Key insights:
- The ocean remains an alien environment we know very little about
- This lack of knowledge has implications for vital human infrastructure like underwater fiber optic cables, oil and gas pipelines, as well as the development of offshore renewable energy and our ability to manage natural resources
- A greater understanding of the oceans, which absorb one-quarter of all carbon emissions, will give us a better grasp on how human activities have altered the environment, helping us better predict and mitigate climate change
- A new generation of low-cost autonomous vehicles is poised to make collecting data and insights from all levels of the ocean, from the surface to deep sea, easier, faster, and more affordable
Consider, for a moment, an email that someone in London sends to a work colleague in New York. That message would depart from a server in the UK and arrive at a data center somewhere on the East Coast so instantaneously that it might seem as though the missive never really traveled at all. But, in fact, this trans-Atlantic email would have an expansive journey. Like most other digital communications between continents, it would travel at near-light-speed through fiber optic cables on the ocean floor, traversing some of the most mysterious and unknown terrain on the planet.
Across the globe, more than 600,000 miles of deep-sea fiber optic cables form the backbone of the global internet and digital economy. These wires — as thin as a strand of hair and wrapped in layers of steel and plastic — carry 95 percent of international communications, with the remaining 5 percent transmitted via satellite.
That this hidden submarine infrastructure enables basic aspects of our everyday lives is just one of the ways in which our oceans are far more important than we realize — and why it’s critical that we begin to understand these environments far better than we do today.
You’ve probably heard the often-repeated fact that we know more about what’s on Mars and on the surface of the moon than we do about what’s in the ocean — this has been true for decades. Scientists estimate that as many as one million different species (not including microorganisms) reside in our oceans, representing roughly 95 percent of Earth’s biodiversity, most of which we’re still clueless about. Every year, scientists identify all kinds of new marine species. A recent study even challenges one of the basic tenets about life on Earth, revealing that oxygen doesn’t just come from photosynthesis; it is also produced in the darkest recesses at the bottom of the ocean (more on that later).
“As many as one million different species (not including microorganisms) reside in our oceans, representing roughly 95 percent of Earth’s biodiversity.”
The point is that these gaps in our ability to understand, explore, and monitor the oceans are problematic in a variety of ways. Those 600,000 miles of fiber optic cables, for instance, remain a completely unguarded and extremely vulnerable piece of global infrastructure. Cutting one cable could knock critical financial and commercial facilities (and even entire nations) offline for days, wreaking economic and social havoc. So, too, would disruptions to the 20,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines that also cross the ocean floor. It’s already happening in small doses. In 2022, the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea were sabotaged by an explosion. In 2024, three subsea global internet and telecommunications cables in the Red Sea were attacked, disrupting and slowing traffic in the Middle East and between Asia and Europe. It could have been worse. Imagine people losing both power and internet connectivity for weeks, and with it all the modern-day comforts and capabilities they depend on.
Our ignorance about Earth’s vast ocean landscapes also slows the speed at which offshore renewable energy can happen and is a missed opportunity to better understand, predict, and mitigate climate change. In order to protect existing assets and help secure our future on this planet, we need to be able to journey to more of the ocean, more consistently than we have before, and then master the ability to coexist sustainably with its vast ecosystems.
Cheaper, better, faster data-driven decision-making
A new generation of low-cost robotic technologies and data-centric computing platforms is starting to make this a possibility. Lightweight and portable autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) costing several thousand dollars to low hundreds of thousands of dollars — instead of the several million required to build and operate traditional deep sea vehicles — can be deployed en masse to both monitor and survey various parts of the ocean. The data collected from these vehicles is then analyzed on cloud-based, AI-enabled platforms, rendering it uniform and accessible. From this high-level computing, changes or threats can be quickly identified and insights derived to help drive decision-making.
These new systems have a clear role in protecting infrastructure. Underwater drones, for instance, can patrol the seabed for submarines, divers, robots, intrusion vessels, and anything else that doesn’t belong near fiber optic cables, relaying information back to the surface in real time, where it can be autonomously analyzed. To protect marine wildlife from bad actors, AUVs operating closer to the surface can detect suspicious vessels engaged in illegal fishing, sending immediate video evidence to authorities without being detected. Intelligent, end-to-end data management systems would parse through video feeds to identify signals amid the noise.
This is just the beginning. Robust fleets of AUVs/ASVs with an intelligent interconnected data platform also promise to dramatically accelerate how we research and map ocean environments — with far less impact on marine life and ecosystems than existing approaches. Take the seafloor, for example. The industries that lay infrastructure at the bottom of the ocean, such as telecommunications, oil and gas, and offshore wind, all need high-resolution, three-dimensional surveys of the contours at the bottom of the ocean. Current methods for obtaining these involve sending crews out into the middle of the ocean on large, diesel-powered ships that emit large beams of sonar into the sea below. The time it takes for sound to reach the seafloor and bounce back provides a measure of depth. Because this process is expensive, time-consuming (crews are often out at sea for weeks or months), intrusive, and often dangerous, only one-quarter of the planet’s seafloor has been mapped with any detail. For the rest of the seafloor, we only have crude, low-resolution grids collected by satellite radar altimetry and measured in kilometers, not meters or centimeters, all of which is of limited use.
“Robust fleets of AUVs/ASVs with an intelligent interconnected data platform also promise to dramatically accelerate how we research and map ocean environments — with far less impact on marine life and ecosystems than existing approaches.”
Instead of large survey ships that blast powerful and disruptive sound waves into the ocean, AUVs from companies like Bedrock Ocean Exploration can collect data close to the ocean floor, placing its sensors in optimal and efficient positions. These autonomous explorers travel at slow speeds and use low-power sonar that is outside the auditory frequencies of marine mammals. And because being closer to the seafloor and away from the surface results in enhanced stability, seabed AUVs can produce significantly clearer and more detailed surveys. With many lower cost vessels launched at once, the job can get done in a fraction of the time needed for traditional methods.
Protecting life on land
Compared to space exploration, which produces stunning images of the Earth, moon, planets, and space shuttles, not to mention floating astronauts, underwater expeditions are hard to get excited about. Below 1,000 meters, the water is pitch black, making it difficult to create compelling photos or videos. But getting data from this and other parts of the ocean has direct implications for our lives and those of future generations. In my 15 years working on ocean technologies, it has become clear to me that no stable, prosperous future on Earth can exist without the ability to operate in, and gain a better understanding of, the waters that comprise 70 percent of our planet.
“No stable, prosperous future on Earth can exist without the ability to operate in, and gain a better understanding of, the waters that comprise 70 percent of our planet.”
Oceans, for instance, are our biggest ally against climate change. Representing one of our greatest thermal management systems, they absorb 25 percent of all carbon emissions and 90 percent of the excess heat generated from these emissions, protecting us from even more severe climate change impacts. They are also heavily involved in driving weather. Doing better and more expansive monitoring of how oceans are changing — their salinity, pH levels, temperatures, currents, biomass — can enhance the accuracy of climate models, produce better environmental indicators, and improve weather predictions. A high degree of uncertainty currently exists, for instance, about whether the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which moves warm water from the tropics to the far North Atlantic, is likely to collapse this century. It’s not hyperbolic to say that better data collection about this current system is an existential imperative. Failure of the AMOC would be catastrophic for the climates of Europe, South America, western Africa, and the eastern United States. We need to be able to identify such human-caused environmental disasters on a much shorter time scale.
With affordable and scalable autonomous technologies, climate scientists can measure more of the oceans at a faster pace. Meteorological and oceanic surveys run by crews of scientists at sea for weeks can now be conducted by fleets of wind- and solar-powered drones that circumnavigate the globe and transmit real-time data to modeling software. Similarly, expensive research buoys are being replaced by inexpensive micro-devices that float across the ocean and transmit sensor readings through their onboard solar power and computing. With intelligent systems that are constantly learning, the time between data collection and new understandings or decisive execution is dramatically reduced.
AUVs can also help us speed up the transition to carbon-free energy production. When deployed at scale, Bedrock’s seafloor mapping systems can operate 10 times more quickly than today’s large survey ships, at a fraction of the cost, and with greater resiliency. For offshore wind developers, which need to create seabed surveys and make decisions about where to place their massive turbines, this can shave months off the permitting and approval process, and allow developers to take advantage of weather windows. This is especially important for offshore wind farms that need to move quickly to avoid losing out on federal contracts or valuable land deals. As more seafloor mapping becomes available, the timeline can shrink even further. Bedrock is building a library of standardized and interconnected seafloor data that any company, organization, or scientist will be able to access.
Responsible, sustainable exploration
As we seek to unveil the ocean’s secrets and benefit from its resources, we’ll have to tread carefully. The ocean is a collection of more than 60 different ecosystems that will need to be preserved for generations to come, especially as we eye some of its more valuable assets. In recent years, companies have been surveying large collections of metallic nodules that are scattered across the seabed in the Indian and Pacific oceans. These potato-sized structures, which have formed over tens of millions of years, are packed with many of the valuable minerals needed for electric vehicle batteries and solar panels, such as nickel, copper, manganese, cobalt and molybdenum. The US Geological Survey estimates that the 21 billion dry tons of polymetallic nodules found in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (500 miles south of Hawaii) contain more critical metals than all the world’s land-based reserves combined. If these incredible, untouched deep-sea resources are going to help sustain life on land, we must fully understand their role in the holistic marine environment before we start disturbing it. The mining of mineral-packed nodules may be necessary and inevitable, but we will have to access them in the least impactful way, serving our needs without destroying ecosystems. Too often, humans have operated with a careless “this is the next guy’s problem” attitude. Think DDT, sarin gas, and unexploded ordnances.
“The ocean is a collection of more than 60 different ecosystems that will need to be preserved for generations to come, especially as we eye some of its more valuable assets.”
Exploration must come before human exploitation. Only with understanding will we have the grounds and evidence to hold people accountable. If we are simply learning about the seafloor and its ecosystems in order to take something we need, we miss an opportunity to deepen our knowledge and act responsibly. In order to avoid any negative first, second, or third order impacts, we have to fully understand the environments we are taking from. Before we know it, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone will be exploited with irreversible damage if we don’t invest in capabilities and policies to measure and monitor the impacts. Will mineral mining equipment harm midwater ecosystems or organisms that often live on the nodules? Will it disrupt the way carbon is stored in the ocean? And most intriguingly, does the ocean’s mysterious “dark oxygen” come from electric currents in the nodules that split water into hydrogen and oxygen? The answers to these questions will guide the necessary limitations and regulations we put on these exploitative human activities.
But just the fact that large areas of the Pacific contain multi million-year-old rocks some 4,500 meters below the surface that may prove critical to the production of batteries should be all the reason we need to get excited about – and sense the necessity of – exploring the Earth’s last remaining frontier.
