All Categories - GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

TIME Best Invention of 2023

11/6/2023

The underwater artificial intelligence (AI) technology I've been working on the past 5+ years was recently named by TIME as one of the world's best inventions of 2023. Proud of my team!

Tidal is "a moonshot to protect and preserve the most valuable ecosystem, the ocean, so it can continue to support humanity for generations to come. The novel hardware and AI software we've deployed to help ocean farmers observe underwater fish behavior was an important starting point, but it's just the beginning of what we believe will be possible with our technology."

TIME announcement
LinkedIn update

5 Ways Ballet Prepared Me for An Engineering Career

9/18/2022

As a young person in ballet classes, Pointe was one of my favorite magazines. I remember pouring over the pages, cutting out the articles and photos I connected with. I would’ve loved to read about what engineering was like. Little did I know that years later I would build a career as an engineer. Last Summer I published an article with Pointe about my experience. My top cross-over lessons:

1. Most top performers aren’t geniuses; they work at it.
2. Jealousy doesn’t serve you unless you convert it into inspiration.
3. Managing energy is the key to working well.
4. Strengthening weaknesses requires conscious effort.
5. Balance emotions and logic to find motivation.

At this point in my life I’ve meet several dancers turned STEM professionals; it’s not that unusual! Cheers to other dancers in #STEM (or #STEAM). I know there’s many more out there! I share my lessons here in hope that they may comfort other dancers thinking about life after dance.

Full article at on Pointe Magazine: https://www.pointemagazine.com/ballet-and-engineering/

The author during her dancing days. Photo by Stephen Baranovics.

People often ask me about my ballet background because it seems like strange preparation for an engineering career. To me it’s not peculiar at all. Ballet taught me many of the skills I use to excel in both the classroom and technical fields.

When Royal Ballet first soloist Beatriz Stix-Brunell announced her recent move from stage to Stanford University, it made me reflect on my own journey. Although my ballet career never reached the level of Stix-Brunell’s (she was with The Royal Ballet for 11 years and is retiring at her peak, at age 28!), I’ve been in the academic and engineering world for 11 years (I’m also 28). After studying as an undergraduate at MIT and as a PhD student at the University of Oxford, I’m now a senior engineer at X (formerly Google X), where I build radical new technologies to solve some of the biggest challenges facing our ocean.

Here are lessons I learned through ballet that have prepared me for my engineering career. I share them in hope that they may comfort other dancers thinking about life after dance.

1. Most top performers aren’t geniuses; they work at it.
As a young dancer I was awestruck by a girl in my Royal Ballet School summer intensive. She always seemed to execute combinations perfectly on the first try. I figured she must be a genius. Then, during the last week of the program she was assigned to my room in student housing. I noticed that every night she reviewed the combinations we danced that day, either motioning with her hands, saying them aloud or half-dancing around the room. She repeated them in the morning. Her “genius” was smart preparation, and this let her excel. She practiced, practiced, practiced, mostly when people weren’t watching. She taught me how much work it takes to achieve the skill levels I aimed for.

At MIT, many students similarly fall into the genius stereotype. One of my friends there was a former champion of the International Physics Olympiad. Our freshman year he started in junior-level physics courses and rocked all of them. Classmates were awestruck by his “natural” ability to solve complex problems quickly. But I also saw him as an extremely hard worker. Since high school, he’d been doing thousands of practice problems every week.

I’m thankful to have learned strategies from top performers rather than dismissing their skills as inherent or unobtainable. I, too, have been called a “genius,” and in response I emphasize the teams and resources around me and years of practice. If it weren’t for ballet, I’m not sure I would appreciate all the work that goes into making science and engineering skills look effortless.

2. Jealousy doesn’t serve you unless you convert it into inspiration.
It’s easy to be envious of a talented classmate; maybe she has quicker jumps, better balance, better flexibility. But succumbing to jealousy not only feels horrible, it also makes your own dancing worse. In ballet class I learned to convert envy into inspiration and motivation. I’d think, How lucky am I to train with someone I admire? I’d also put on blinders to stop comparing myself to others and focus on my own improvements.

Fast-forward: I’m at MIT doing the final assignment for an Intro to Python course, where I learned to code for the first time. We had to code a game of Tetris within the allotted lab session. Some of my classmates were already expert programmers, so I knew they would ace the assignment in 20 minutes. I could strive for that eventually, but I knew that in order for me to complete my own assignment, given my skill level at the time, I’d have to put blinders on and stay focused. (One classmate not only programmed a perfect game, he’d added special key-codes that formed an image on the falling blocks!)

Jealous emotions would have distracted me from finishing. Just like at the ballet barre, concentrating on my own work let me feel proud of what I’d accomplished, and then be inspired by a peer who was ahead. Now, the technical knowledge and experience I gained help me every day in my professional career.

3. Managing energy is the key to working well.
Not surprisingly, I got the most out of ballet class when my mind was fully engaged and focused. Usually this was due to a good night’s rest, healthy diet and getting into the right mindset. What helped me stay there was knowing what tasks were suited to different energy levels. I’d use low-energy time to mark a combination (even just in my head) or stretch, and reserve strong energy for full-out run-throughs.

Dancers learn that energy management is the key to time management and productivity. With engineering, it was harder at first to tell whether I was in the right mindset. I wasn’t wobbling in a pirouette, but maybe I’d zone out while reading. Eventually I figured out how to use low-energy time productively—for example, by reviewing flash cards or organizing material. This way when I had strong energy, I put it towards solving challenging problems.

4. Strengthening weaknesses requires conscious effort.
Before ballet class, dancers warm up on their own. I found it tempting to use this time to ease into what I was already good at, like splits or hamstring stretches. But this was not what I needed. I had to make a conscious effort to add exercises that addressed my weaknesses, like turnout. Doing so set me up for a far better class than if I’d put the same time into my strengths.

Fast-forward to calculus class. One of our exams covered roughly 80 percent integrals (which I’m good at) and 20 percent theorems (which I needed to practice). So I buckled down and studied the theorems until I understood them as well as I could. Then, when the test came, both sections were a breeze. Realizing my weakness, and then making the effort to improve it, was something I’d already learned to do at the beginning of every ballet class.

5. Balance emotions and logic to find motivation.
When dancers are asked what motivates their work, they often describe their love for the art and the feelings it brings them. It’s not logically clear why we enjoy ballet and devote so much time and energy to it—and, frankly, why we endure so much pain for it. We adore it and accept that it enriches our lives.

When you ask a scientist or an engineer the same question, they’re often expected to have a purely logical answer. For example, “I study the ocean because it provides half of the oxygen we breathe and regulates our climate.” Facts and figures may help me prioritize certain topics or give rationale to a funding agency, but ultimately what motivates me is the emotional connection to my work. Like an artist, I may seek to find a creative flow or explore learning for learning’s sake. The emotional and creative forces guiding my engineering work are just as powerful to me as the logical ones.

Full article at on Pointe Magazine: https://www.pointemagazine.com/ballet-and-engineering/

California's Offshore Industry Up Close

10/3/2021

Note: I wrote this post before learning of this morning's news that the oil rig Elly seems to be causing a massive oil spill off the coast of LA. News is still coming in. I'm especially following coverage from the Los Angeles Times.

Last weekend I had the enormous pleasure of joining the Blue Latitudes Foundation on a dive on two oil rigs off the coast of LA. The Blue Latitudes Foundation is a non-profit organization with the mission to "unite science, policy, and communications to create innovative solutions for the complex ecological challenges associated with offshore industry." It is founded and run by two women I've admired for a while: Amber Sparks and Emily Hazelwood. Here's how our day went down:

Night Before - Prepare
I triple checked that my dive gear was packed and ready to go, cameras had fresh batteries and a clear memory card, and I had snacks ready for tomorrow. I wrote down an intention for tomorrow, which was to learn.

Weeks before, our Captain had secured permission to dive the rigs. Each of the 23 rigs off of California is privately owned, and special permission must be obtained in order to dive on them. This is understandable, given that activity could interfere with the rig's normal operations.

6am - Wake Up
Sleepy but excited, we drove from downtown LA to the harbor in San Pedro (near Long Beach). Along the way, we passed a massive oil refinery (“Philip 66”). Although only 20 minutes from downtown, it felt like a different planet. The 659-acre refinery supplies gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuel to California, Nevada, and Arizona. It's hard to wrap my head around the fact that when the refinery was built in the 1920s, the global population was about one fourth what it is today (~2BN vs 8BN).

7am - Rendezvous
We met Captain Jim on his boat next to a restaurant called the Crusty Crab; I found this hilarious because it's the restaurant name in SpongeBob. Our intrepid expedition crew included three researchers, an artist, a cinematographer, and Blue Latitudes staff. We hauled our tanks onto the boat, checked our gear one more time, and headed off.

8am - Depart Through Maze of Cargo Ships
Unlike the oil rigs off of Santa Barbara, you cannot see the rigs off LA from the shore, although the Captain said that on clear days he can sometimes see them as little blips on the horizon. It took us an hour to motor out to them, and I didn't see them until we were about 15 minutes away. What was hard not to notice though were the 30+ cargo ships waiting around the harbor. The Port of LA is the busiest port in the US (and the adjoining Port of Long Beach the third busiest), so it's always heavily trafficked. That said, regulars on the boat agreed that seeing this many waiting ships was unprecedented. Just two days before the New York Times confirmed that "[a] record-breaking number of cargo ships are waiting off the coast of California due to a backup at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach." The delay is a symptom of supply chain chaos, including changing demand and labor from COVID-19. These two ports handle 40% of all cargo containers entering the US (source: BBC), which (I think) means that if you're waiting for something overseas, there's a 40% chance I saw it last weekend.

Unusual times in the Port of LA: There's a record-breaking number of cargo ships waiting to enter the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach; these two ports are the 1st and 3rd busiest ports in the US, brining 40% of all cargo containers to the US.

Fellow explorers gathered around a table on deck planning our dive missions, just like our LEGO characters in the Ocean Exploration Base!

9am - Reach First Rigs: Elly and Ellen
Offshore rigs cost on the order of $500M dollars to construct (source: Offshore Magazine), yet they look, well, ramshackle. Built in the 1980s, with their layers of cranes, scaffolding, decks, and piping, they looked like steampunk sculptures rising out of the blue.

Dolphins were swimming near the platforms Elly and Ellen as we approached, which our Captain reminded us is a good omen. As we got closer, you couldn't miss the bark of the sea lions.

(Left) Dive buddy looks at the platforms Ellen and Elly in the distance; we're still about a 15 minute boat ride from being close enough to dive. (Image source: author). (Right) Ellen and Elly platforms up close. Built in the 1980s, Ellen is a drilling platform. It's connected by bridge to Elly, which separates oil and natural gas and produces water and electricity for both Ellen and the nearby rig Eureka. These rigs sit in 260 feet of water and their oil is pumped onshore via underwater pipes. (Image source: The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) via Flickr).

9:30am First Dive
The most important note of our Captain's pre-dive briefing was to make sure to end our dives surfacing under the rig. This is because you don't want to surface near a moving boat. He could not anchor because of the deep water (260 feet), and is not allowed to tie onto the rigs.

My dive buddy and I immediately descended to 90 feet, where the platform has its second-shallowest set of cross-beams.

View from under the rig. Try spotting the diver's head for scale.
(Image source: author).

Mussels densely encrusted portions of the underwater structure; apparently there are pyramids of fallen shells at the rig's base some 260 feet deep. (Image source: author).

We saw hundreds of fish around the legs. Much like a coral reef, the 3D structure provides refuge and food for the fish; plus, the rig is off limits to fishing. (Image source: author).

I couldn't believe my eyes. While the surface portion of the legs are bare, underneath every inch is encrusted with marine life -- mussels, brittle stars, anemones. Hundreds of fish swam around. Looking up, we saw dozens of brittle stars falling like rain. They fell in such dense clusters that some were intertwined, presumably mating. Around 60 feet, I felt a bop on my head, which was from a visiting sea lion coming to check us out.

The rig seems to be teaming with life.

Underwater, I felt like I was flying around a skyscraper. When diving you can move in all directions (x, y, and z), unlike on land, where we're generally constrained to x and y. If this 260 foot structure was a building, it would be about 18 stories tall. When we stopped at 90 feet deep, it was like stopping at the sixth story of the skyscraper. The legs descended far deeper than us.

This video starts with me laughing because a sea lion had just startled me by bumping me in the head (I turned my camera on after!). If anything, let this video help you appreciate how incredible professional underwater videographers are. I did not color correct my footage; it really does look mostly green like this to the human eye underwater. At depth, red light can't travel far, so we mostly see only greens and blues. Some of the organisms pictured are indeed very colorful though -- for example on the surface the anemones are a bright strawberry color, brittle stars deep purple and red, and my fins, which look gray in the video, are neon orange. The video ends showing the brittle stars raining down, including a dense cluster that's maybe mating (although a quick internet search indicates many brittle stars reproduce asexually, so I'll wait for the experts to weigh-in).

Video by Amartya Banerjee from their dives on Eureka, Elly & Ellen in 2017. This is not my video (it's higher quality!), but looks just like what I saw. They shared, "The highlight of our dives was a series of close encounters with a colony of resident sea lions. We also got to see some pelagic invertebrates that were quite otherworldly and mesmerizing." I'd agree!

Biologists on board later showed lots of excitement over seeing so many juvenile fish on the rig; it means there will be a good fishing season. Juvenile fish especially need dense 3D habitats to grow; they can use nooks and crannies of a structure to hide from predators and take advantage of food growing on the structure.

I didn't realize until after leaving this rig that it was drilling oil while we were there. In my head I'd imagined an active rig would be very noisy, rumbling like a factory, but I didn't hear anything. Even underwater, the sounds of nearby boats were by far the loudest noises.

1pm Second Dive: Eureka
SCUBA divers take a break after any dive to allow dissolved gasses to release from the body. During this surface interval, the Captain motored us towards the Eureka oil rig, which sits much deeper, in 720 feet of water. From a distance I glimpsed one of the people working on the rig. Although you can barely tell they're there, about eight employees are on each rig at all times, working one week on, one week off; I wonder what that's like.

Sea lions greeted us on this platform too. Once again, every inch of the underwater structure was teaming with life, and fish were galore. This time my dive buddy and I followed a baseball-sized remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that our team member was driving from the boat through a tether. She was trialing using the Deep Trekker ROV for video surveys. Sea lions came near us for all of the last 15 minutes of our dive.

These rigs are popular dive spots, and other divers have taken much better photos than I did. My favorites photo stories are listed below; they seem to accurately capture what I witnessed (albeit with better cameras and photography skills!):

Jeremy Deaton and Bart Vandever for PBS ("The Dazzling Ocean Reefs Hidden Beneath Offshore Oil Rigs")
Phillip Colla for his blog ("SCUBA Diving Beneath Oil Rigs Eureka, Ellen, and Elly in Long Beach, California")
Andy and Allison Sallmon for Divers Alert Network ("Long Beach Oil Platforms")
Adam Popescu for Los Angeles Magazine ("Happy Fish Are Fueling a Battle to Preserve Offshore Rigs as Artificial Reefs")
Katherine Kornei for Eos magazine ("The Ecological Costs of Removing California’s Offshore Oil Rigs"

3pm Return to Dock
By the time we were back at the dock, my mind was buzzing with curiosity, wanting to learn more about what I just witnessed.

Big Issues & Parting Thoughts
Hours after I drafted this, news started coming in of a massive oil spill that seems to be originating from the underwater pipe connecting Elly to shore. I’m deeply troubled by this news, and only comfort is that I hope it spurs action towards responsibly decommissioning these rigs.

"What to do with these rigs?" was a hot issue even before the spill.

This July, the federal government announced it would review plans for decommissioning rigs off California. The Notice can be accessed here. It states:

There are currently 23 oil and gas platforms and associated wells, facilities, and pipelines on the OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] offshore Southern California that were installed between the late 1960s and early 1990s and that will eventually need to be decommissioned.

Currently, eight oil and gas platforms on the OCS offshore Southern California, near Point Conception and in the Santa Barbara Channel, no longer produce oil and gas and are located on terminated leases that no longer allow resumption of production. BSEE expects to receive decommissioning applications for these platforms and associated pipelines and other facilities in the near term.

It's not known when the remaining rigs, including those I dove upon, will begin decommissioning. It's likely to be soon, given their ages.

The question remains as to how California will process decommissioning. When decommissioning, the well must be capped (and a company must assume liability), any toxins mitigated, and (in most cases) any surface portions that could interfere with boat traffic must be removed. It may be possible to leave portions of the underwater structure as an artificial reef, should an environmental survey deem this appropriate. Not all rigs make suitable artificial reefs; each must be carefully assessed via an independent survey. Moreover, if reefed, the oil company must deposit significant funds to cover longterm maintenance and monitoring of the artificial reefs. California will learn from the Gulf of Mexico, which dwarfs California with its number of rigs. The Gulf has nearly 2,000 offshore rigs and has already decommissioned over 500 through a Rigs-to-Reefs program (sources: US Bureau of Environmental Safety and Enforcement).

In other parts of the US and world, there have been cases where an offshore rig is abandoned and the company owning it disappeared, gone bankrupt. This leaves the question is: Who is going to foot the tens of millions of dollars it costs to decommission the rig? This is still an open question, and it shows why the government must be involved. At this very moment legislators are debating a related bill to addresses this problem, Orphaned Well Cleanup and Jobs Act of 2021. A local newspaper summarized the standpoint of the bill's sponsor, US Representative from New Mexico, Teresa Leger Fernandez:

Leger Fernandez argued oil and gas companies needed to be better held accountable for abandoning wells, going beyond reactive funding for remediation ... and including preventative requirements before a well is drilled. “We cannot allow taxpayers to get left holding the bag,” she said.

I'm still learning the issues. Like most solutions for the environment, decommissioning is not simply a matter of engineering; it intertwines science, engineering, policy, and law. What I know for sure is that I'm following the issues extra closely after the dives focused my attention.

US-Italy Team-Up to Protect and Respect the Ocean

3/23/2021

Today I had the honor of presenting our film, Ocean's Breath, at a virtual event hosted by the Italian Embassy in Washington DC. The event spotlighted collaborations between Italian and American scientists working to protect and respect our seas. Ambassador Varricchio opened by stressing Italy's commitment to an ambitious climate agenda, including in its role as President of the G20, the international forum that brings together the world's major economies, and co-host with the UK of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, also known as COP26. Nicole LeBoeuf, Acting Assistant Administrator for NOAA's National Ocean Service, emphasized the US' renewed commitment to the Paris Agreement and eager participation in COP26. I was smiling ear-to-ear hearing about the specific actions and agenda items from both countries as we work together protect and respect the water cycle and emerge from COVID as more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient community of nations.

"As chair of the G20 and co-partner of COP26, Italy is ready to work with the United States and the world to promote an ambitious international agenda on climate change and environmental protection."
-- Press release about the event on Italian American Entrepreneurship

A moment that stood our for me is when the protagonist of the film Sea of Shadows, Andrea Crosta, said that the biggest exploiters of the ocean are "not at sea; they are on land, in big cities."
Crosta and his team at Earth League International (ELI) are former intelligence professionals protecting Nature by investigating and exposing wildlife criminals and traffickers worldwide. Their film, Sea of Shadows (produced by Leonardo DiCaprio!), exposes how how illegal fishing has brought the population of the vaquita down to just 10 individuals. The film is available on Amazon Prime, Hulu, and other major distributors.

Our film, Ocean's Breath, is available on Disney+ in Italy (coming soon elsewhere!) and on Sky TV; it's also marketed under the title Il Segreto Degli Oceani. Snippets below!

Still from our National Geographic film, Ocean's Breath. Federico and I are diving on a coral reef smothered by the flow from an active volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. We compare this reef to millions of year old fossilized reefs in what's now the Dolomites mountain range in Italy. To learn more about the work of partners based in Montserrat, see Veta Wade's organization Fish n' Fins.

Me examining a baby coral growing on top of the volcanic material on Montserrat. In the Dolomites fossil record from millions of years ago, we see the same thing: coral reefs covered by volcanic material and then growing again.

Federico and I assessing coral reefs off Tanzania that are living in conditions similar to what the Dolomites faced hundreds of millions of years ago. To learn more about the work of partners based in Tanzania, see Ngoteya Wild.

On March 23rd, join us for a special conversation highlighting the collaboration and cooperation between Italy and the United States in their commitment to protect oceans, marine life and habitats.

Inspired by two recent National Geographic documentary productions, "Ocean's Breath" by Michele Melani and "Sea of Shadows" by Richard Ladkani, the panel will feature the very protagonists of these films: geologist Federico Fanti and robotic engineer Grace Young; Earth League International Executive Director, Andrea Crosta, and National Marine Mammal Foundation Executive Director, Cynthia Smith. Moderated by Valerie Craig, Interim Chief of the Science and Innovation Office at National Geographic, the discussion will include selected clips from each film.

The event will be opened by Armando Varricchio, Ambassador of Italy to the United States, and Nicole LeBoeuf, Acting Assistant Administrator for NOAA's National Ocean Service.

WHEN: March 23, 2021 at 11:30 AM ET
WHERE: Zoom Webinar
LANGUAGE: English
REGISTRATION: This Link

I can't speak highly enough of Veta's organization, "Fisn N' Fins". Veta was born and raised in Montserrat, and right now she is helping kids on the island learn to swim and become ocean leaders. Click here to learn more about helping Veta's organization, including donations, sponsorship, and volunteer opportunities.

LEGO Ocean Exploration Base Collaboration

9/20/2020

Proud to announce this collaboration with LEGO! My vision is for kids to become enamored with the ocean. When these kids grow up, I hope they will build more underwater bases in real life (so I can dive on them!), and so we can continue learning from our marine environment.

LEGO Catalogue Supplement Fall 2020

Video: Can People Live Under the Sea? | LEGO® CITY

LEGO characters plan mission over coffee (or hot chocolate).

Pilot scopes research area with her submarine.

LEGOs use their research ship, submarine, and dive gear to explore.

Caught in the LEGO store!

Update: A few months after this set came out, I had shivers down my spine when I came across this passage in Tiffany Dufu's 2018 book, Drop the Ball. She examines how the toys we play with as children shape our behaviors and expectations as adults:

"What little girls often see are baby dolls, easy bake ovens, and tea sets. These popular toys ignite our imaginations about our future roles as caregivers, cooks, and hostesses, and teach us how to perform them... [There is] LEGO deep sea operation base for boys, and Heartland Food Market for girls. By playing with these toys, our boys are envisioning themselves exploring the sea, and our girls are imagining themselves collecting broccoli for $2 a pound."

Her analysis is more nuanced than just this snippet (see Chapter 4 of her book), yet I found the last example strikingly specific. I'm happy to say, as of 2020, that at least there is a now LEGO deep sea operation base featuring feminine explorers. Of course there's still a lot of work to do.

"Look around you and you will see on the rise climate leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration.
... [T]here is a clear focus on making change rather than being in charge. We see women and girls moving beyond ego, competition, and control, which are rampant in the climate space (as elsewhere) and impede good work. We see joyful following where wise leadership appears, joining instead of duplicating, giving one another credit, sharing resources, passing the mic, and celebrating one another's successes.
... [T]here is a commitment to respond to the climate crisis in ways that heal systematic injustices rather than deepen them.
... [T]here is an appreciation for heart-centered, not just head-centered, leadership. We see women and girls bringing their whole selves to this movement--fear, grief, fiery courage, wracking uncertainty, all of it--and doing the inner work that often precedes effecting change.
... [There] is a recognition that building community is a requisite foundation for building a better world."
-- Introduction of All We Can Save by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson

Aida's Submarine DEEP Dive

9/5/2020

Last week I had the absolute pleasure of learning more about Professor Aida Farough's dive in the submarine Alvin to explore deep-sea hydrothermal vents on Pacific Ocean floor. Aida is a fellow scientist on the Pisces VI Deep Sea Submarine crew; you'll quickly see why she's a favorite lecturer among students at Kansas State University. Her excitement for marine geology (aka, rocks on the seafloor) is contagious.

We recorded our chat so I could grab a short snippet for a presentation, but when I went back through the recording, I found tons of other great moments too good not to share.

laughing...

smiling...

grimacing...

In December 2018, Aida joined the NSF-UNOLS Early Career Scientist Training Cruise. NSF is the National Science Foundation, and UNOLS is the University National Oceanographic Laboratory System. Here's Aida's explaining the cruise in her own words (0:00-2:10):

They visited a vent referred to as 'EPR 9 50 North'. Aida rattles this off as if it's easy to say! EPR stands for East Pacific Ridge, and '9 50 North' refers to the location's latitude (9°50'). Aida's dive location was approximately 2.5 km deep, "one of the shallowest spots on the mid ocean ridge," she explained.

I laughed because I don't often get to hear the word shallow next to 2.5 km deep. For reference, my PhD research focused on shallow reefs 18m deep -- yet Aida was 140x deeper! Alvin's maximum depth is 6.5 km, so Aida and team were well within this limit, but still deeper than only a few humans have explored.

Aida's dive objectives spanned disciplines including petrology, geophysics, and biology (micro and macro). Additionally, an artist and science communicator aboard the cruise used some of their footage. Because they were the first team to visit the vent since the previous cruise, their initial objective was to look for indications of eruption; it had not. Aida listed a few of the tasks they accomplished on her dive: they deployed thermal blankets to measure heat and placed tiny buckets for microorganisms to grow upon that will be picked-up in later dives; they collected crabs, tube worms, and rocks from various portions of the vent.

Aida's specific project was to deploy thermistors that would measure heat coming off the crust. She needed to find a flat spot on the ridge to leave the sensors for several months, until another expedition could retrieve them, even though there were no guarantees. "It was a big risk, but it was wonderful because now we have three months of data."

Ten years before Aida's dive, scientists had left measurement instruments at the very same vent, and an unexpected eruption engulfed the sensors in lava. You may be thinking "oh no!" like I was, but Aida explained how the scientists flipped this into an opportunity for discovery. The Alvin submarine was able to pull some of the instruments, even just their SD cards, from the site. "A couple of Nature papers came out of it, because they had real-time seismic recordings of when an eruption actually happened at the ridge."

Quick Timeline of the Dive
Decent: 1hr
Exploring the vent: 6 hrs
Assent: 1hr

They did take a break to have sandwiches and coffee for lunch. I had to ask :)

See why I was startled when Aida answered, "it'd be freakin awesome" to my question:

And can you guess what story led to this sequence of hand gestures? Answer 3:37 - 5:07 in video.

"I'm still working on the data, but I don't stop talking about the dive because it was such a critical point in my career. I've been studying hydrothermal vents since 2010. I received my masters and hD without being able to see a hydrothermal vent up close. Being given that opportunity was huge for me. It made everything fall into place for me, like pieces of a puzzle. "

I kept thinking of Michelle Obama's quote: "If something good happens to you, if you have an advantage - you don't hoard it. You share it, you give back." This is the hundredth time Aida has talked about her Alvin dive. I'm sure she's spent plenty more time talking about it than the dive itself, which was only eight hours. For more details on the dive, you could watch her post-dive interview, Woods Hole's live camera, read her blog post or website. I believe that if we think studying climate change and understanding our ocean is important, then we need a fleet of scientists making a living out of it. It can be tough to have the patience and persistence to stick with it. I haven't seen many scientists more dedicated and devoted to deep sea exploration than those like Aida who spent just eight hours in a deep-sea submarine like Alvin. It almost guarantees you'll stay in the field.

If you wish to learn more about Alvin, I suggest two books: Water Baby: The Story of Alvin by Victoria A. Kaharl, and The Octopus's Garden by Professor Cindy Lee Van Dover. Both are written in an engaging, approachable manner.

What Scares Me Underwater

7/28/2020

It’s not sharks or barracuda. (Image Source: Pexels)

I originally wrote and published the following piece for LinkedIn; comment and join the conversation here! It was shared by X - The Moonshot Factory on World Conservation Day 2020. If you've followed my other posts recently you might be thinking "this gal is obsessed with Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson". And yea, it's true. We had the pleasure of hosting Dr Johnson last month at X, which gave me the perfect excuse to catch up on her writings, and I found them inspiring.

I’ve swam at night with sharks and barracuda, watching these predators up close with awe. I’ve lived underwater, spending 15 full days immersed in the Aquarius undersea lab. I’ve sailed across the Atlantic, losing battery power for navigation tools on the way and nearly running out of food and fuel in the process. Whenever I share these experiences, the most common question I’m asked is, “Weren’t you scared!?”

Yes, I’m scared — but I’m not scared for the reasons people might assume. During years of training, my teams and I considered and practiced how to deal with any imaginable emergency contingency. Before and during missions, we reviewed the risks we faced and implemented plans to mitigate them. Because of all this training, my personal safety doesn’t consume any raw emotional fear at the time of a mission; if it did, I likely wouldn’t join because it would indicate to me that I wasn't prepared sufficiently. Instead, I’m afraid for what the ocean will be able to provide for current and future generations.

My greatest fear is that we’ll destroy marine ecosystems before we know they exist, or before we understand how dependent we are upon them. As I told National Geographic back in 2014, after emerging from more than two weeks conducting research undersea at the Aquarius lab: "I find it incredibly frightening that we have the technology to completely destroy the ocean in my lifetime." What I hope we now find is that we also have the technology to remediate our relationship with the ocean and its incredible resources.

World Conservation Day is a time for us to think critically about the relationship between the ocean, humanity, and technology — especially this year, as we grapple with what we took for granted and what the future holds. COVID-19 has highlighted our relationship to nature like never before. Many of us have never had to think about staying safe while breathing the same air as others, or touching surfaces without disinfecting them, or our place in the ecosystem. Although the precise source of COVID-19 is not yet known, we know infectious disease rates increase as we encroach into — and damage — natural habitats and ecosystems. Likewise, global protests against racial injustice have reinforced how environmental and racial justice are irrevocably linked while showing just how much lasting change needs to happen. Even if that systemic change can be difficult, it’s possible. But if our relationship to the ocean is based in fear and despair, it can be hard to see where the opportunities for change lie — and what levers are within our control.

With that in mind, I’m looking for ways to re-frame my fear of “what do we lose when marine ecosystems are destroyed?” to “what do we gain by living and working in harmony with them?” The ocean has been here far longer than we have, proving its resilience and adaptability to change across millennia. Realistically, while we don’t need to fear the world beneath the waves, we also don’t need to “save the ocean.” Instead, we must work to find ways to live in harmony, sustainably, with the ocean and its complex ecosystems. In the words of Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: “We are overdue for a re-frame, from seeing the ocean as victim or threat, to appreciating it as hero.”

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.

Miley Cyrus Also Inspired By Dolomites

8/11/2019

Celeb news this week is that Miley Cyrus and Chris Helmsworth broke up. Miley decided to announce this in the place Federico and I have been talking about for the last year and where we filmed just last week -- The Dolomites! What are the chances that she is stalking us?

For more on our film, Ocean's Breath (in English) and Il Segreto Delgi Oceani (in Italian), check out
my post "Dinosaurs? They were like yesterday." or the National Geographic feature page. As of August 2021, it's available on Disney+ in Europe and on SkyTV.

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?