Underwater Drones Nearly Triple Data from the Ocean Floor | Hacker News Reader

Underwater Drones Nearly Triple Data from the Ocean Floor

bloomberg.com

87 pointspseudolus10 comments

I work for the company building these, albeit in a less sexy division - I help design the kit which launches and retrieves the Hugins[0].

At the time being, these are too expensive for just about any research institution, but I really hope Kongsberg manage to push the price down a bit as several oceanographers I've spoken to at institutes around the world basically view the Hugin as the stuff from which dreams (and scientific papers) are made.

[0] Named after Norse god Odin's raven, which along with companion Munin was sent out in the world every morning, observing all that happened and reporting back to Odin in the evening, thus making Odin the most well-informed of gods.

I was recently at a workshop about Marine Permaculture Arrays (MPA).

Picture square-kilometer kelp farms in the open ocean, using ocean current eddy shear levels to move MPA to different locations in a region (different vertical layer current speeds enable a kind of underwater sailing).

MPA need new kinds of sensors to enable this marine autonomous navigation.

I asked what tech was available off-the-shelf, wondering if sensors from ocean gliders could be used for the MPA autonomous navigation capability. Brian von Herzen said they were too expensive now.

He followed up by writing that current sensing is something they are working on. Cost effective nutrient sensors are needed also...

Getting the sensor cost down will help develop multiple new industries providing a range of ecosystem services that would supply food, fuel, fertilizer, fiber, farmaceuticals (nutraceuticals). And carbon sequestration. When kelp sinks in deep waters, it stays there. On the ocean floor.

This will be enormously helpful for climate modeling, lack of subsurface oceanic data severely limits accurate long-term prediction.

One of the elephant-sized gaps in our ability to model the climate is that we know our current understanding of subsurface oceanic geochemistry and geophysics is basically fiction, we are routinely surprised in this regard when we actually measure it. The measurements we've based models on have been extremely sparse relative to both the complexity and dynamics of the system. We tend to model it as a relatively dead, static space but we have substantial evidence that suggests this is very far from the truth, we just don't have enough data to understand what drives the actual dynamics. This is one of the biggest inputs for climate behavior and it is by far the biggest hole in our models that prevent us from making useful predictions.

A future version that can continuously dive (with visits to the surface for solar) would be amazing. A Google Earth of the sea with regular updates.

Building sensors that detect fish populations and could accurately, automatically flag potential new species would be amazing.

I wonder if there's a decent way to encourage kids want to grow up to explore the ocean floor, rather than everyone wanting to become an astronaut? The difference had always been so interesting to me, since so many writings draw comparisons between the surface of planets and our ocean floor.

I think just describing what's down there (or, more precisely -what we suspect might be down there, given our lack of knowledge!) may be sufficient.

That, and stressing that rather than committing years of your life to sitting inside a titanium cylinder being transported to wherever, you get to do real science within hours of entering an infinitely stronger titanium cylinder - and be back with your family in time for the weekend. (Yes, I exaggerate - but you get the idea. :)

This is a tangent, but all my adult life I thought that construction workers are fascinating and I wondered why the occupation is not more popular among kids. When you pass a construction site, you see the workers walking around, shouting a bit, hammering some small seemingly insignificant thing (or driving a powerful machine which is cool on its own), but over time an enormous structure rises around them, and it seems that they were just there, doing their thing and that was all it took. It fascinates me. In part because the process is counter-intuitively ungrandiose, at least if you're just a casual on-looker, but the result is grandiose and exceptionally material, as opposed to say an intellectual project's result.

I assume this 3X number does not include the data collected by the US and Soviet Navies.

That being said, I remember reading in Backroom Boys that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB tried to moneitze spy satellite photos by selling them to Vodafone for radio planning purposes.

It would be really neat if they found traces of "Atlantis", assuming some of it survived underwater erosion. They already found a few sites off the coasts of India and Indonesia. And We know an ancient civilization existed that got wiped out at the end of the last ice age - for those interested in a virtually unending rabbit hole, look up Gobekli Tepe and Graham Hancock on YT.

There's a lot of myth and ancient legends insinuating that we're only building our world on top of pillars built by "those who came before", but that's quite expected considering that there are abandoned human settlements spread all over the globe. Every generation has seen more and more of those abandoned settlements as time has passed, and so those legends were born.

That doesn't mean we _know_ there's been civilizations that were wiped out during the last ice age, though. All evidence is circumstantial at best. It would be awesome if those bots found something, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com