the signal from the noise in an image using a density-based clustering (DBSCAN) algorithm.

3

Result 3: We also wrote a script that estimates the spin state of an asteroid from available data. That data can be radar data, optical or light curve data, or any of the input sources used by existing 3D modeling software for asteroids called SHAPE. It quickly and efficiently estimates spin states by performing Bayesian optimization on a spherical coordinate system. Already processing time has gone down from 3 days to 4 hours (and getting faster!).

More details will be in our final presentation and report at the end of the summer. Register here if you'd like to attend our final presentation in Santa Clara, California.

References:

[1] R. Scott Hudson. Three-dimensional reconstruction of asteroids from radar observations. Remote Sensing Reviews 8, 195–203, 1993.
[2] Christopher Magri, Michael C. Nolan, Steven J. Ostro, and Jon D. Giorgini. A radar survey of main-belt asteroids: Arecibo observations of 55 objects during 1999-2003. Icarus 186, 126–151, 2007.
[3] Adam H. Greenberg and Jean-Luc Margot. Improved algorithms for radar-based reconstruction of asteroid shapes. The Astronomical Journal 150(4), 114, 2015.
[4] Jonas Mockus. Bayesian Heuristic Approach to Discrete and Global Optimization: Algorithms, Visualization, Software, and Applications. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010.
[5] Ruslan Salakhutdinov. Learning deep generative models. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Applications 2, 361–385, 2015.
[6] Shane Carr, Roman Garnett, and Cynthia Lo. BASC: applying Bayesian optimization to the search for global minima on potential energy surfaces. International Conference on Machine Learning. 2016.

This post is modified from the original published on the NASA FDL page (here). All work was developed while at NASA Frontier Development Lab, working with Agata Rozek, Sean Marshall, Adam Cobb, Justin Havlovitz, Chedy Raissi, Michael Busch, and Yarin Gal.

UPDATE - 12 Sept 17

My colleague Adam just posted his perspective on the project. Read his blog post here.

Update - 20 Nov 17

The video of our final presentation at Intel Headquarters is live! It's on YouTube at this link.

Update - Jan 2018

The results from our team of four engineers and scientists were well-received by NASA's Planetary Defense Community. The tool we developed will be implemented this year at the Arecibo Observatory to help track near-earth asteroids.

Related blog posts:

National Geographic Explorer Festival

6/27/2017

Last week I had the honor of attending National Geographic’s first-ever Explorers Festival. It was many things: It was a gathering of explorers from all disciplines and corners of the globe; it was my introduction to the NatGeo “family;” it was an excuse for NatGeo to roll out the 'yellow carpet' for James Cameron, Sylvia Earle, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bob Ballard, and other explorer-celebrities.

As a 2017 Emerging Explorer, I gave a 10-minute talk about my work and dreams and then contributed to a panel discussion on “Transformative Technology;” both are online here.

<-Video of our talks. Also check out Charlie Hamlton James, Jennifer W. Lopez, and Corey Jaskolski; they talk about wildlife photography, space, and 3D mapping ancient sites.

The week was a gear-shifting process for me. For the past several months I’ve been up to my ears in my PhD thesis. This week forced me to take a few steps back and think big-picture, about major goals and priorities in terms of ocean technology development. It also forced me to reflect on my personal story --- the twists of fate that pushed me to where I am now.

NatGeo focuses on human elements of any story; I believe this is one reason why it effectively engages across disciplines. Explorers are encouraged not just to talk about their work, as they might at an academic or technical conference, but also to speak of their motivations – how and why they got to their unique position. Usually these stories take us back to childhood, but not all the time – sometimes the story starts later in life. Distilling one’s life into a story is a difficult task if you overthink it. How can one figure out which moments of the past millions and millions of moments to cut and which to mention? How do our brains remove the signal from the noise? Only in hindsight have I identified some of the more transformative moments. The storytellers at NatGeo helped me bring out the bits of my story that linked my path in ways I hadn’t considered before. For that I’m very thankful to the NatGeo community.

During the Festival, Fabien Cousteau’s Mission 31 got a shout-out not just in my talk, but also in educator Joe Grabowski’s talk. Joe founded Exploring by the Seat of Your Pants (EBTSOYP), an awesome program that connects classrooms with explorers for virtual field trips. If your classroom is studying the ocean, EBTSOYP can connect your class for 30+ minutes with someone or a team doing ocean work that as their full-time job(s). I believe exposing young students to human stories related to their studies is essential to engagement. I remember in middle school wanting to be a dolphin trainer, orthodontist, or teacher because those were the professions that I understood---I never heard of an ocean engineer until university! I can’t wait to connect students with the Pisces VI submarine project through Joe’s program.

Chatting with legend James Cameron about lights and cameras for the Pisces VI submarine. Although it doesn't look like it in this picture, I swear I was paying attention!

One of the moments that brought happy tears to my eyes last week was watching Wasfia’s story. I was introduced to her a few days before at a happy hour, when someone whispered to me “she’s climbed Everest…” but only after watching her film did I realize that’s the tinniest part of her story. A Bangladeshi orphan, she learned new definitions of home. On summitting the highest peaks of all seven continents, she said "in my eye, climbing is more of a surrender rather than conquering; if anything nature conquers you."

Watch Wasfia's inspirational story here^

WHAT’S NEXT.

Yesterday (Monday June 26, 2017) was the first day of my 8-week stint with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab. In September I’ll return full attention to my doctoral thesis, which I plan to submit in December. In my spare time I’m thinking about the science addenda for the Pisces VI submarine, which I’ll visit this August with fellow scientist Anni Djurhuus. Scott is currently on a cruise with the Alvin submarine in Costa Rica.

At the Festival, I learned and experienced the word “overinspired.” I feel extremely motivated to get back to work, even if that means getting back to the grind. I’m looking forward to learning cutting edge machine learning applications this summer with NASA colleagues and will devote my whole focus to that. Down the line, I look forward to collaborations with fellow explorers, whether that be on ocean research expeditions, technology development, or yet unplanned adventures.

UNITED NATIONS OCEAN CONFERENCE

6/25/2017

This month I attended the United Nations Ocean Conference. It was the first-ever Ocean Conference at the UN. Headquartered in New York City, it focused on Sustainable Development Goal 14: "to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development." I'd never been to a UN general assembly meeting before, so it was a new experience for me (plus an excellent excuse to catch up with NYC friends).

LOOKING UPWARDS THIS SUMMER -- INVITE TO NASA

5/25/2017

Excited to announce that I’ve been offered a research position this summer at NASA’s Frontier Development Lab in Mountain View, CA. I’ll be working alongside other scientists and engineers for eight weeks in an intensive research accelerator focused on artificial intelligence.

Hosted by the SETI Institute and NASA Ames and supported by leaders in AI from the private sector, such as IBM, Nvidia, Autodesk and Miso Technologies, FDL brings together teams of experts in the physical sciences and specialists in data science and machine learning for an intense 8-week concentrated study on topics important to NASA – and to humanity’s future. The format encourages rapid iteration and prototyping to create outputs with meaningful application, papers and conference posters.

They've asked me to develop a project with cohorts on near-earth object 3D shape modelling and lunar water detection, topics that directly relate to my thesis (minus the "lunar" part and replace "near-earth" with "underwater" of course!). It's a fantastic opportunity to develop skills and learn from NASA in ways that will not only further develop our underwater 3D modelling techniques, but also vise versa; they'll learn from our research techniques.

Image: G. Young Credit Mission 31.

Still Team Ocean

Ocean and space are commonly pitted against each other – upward vs downward – astronaut vs aquanaut, etc.

Fabien Cousteau and Liz Magee from Mission 31 recently debated in a Science Throwdown: Space vs. Sea at the American Museum of Natural History, and Nat Geo 2011 Explorer of the Year Kenny Broad plans to highlight the topic in his Red Planet vs Blue Planet session at the National Geographic Explorer’s Festival this June.

I delve into the debate’s history in my undergraduate thesis Missiles and Misconceptions: Why We Know More About the Dark Side of the Moon Than the Depths of the Ocean, TEDx Talk Why We Know More About the Moon Than the Depths of the Ocean, and in an interview for an upcoming PBS documentary based on Ben Hellwarth’s awesome book SEALAB.

It’s not an either-or debate, however. We can explore both.

I’m looking forward to this summer opportunity at NASA for a number of reasons. I’m eager to learn from NASA methods that will enhance our underwater 3D modeling techniques while sharing what we’ve learned underwater. The experience will also provide another perspective on how public-private partnerships can work effectively to achieve defined research objectives. I believe public-private partnerships like NASA FDL and what I observed at CERN OpenLab, are the key to tackling our most urgent ocean research objectives---a vision I outlined in my 2015 TIME op-ed. Finally, I’m excited to spend weekends diving, surfing, and reuniting with West Coast friends.

Image: G. Young credit Mission 31

Many astronauts are also aquanauts, but most people don’t realize more people have been to space than have lived underwater! Several acquaintances work in both arenas: Pisces VI submarine owner Scott Waters is also on a space advisory board. FDL founding member, Jordan McRae, invented OctoTalk, a system for divers to transmit voice communications underwater. Jonathan Knowles, who is involved with FDL through Autodesk, also advises The Hydrous, an organization that 3D models corals around the world.

That said, I’m committed to Team Ocean. I’m personally drawn to water, a connection many humans have (see Wallace Nichols' book Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do.).

Moreover, engineering-wise, while space may seem more exotic, I’d argue the ocean, particularly the deep ocean, is a more challenging work environment considering that E&M waves, upon which wifi, GPS, and many modern innovations are based, do not work, and salt water kills electronics. We’re forced to innovate.

(Thanks Somerville (Oxford) for the article with video!)

Author

Grace Young (B.S., MIT, Ph.D, Oxford) is an ocean engineer, aquanaut, and explorer currently working at X. She was a scientist and engineer on Fabian Cousteau’s Mission 31 and is currently chief scientist of the Pisces VI deepsea research submarine and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

Blog Highlights:
1. No Engineer is an Island
2. Mission 31 Highlights
3. Sailing Across the Atlantic
3. Return to CERN

Tweets by @grace_h2o

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