How remotely operated vehicles are mapping the future of our oceans

One of the great natural wonders of the world is dying. I'm talking about the Great Barrier Reef, the effects of climate change have decimated quarrels, and the creatures that call the reef home. In fact, a study published last month found the reef has lost half its chorals since the 90s. So now what? I'm joined today by Carly Wiener of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using technology to advance ocean research for stuff. Just tell me about the Schmidt Ocean Institute, who you guys are, you guys? Do Institute is a nonprofit founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt in 29, and we have the philanthropic research vessel Sock, or that sales around the world doing cutting edge science and applying technology to some of the ocean science. To make data openly available, can you tell me a little bit more about the falcor and, the technology on board and kind of what it does so fat court was actually a German fisheries enforcement vessel that was built in 1981 and was completely re fit in 2012 to be a state of the art ocean science vessel that sales around the world globally conducting research. We have an incredible high resolution mapping system so we use Echo Sanders to be able to map the sea floor and see that visualize the sea floor an high resolution. That allows us to then look for really interesting things. Like you know canyons. We've discovered's emails and we can go then dive with an underwater robotic vehicle on these areas now. Schmidt Ocean Institute in 2016 developed its own ROV, which is a remotely operated vehicle Sebastian, and that allows us to go all the way up to 4500 meters depth and to explore these deep sea areas in high definition with 4K video cameras. So it's like. You're seeing there, this underwater robot is like your eyes in your hands while your own in the lab. It can see things that we wouldn't be able to see otherwise. And then we can also take samples so it allows us to be able to precisely take small samples which not only allows us to preserve the specimens and understand new species and characterize the biodiversity. So what actually is living in these ocean environments? But also so that were not trolling or taking large? Pieces of our Ocean Florida understand, so it's actually helping to refine the science without doing impact or damage. It's been an incredibly productive year for us in terms of the science we've been able to accomplish, despite everything that's going on globally, but also some of the discoveries we made. In April, we were able to find the world's longest species 150 foot siphonophore. We've made several knew black coral discoveries recently. We have found knew. Records for locations of where certain species are found. So for example, there have been a couple of coral and fish species that we thought didn't extend past why, but we've actually found them in Australian waters. Walking scorpion fish that was that we believe is knew as well as late as a couple weeks ago. Right after this discovery we found we had the first video of a Rams horn squid, which is commonly known from it. Skeleton that washes up ashore in beaches, but it's never been seen alive or captured on video before it. What? What is a discovery like these? What these discoveries tell you about the state of our ocean right now, and I mean, particularly with climate change. And we hear so much about plastics being dumped in the ocean. So what are all these new discoveries really teaching us about the future of our oceans? So, you know, I think that depends on who you ask, but I really like to take a positive outlook of where we are with our oceans. Yes, there's. So much happening with climate change and plastics pollution, but what we're able to do is really find the wonder and the beauty in the ocean and things that still exist that we don't know about. An really we can't understand our ocean completely and be able to protect it if we don't know what's in it and what we're protecting. And so being able to make these discoveries to characterize these environments and really know how they are interconnected, do we still do not know that? And can you talk a little bit about how technology is really just even the last couple of years, how it's improve your ability to do that? It's allowing for autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence to be able to go through date large datasets and be able to extract the information we need at a much faster rate. It also allows for us to be able to refine how we're doing our science, for example, on several Expeditions we've done in the past couple years. We've brought technology development projects. What we've been able to get soft robotic fingers that can gently pickup organisms that have been too fragile to collect in the past or use high resolution scanning so we can see see through animals. And these are the things that are allowing us to really refine how we understand the ocean at the scale. We can do so that we've been looking at reefs in deeper environments that are in cooler waters and aren't as susceptible to bleaching. And these deeper areas do in fact show that these quarrels are quite healthy and they could serve. As a refuge for the shallower quarrels down the road, but we really don't know that relationship as much as we'd like to, and that's why these studies are so important. The other thing that's really important about the work we're doing is that we're looking at old coral, so ancient coral. These drowned reefs that have all this information from the past, buried with them, and so we can extract things like ocean temperature and ocean currents. And we use that information to model for the future so we can better understand what the impacts of a warming climate are on our oceans. So you guys made a pretty big announcement last week, so we're very excited. Last week to announce that our team aboard Falcor had in fact found at 500 meter tall reef, which to those of you that don't picture scale like myself that is taller than the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower. This thing is massive in the Great Barrier Reef an what's really remarkable is it's the first reef discovery in 120 years. In the Great Barrier Reef, so we're very excited about it. Sebastian was live streaming this and so everybody was watching this at the time, so it was it like watching him explore this massive Nuri for the first time so we knew that we had found something, but we didn't know what it was going to look like. And so we were very excited about this dive. In anticipating it, we made announcement on social to our faithful followers that Schmidt Ocean that like to participate in our dives and so we had people all over the world watching as we were making this discovery. It was really unique. Is it so tall that you get to see how the different systems change from these drowned reefs that have quarrels and deep coral's growing on them up to the shallower fit? 3040 meter depth that had schools of fish and sharks and incredible healthy coral. So it was really taking you from the bottoms of the ocean up to the surface of the water was a really exciting die for us. How does something this big go undiscovered for so long? Well, there's a couple reasons behind that, so a lot of people don't realize that we don't know much about our own planet. We don't know a lot about our ocean floor. In fact, about 5% of our deep sea or ocean is really understood and characterized an we have about 20% math now of RC floor. So when you think about that, we know more about some planets and moons than we do about our own, our own oceans. It's mind blowing, and so a lot of it is just it hasn't. Been accessed and that's because of technology and we're now the place where we have the technological developments to go, explore and discover and understand. And so we're finding all these things.