The fact that humans have mapped the surface of Mars more thoroughly than the bottom of our own oceans is subtly unsettling. If you were to watch a 72-foot autonomous ship slip out of the harbor and into open water in July 2022 while standing at the edge of San Francisco Bay, you might assume you were witnessing something commonplace. A boat is departing. occurs daily. However, the Saildrone Surveyor was sailing toward the unknown, bound for areas of the Alaskan seafloor that no instrument, much less a human, had ever meaningfully documented.
You are stopped cold by the numbers alone. Approximately half of the waters in the United States are unmapped, and over 80% of the world’s oceans are still unmapped. In an effort to close that gap, NOAA has been using unmanned systems more quickly than it did a few years ago. Over 10,000 square miles of the Aleutian Islands alone were scanned by the surveyor over the course of 52 days, using sonar to create an image of the terrain that was more than four miles underwater. It doesn’t require crew rotation, supply runs, or sleep because it is powered by sail, solar, and diesel.
What’s amazing—and possibly underestimated—is how COVID-19 subtly compelled this change. NOAA didn’t just stop working when ship and aircraft missions had to be reduced for safety reasons beginning in 2020. It deployed autonomous surface vessels into the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic at the same time, putting more emphasis on the drone strategy it had been working on for years. Tim Gallaudet, a retired rear admiral, described it as fulfilling “critical mission needs,” which is the kind of cautious bureaucratic wording that tends to minimize what’s truly taking place. In reality, a significant reevaluation of the methods used in ocean science was taking place.
The missions in the Bering Sea are particularly important. To evaluate walleye pollock, the foundation of America’s biggest domestic fishery, three autonomous Saildrone boats fitted with acoustic sensors were sent there. Resource managers were already using early data to help set fishing levels for 2021, though it’s still unclear how much these surveys will change the science in the long run. That’s a big deal. These are not exploratory missions; rather, they directly influence economic choices that impact fishing communities throughout Alaska.
These ships have an almost compulsive amount of technology. Sonar, weather instruments, ocean condition sensors, and what researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute refer to as a “lab in a can”—a containerized system that can gather environmental DNA from the water column while the drone is in motion—are all carried by the Surveyor. It gathers information 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and sends weather and oceanographic data straight to international weather modeling systems. Observing all of this, it seems as though the speed of what is conceivable has subtly surpassed the speed of what the majority of people are aware of.
With BOEM, NOAA, and the USGS working together to discover a variety of habitats off the U.S. southeastern coast, including cold-water coral gardens, methane seeps, and submarine canyons, each of which appears to be distinct in its biology and environmental conditions, deep-sea exploration using ROVs and AUVs has added another layer to this picture. In order to determine whether the seafloor has recovered, a Blake Plateau site that was disrupted by pilot mining operations fifty years ago is currently being reexamined using high-resolution imagery. Most likely, it hasn’t. But we can see it now, at least.
The machinery is working toward the ambitious but seemingly naive goal of mapping the entire world’s seafloor by 2030. NOAA has admitted that no one ship can accomplish this on its own. A fleet is required. an increasingly unmanned one.
