Technology Day 1993—"Riding the Wave of Innovation: The Ocean and MIT"

HECHT: My name is Bill Hecht. I'm a member of the class of 1961, and I'm the Chief Executive Officer of the Alumni Association. So it's my great pleasure to welcome you back. After all, I work for all of you.

MIT pays my salary, but I work for all of you. It's a very funny business I'm in. What I want to do this morning is to introduce this program. As you know in the last several years, we've had the great good fortune of enlisting our distinguished faculty as assistants and helpers in putting together a program.

And I have to say that in this case, we enlisted a faculty member who did an extraordinary job for us in putting this program together. In fact, I think it's more his program than it is our program. And Chuck Vest will introduce that faculty member, Francis Ogilvie, Head of the Ocean Engineering Department.

It's my pleasure this morning to introduce the 15th President of MIT, Chuck Vest. Chuck is a person who majored in mechanical engineering at West Virginia University, did his PhD at Michigan. The University of Michigan has given us two presidents now, he and Jerry Wiesner. And he and Becky came to this campus a couple of years ago, and have indelibly put their own stamp on this very special place. It's my great privilege to introduce Chuck Vest.

[APPLAUSE]

VEST: Thank you very much, Bill. It's really a great pleasure to welcome all of you. Or perhaps in the case of a large number of you, to re-welcome you since I've had the great good fortune to visit with quite a few of you over the preceding days.

It's my understanding that we are close to, if not at a record attendance of alumni and alumnae and their families here for the reunions and Technology Day. Somewhere over 3,000 of you in attendance. And that's really terrific and makes it a very exciting day and week for all of us.

And one of the most exciting parts of the week is, indeed, ahead of us today. And also, tomorrow looks to have something very special for everyone, be you an entrepreneur, an explorer, an athlete, or just plain an eater. And there are a lot of those around I've noticed.

We have lived and worked in an era that will be remembered largely as the beginning of the age of exploration of outer space. The exploration of the seas on the other hand, is a human endeavor that dates from earlier millennia. But it is a never-ending quest.

The current decade has seen great advances in the exploration and utilization of this important inner space through the development of a whole new set of tools. These new tools, ranging from deep sea vessels to computer modeling, are giving us a better understanding of our oceans, their vitality for shipping and commerce, their effects on the control of the Earth's environment, and their biological richness.

The oceans hold a great appeal to us scientifically, spiritually, and pragmatically. And MIT faculty, students, staff, alumni, and alumnae are there at the leading edge of every advance in this great adventure.

Today, our speakers are truly a stellar group of experts drawn from the Institute and beyond who have an intimate knowledge of the sea. They will be sharing that knowledge with us as they look at the ocean, its uses, and its resources.

I want to note that not only MIT faculty, but our graduates are among the experts who will be addressing us today, including Bill Koch, the winner of the 1992 America's Cup. And special thanks, indeed as Bill has said, go to Francis Ogilvie, Head of our Department of Ocean Engineering. And to Arthur Winston and the rest of the Technology Day Committee for putting together such an extraordinary array of talks and panel discussions.

I look forward to talking with and learning with many of you throughout the day. And I'll certainly be seeing you again at the Technology Day Luncheon this afternoon. So again, welcome. I want to extend a very warm welcome on behalf of those of us who live and learn and work here at the Institute. We're just terrifically glad that you're here.

It's now my great pleasure to introduce Professor Francis Ogilvie, who will moderate this morning's session. Francis.

[APPLAUSE]

OGILVIE: Well, this is a special pleasure for me. Before we really get onto the program, I should say that this is my first experience at working intensively with the Alumni Association and both the staff and the volunteers. And I found it a remarkable experience. A professional staff. A lot of dedicated, hardworking committee members who are mostly down here in the front except, because of these lights, I can't see them. But I'm sure they're there.

My job this morning mainly is to introduce the speakers. And since we have a couple of professors on the program, to make sure they stay within the time that's allowed.

Chuck Vest has already spoken a little bit of the history of the oceans and how our view of it is changing. Of course, Naval architecture is probably the world's oldest engineering profession.

In more recent decades, it was discovered that ocean engineers-- Naval architects actually, as they were called, were just what was needed for the offshore oil industry as they started going out in the deeper and deeper water to try to find and produce oil and gas.

Now, there are entirely new areas opening up. Part of it is driven simply by our curiosity, our desire to understand the environment. And it's been pointed out by a lot of speakers and writers, we have better maps of the backside of the moon than we do of the bottom of the ocean. In fact, it's now also true that we have better maps of Venus than we do of most of the bottom of the ocean.

We've also come to learn in the last few years what a remarkable effect the ocean has on global weather and climate. That we don't understand a lot of it, but we know that it has a major effect. And we are just really taking the first steps to understanding it.

I think that I can make a comparison that our status in knowledge of the ocean is probably comparable to our knowledge of space in the 1950s. We're really just getting started. We're really just finding out the things we can do. We see lots more questions out there than we do answers.

Now, this morning's program, the first three talks will focus on some of these newer aspects of working in the ocean. And then the last one, as you've already been told and you know from the program, will be on the most ancient of Maritime arts-- sailing-- and how it has been changed by technology.

You all have the program booklets. And so I'm not going to cut into the speaker's time by reading you or paraphrasing the description of the various speakers. So at this point, I'm happy to introduce Dr. Sylvia Earle, who had a remarkable career already in business related to ocean, in government. And actually, in personal exploration of the ocean as you can read. So Dr. Earle, very happy to welcome you.

[APPLAUSE]

EARLE: Thank you so much. I'm very pleased to be here, having just taken the dreaded red eye from California to arrive. You all look pretty good to me.

It's a special honor to be invited to speak here during this week of celebration. Last week, I had the pleasure of introducing one of this Institution's many illustrious alumnae, Physicist and Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann when he received the 1993 Charles A. Lindbergh Award at the Explorers Club in New York for his lifetime of accomplishment in promoting a balance between technological advancement and environmental preservation. It's a challenge that occupied much of Lindbergh's life, and one that is of increasing importance to the future of all of us.

While preparing for Professor Gell-Mann's introduction, I discovered that when he graduated from Yale at the tender age of 18 in 1948, he really wanted to go to Princeton for Advanced Studies, but he was turned down. He was attracted to MIT. But especially after the Ivy League environment at Yale and dreams of Princeton-- and with all due respect, he thought, this institution-- and this is a quote-- was a rather grubby place.

He even went so far as to say that I had a choice between suicide and MIT. But a little reflection convinced me that I could try MIT, and then commit suicide. But not the other way around.

Happily for Gell-Mann, and for this institution and for all of us, he did come here. And it proved to be a win-win-win.

Another for whom this place was just right was Herald, otherwise known as Papa Flash, Edgerton, whose contributions to ocean engineering are the stuff of which legends are made. He, too, loved and helped to generate a certain down to earthiness that seems to be conducive to inspiring great work and an amazing creative atmosphere for faculty and students alike.

There must be a million Edgerton stories, but one of my favorites-- and I understand this is really true-- concerns the occasion when several distinguished visitors from Europe came looking for Dr. Edgerton with suits, ties, polished shoes, and an attitude befitting distinguished visitors about to meet the famous MIT professor and engineering wizard. But just outside the building, they encountered a janitor wearing a plaid shirt and khakis. You know, grubby. He was moving some boxes And they asked if he would please show them the way to Edgerton's lab. Better yet, the janitor replied, I'll take you there. It's only when they arrived at Edgerton's office, the janitor sat down behind the desk that they realized they been had.

I witnessed something of the special magic of this place myself a few years ago when I accompanied a distinguished European visitor to the Ocean Engineering Lab. We had the ultra-grand tour with a demonstration of some of the remarkable manipulator technology that has been developed for use on underwater vehicles. Dana Yoerger showed us around. And we visited with some of the students and walked the hallowed halls listening to the sizzle of creative blue fire emanating from the rather ordinary-looking, some might say grubby-looking, spaces.

In fact, my European colleague looked increasingly distressed and perplexed as we neared the end of the tour. And as we kind of came to the end of it, he waited until Dana was just out of hearing range and he leaned over and he kind whispered, is this all there is?

I don't know exactly what he expected, but what I, and the world generally have come to rely on from this institution, is not what is expected. Rather, it's the unexpected. The departure from the predictable. The fresh ways of looking at things that continue to keep the legends coming from these seemingly ordinary-looking labs and offices generation after generation.

This institution has, in fact, over the past century-- think of it, a century of work on ocean engineering issues-- has had a remarkable impact on underwater exploration. And thus, on exploration of the planet as a whole.

I personally am intrigued with the history of ocean exploration and the technology that makes such exploration possible, partly because most of it has yet to be. Most of what has been discovered concerning the oceans has occurred during the last 100 years. All the history of humankind, most of the action has been during the history of the ocean during labs here. But the pace has picked up.

More has been learned perhaps about the sea in the last two decades than in during all preceding history. Perhaps, that Bob "I found the Titanic" Ballard, says-- and it may be an overstatement-- that less than 1/10 of 1% of the deep sea has been explored. And yet, last fall at an Explorers Club dinner honoring space exploration, Carl Sagan made an eloquent plea for turning our attention skyward as a species to other planets and beyond. Because after all, he said, exploration of this planet is essentially complete.

Well, some of us nearly leaped straight out of our chairs, anxious to point out that the great unknowns that lurk a few feet from any shore. We can start with an image or two to illustrate some of these points.

During this era, we have a range of sophisticated new technology available. A lot of what is now being discovered doesn't even involve getting wet, nor even being close to the sea. Not like the good old days when half the fun of being an oceanographer used to be getting seasick. You clever engineers out there are taking the macho out of being a marine explorer.

It used to be a really good detective adventure to go out and try to figure out what life in the oceans was about by looking at gobs of gelatinous goo scooped up by nets dragged through the ocean. Not that a lot of fine ocean science hasn't been accomplished by staring into a bucket. That's not a seasick scientist, by the way.

But just imagine trying to discover something about your backyard, or mine-- that is San Francisco, of course-- by using standard, traditional oceanographic techniques, flying overhead in an airplane instead of a ship over the bottom of the sea, blindly dragging nets, snagging a bit of this or that, or the other thing. What could we know about the inner workings of Boston or Cambridge given such approaches based on, say, a sample snagged from a Saturday night out on the square?

We've gotten better at this approach over time. And Doc Edgerton is one example of refining that technique very well with his famous deep-sea cameras that were deployed from the decks of ships, providing unprecedented new information about critters, about sunken ships, and about the nature of the sea itself.

But no longer is it necessary to stare wistfully over the deck, from the deck of the ship or longingly from the side. Ocean exploration during our lifetime has taken some different and wonderful twists so that we can take ourselves directly. And we have a great array of machines that can indirectly, vicariously explore for us.

Getting into the sea with ourselves and increasingly effective cameras and variations on the theme of technology has revolutionized knowledge and understanding about the nature of the planet and life that we share. Even now, many who think they know quite a lot about the sea, do not fully appreciate the significance of life in the sea. As a medium, the ocean is more than just water. It's a living soup, a three-dimensional creepy-crawly minestrone. Eat your heart out, Luke Skywalker. Some of the creations that are down there make engineers sigh with envy.

But with all due respect to fish and whales, most life in the sea-- and of course, most of what transforms the nature of seawater into something not quite seawater, but kind of a living soup-- is small, microscopic. And therefore, not taken into account by most people, including most biologists. Until recently, anyway.

Now, one of the many great incentives to speed up effective access to the sea has to do with getting acquainted with the immense diversity of life that is in the sea. It can't be compared with any place on the land. The greatest major divisions of diversity are without any question in the ocean where the history of life is literally written in the lives of creatures that have deep roots in time, like half a billion years for sponges.

But pick up almost any rock, even on a salt marsh, let alone out in the deep sea, and find yourself travelling back in time to do a cross-section in terms of the history of who's who and what's what with respect to ancestry that makes ours really get into perspective. We are truly newcomers, even with respect to fellow vertebrates.

Well, I'm one of those vertebrates who has a history of liking to get out in the ocean directly. And part of that history has led me to appreciating the variations on the theme of new technology to take ourselves vicariously.

I enjoy the close-up view. I am, by nature, a botanist. And I've spent quite a lot of time cruising around using the senses with which I was born. And I'm among those who have enjoyed the pleasures of staying underwater for longer than most can just using scuba tanks. That is, living underwater for prolonged periods. Using space-age type re-breathers to prolong individual excursions to hours instead of minutes. And using some of the new material, such as acrylics, to put true windows in the sea from looking from the inside out.

In fact, just recently this nation's latest adventure along those lines, the Aquarius Underwater Habitat, analogous to Skylab or the Space Shuttle. And certainly, to the Space Station, has gone back into the water after being in dry dock for a year or so, to enable scientists and others to go and live underwater for some period of time in the Florida Keys.

I know, I'm supposed to be talking about ocean exploration and unmanned systems. And I'm getting there. But I want to put things a bit in perspective. Again, suppose knowledge of the land were limited to conventional diving techniques. Limited to close-up views. Limited to what you can sense only with your own eyes and fingertips and ears and so on. As good and as important-- in fact, vital as this approach is, as far as either space exploration or for ocean exploration, it represents one variation on the theme of a tool in the box. By no means, not the only one.

There are debates, of course, that rage, both in terms of space technology and in ocean technology, about whether to have manned systems or unmanned systems. What is cost effective?

Well, I think astronauts have made their case more effectively than their aquatic counterparts. I mean, I look at the budgets for, let's say, the Space Shuttle's toilet, $23 million, and dream about what I could do with that for underwater exploration.

But it's not just limited to people in space. It's also those who favor the unmanned approach, the use of satellites, as compared to, let's say, ocean buoys or remotely-operated vehicles, or autonomous vehicles. The dollars that we, as a nation, as a species, have been willing to commit to space have certainly far and away surpassed what we have been willing to commit to ocean exploration and ocean technology.

There are many haunting parallels, however, putting dollars aside. Aside from that orders of magnitude difference in terms of costs. I've had the pleasure of experiencing some of these parallels directly. Living underwater is one. But to go into the so-called "hostile environment" of the sea or of space requires packaging human beings and instruments in some cases to withstand the absence of pressure in space or the great addition of unfamiliar space if we venture deep into the sea.

This system is one that was developed actually at about the time Charles Lindbergh was crossing the Atlantic in 1927. And it does illustrate the point that while some refer to this as the cutting edge of ocean technology. If it is, we're in trouble. And it really isn't. There are other variations on the theme of both manned exploration and that which leaves us sitting on the surface deploying instruments subsurface that in the last two decades have advanced considerably.

But we are still handicapped when it comes to venturing deep in the sea. Only once in the history of humankind has it been possible to package people-- two of them-- in a protective container to go as far as the greatest ocean depth. A mere 7 miles, about 11,000 meters, withstanding 16,000 pounds per square inch on the shell of the container that holds them. That little sphere in the base of the Trieste.

That was 1960 for 20 minutes. Once and never more. At least not so far. Technologically, the capability exists, but so far not the will. Either to take ourselves or to package instruments to go to the deepest part of the sea. Perhaps it will be possible in the very near future.

Japan is on the very edge of launching a system, this summer in fact, on a tether that will go to the deepest part of the sea.

The famous Alvin submersible. And many of you here have had something to do with this delightful creature launched in 1964. It goes to merely the average depth of the sea, 4,000 meters.

And here, the deepest-diving manned submersible in existence now. It's the Shinkai 6500. It's the deepest diving that presently exists to take people. Although, there are some systems that can venture further. And as I indicated, this summer a tethered unmanned vehicle will be deployed for access to 11,000 meters on a voyage back to the Marianas Trench.

The cable connecting the vehicle to the surface is at least as impressive as the vehicle itself. Can you imagine the cable that will go 11,000 meters with power down the line and all the rest?

Well, one of the limiting factors in using manned subs and even large, remotely-operated vehicles, despite the disparity with space budgets is cost. Mostly, because of the large support ships and the crew required.

When I used the Shinkai 6500 two years ago, the cost was $100,000 a day. And now, it is said to be $150,000 a day. That gives National Science Foundation and other granting agencies a little heartburn. Cost is what has driven the development of small systems, manned and unmanned.

Here's an example. One that is near and dear to my heart because I have tracked it from a sketch on a napkin at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, DC, to having the fun of piloting the little beast down to 1,000 meters. This is an example of, obviously, one with a human being inside that can be deployed from a platform that cost about $1,000 for exploration of Crater Lake.

It provides a tiny window in the sea. Again, not at all comparable to some of the new autonomous vehicle technology that travels over wide distances, or even the remotely-operated vehicle technology that enables instruments and other devices to record what's going on for much longer than human beings can tolerate. Such systems, however, are useful in part because they're so simple to drive. Even a scientist can operate Deep Rover.

And you can wear whatever you like. And of course, it's possible to instantly transform the system into an unmanned vehicle by sending a woman.

[APPLAUSE]

There are places in the sea, however, where taking people, male or female, certainly has risks. Alvin melted a metal temperature probe during one of its first ventures trying to see what the temperature of hydrothermal vents happened to be. At Deep Ocean Engineering, we're now building two acrylic spheres of manned submersibles. We may find out how acrylic reacts to the hot spots in the deep sea. We'll see. But in any case, it's much more comforting to view such places from a safe distance.

There are a lot of places in the sea that divers in or out of subs would rather not have to go, such as the Persian Gulf after the big spill. Time is another factor. Vehicles may get cold, but they don't eat or use restrooms or sleep. They can stay down a long time. Whereas, human beings have certain built-in limits.

Safety is recurrent, and I think maybe a spurious, justification for unmanned underwater vehicles considering what we're willing to do in other directions. Most of you drove on the freeway to get here, right? Now, that's a risk. But we accept it.

And then there are giant squids to consider underwater. But whatever the risks are, no dangers of the deep need to be dredged up to justify unmanned systems, not when a small and growing fleet of passenger subs is safely taking little kids and grandparents for excursions into the sea.

I applaud this approach. There are a couple of dozen of these little passenger subs operating around the world. Rather, unmanned vehicles have proven themselves for their own attributes, for unprecedented time. And in some cases, unprecedented ability to cover distances. The famous SOFAR Floats that drift in ocean currents keeping the recording data beeping out information. Or their clever counterparts, that's SOFAR spelled backwards, RAFOS, R-A-F-O-S, that receives signals from moored transmitters as they bob about in depths to as great as 3,500 meters.

This isn't appropriate work for manned subs or divers. The key to ocean exploration and the technology that goes along with it is to choose the right tool for the job at hand.

Certainly, in the last decade, this institution has been much involved with the development of systems that are helping to make a huge difference in what we know or suspect about the nature of the sea. As was indicated in the earlier remarks, the oil and gas industry helped to spur the development of much of this. But the need to know how the planet works from the inside out continues to push that development.

This little sub designed for use in the oil patch, ultimately has made its way into scientific circles with one at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, one at the Monterey Bay Research Institute, with new systems there being developed that really are extraordinary. With video monitors to enable people to fly from a distance the systems that are operating in the depths below.

But just as with the examples with the manned systems, small is beautiful in some respects. Here is one, an industrial workhorse. More than a hundred of these systems were used for years in support of the offshore oil and gas industry. And to some extent, for basic exploration.

And here is one of Deep Ocean Engineering's fleet of 256 little ROVs, like MIT's famous autonomous vehicle, Odyssey. A little, bitty boat will do. You don't need a big support platform.

I don't have a photograph of Odyssey, but I've seen enough images on the screen as we were walking in and on t-shirts walking about outside of the Odyssey, so I'm sure that if you don't know what Odyssey looks like, you soon should find out. It looks rather like a tuna fish. It's sleek, tapered, with propulsion at the aft end. A system that made history this past winter.

I really regret that I don't have a picture to show you, but I'll keep the little Phantom up there because both shared a little piece of history-making event this winter. Not by doing the same project, but in the same environment in Antarctica. The Odyssey vehicle will warm the hearts of flinty-eyed National Science Foundation funders with a component cost of a mere $50,000, a range of 270 kilometers. It can't go as far as a tuna fish, but they're getting there. A depth range, however, that exceeds that that a tuna fish can achieve, unless it's a one-way trip for the tuna. That is, 6,000 meters.

Move over Shinkai 6500. This system, the Odyssey, can be deployed from a zodiac in Antarctica. Talk about a tough environment.

Well, this year, this little vehicle, the Phantom, made history side by side with the Odyssey in terms of its launching pad. In this case, NASA provided funding because of their interest in remoting human capability to faraway places such as Mars.

There are, happily, spin-offs to this technology and this support here on this planet, Earth. Using virtual reality-type helmets, pilots tilted their head one way or the other and the vehicle's cameras responded accordingly some distance away, under the water and below the ice. But instead of virtual reality, the pilots with their video monitors were witnessing reality-reality.

In fact, the part that made history was accomplished with the help of microwave links and satellite links when a pilot sitting in California caused the vehicle in Antarctica to go through its paces, move its cameras as the pilot in California moved his head left, right, up, down, and so on.

Well, if you go to Spielberg movies, you think, well, of course we've done that for a long time. But the fact is we haven't. We're just getting there. We can envision it, but in many cases, we are just on the cutting edge of being able to do some of the things that people in science fiction terms have thought about for many years.

Video eyes have not yet fully replaced human sensors. It is likely there will always be a place for both because, well-- I, at least for one, certainly hope so. I hope that the either/or attitude gets squashed, that manned versus unmanned. We need all the tools in the box we can muster.

This little manned vehicle called DeepFlight is an example of kind of getting it together both ways. Much can be learned about autonomous vehicle handling by putting a human computer inside the sub for a while, and then substituting as the technology reaches that point, the mechanical substitutes, the artificial intelligence.

Actually, it's a great test bed and a way to work together instead of working in isolation one from the other. And I'm happy to say that, in fact, that is the case, that people do talk in spite of the lines that seem to be drawn between putting human beings underwater and keeping them out of the water, just as is true in space.

There is, of course, much to be learned from watching the ultimate in ocean engineering in action. And here are my personal favorite, the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Again, I have heard engineers sigh with envy as they admire the sleekness, the design, the propulsion system, the ability to go for thousands of miles on a diet of herring, no batteries required as such.

But these particular fish illustrate one reason why we must hurry with our technology. The sea is changing. Ecosystems are feeling the crunch underwater. Those beautiful tuna, for example, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, the breeding population in the last 20 years, despite efforts to protect them, have dropped to 10% of what they were.

We've seen changes on the land as well. As MIT's Ocean Engineering Department enter its second century, the pace is quickening as far as global change is concerned. And with it, the need to know and to understand the nature of our planet, our life support system.

Technology is vital to achieve survival on this shrinking changing planet. I want to end with a salute, especially to those here who see that we need all the tools in the box. Especially to those who, like Murray Gell-Mann, and Doc Edgerton, and others who are seeking and finding the balance, and are helping to engineer a habitable, enduring planet. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

OGILVIE: Well, thank you, Dr. Earle. I enjoyed that very much, and I hope everybody else did.

I should point out that the Odyssey vehicle that she referred to is on display in the Building 7 lobby. So if you get a chance to go through there today, and I think tomorrow morning, you can see it. It just happens to be between missions and so it was available, along with several other vehicles, from the MIT Sea Grant program.

It's a sleek-looking body incidentally because one of the problems of going down deep in the ocean is you have to carry your energy with you. It's an advantage that the people in space have that we don't have. If you put a spacecraft up, and if you put enough photo cells on it, you can get all the energy you need. You can't do that in the ocean.

So you either have to have a cable. And that becomes impossible at a certain point. Or you have to carry it with you. And actually, the MIT approach has been, at least in the Ocean Engineering Department, we were not going to become battery chemists. And we didn't think very much of the idea of trying to put some sort of nuclear device in little beasts that would run around unattended. And so we decided to go in the direction of making the most efficient use we could of the energy that was available.

There is a project in the department related to fish swimming, which is rather interesting. For decades, it's been recognized that fish swim with efficiencies that have been considered to be impossible by engineers. And a lot of people have looked at it. Coding problems, and flexible surfaces, and all sorts of things have been proposed and none of them worked. I think we know the answer now.

Unfortunately, it requires that the tail flap. And we haven't figured out how to make submarines with flapping tails. But at least, I think we are getting a much better understanding of the process.

Well, it's my pleasure now to introduce our next speaker, Bob Spindel. Dr. Spindel was-- I first got to know him when he was at Woods Hole. He was the chairman of the Ocean Engineering Department there.

A few years back, he went over to the competition at the University of Washington. But fortunately, we still work with him closely. In fact, we have joint projects with him. And he was a natural, I thought, when I wanted somebody to speak to us about measuring the ocean environment. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Bob Spindel.

[APPLAUSE]

SPINDEL: [INAUDIBLE].

OGILVIE: Okay. Here's a pointer. Whoops. [INAUDIBLE].

SPINDEL: Thank you very much, Frances. And with all this technology that we're going to hear about this morning, still the most untechnological item that a speaker has to deal with is this little box, which is wireless remote control.

It's really a thrill for me to be here this morning. It's always a thrill for me to be at MIT.

I grew up in New York City. I always wanted to be an engineer, always thought that MIT was the place to go. And when I graduated from high school, I sent my application to MIT, but I also sent an application to the Cooper Union. And I think it was a result of the foresight of Peter Cooper who established a tuition for his school that has kept me from sitting in the audience as an alumni as you are doing today. But it's wonderful to be here, even though I'm not in the audience as an alumni.

What I'd like to do is talk to you a little bit about how we measure the ocean and why I think that if there ever was a time to be excited about being an oceanographer, to be excited about being able to measure the sea, that time is right now. We are on the verge of, really, a complete new understanding, not just a complete new vision of the ocean as Sylvia was trying to impress us with, but a complete new understanding of how the oceans operate, how they drive the forces of the planet, how they control our weather, how they control our climate.

And the reason we're on that verge is because of a few new technologies. One of which is the satellite and the other one are technologies that allow us to actually see into the interior of the ocean. And not just see little pieces of it, not just see that 1/10 of 1% of the bottom that has been explored, but to actually see the ocean as a whole. And let me try to give you some idea of what I mean.

This is still the way we measure the ocean. This is the Challenger. It was the first great ocean-measuring expedition launched in 1872. It lasted about three years. It really is the forerunner, the precedent of the kinds of expeditions that we still carry on today. It's men in ships that still measure the ocean.

There are many expeditions, such as Shackleton's expedition in 1915, which were billed as scientific expeditions, but they weren't. They were really expeditions of exploration. Shackleton was trying to get to the pole, not measure the oceans.

Some of the expeditions ended successfully, like the Challenger. Some, not so successfully, like the Endurance in 1915.

But this is a modern ship. This is the Woods Hole Oceanographic's first research vessel. It doesn't look any different than the Challenger. And it doesn't look any different than Shackleton's Endurance. And the ships that oceanographers sail in today look exactly like that. They just don't have masts. They have not changed at all in all those years. And it still requires men going to sea, being uncomfortable, using buckets. It still requires putting instruments over the side of a ship in the worst kinds of conditions. And through it all, making just a very tiny measurement.

This is an example of an instrument that is the mainstay of the oceanographic world. It is lowered from the ship on a wire. It measures salinity. It measures temperature. And it measures the depth that it's at. And it has little bottles attached to it so it can collect little samples of water and bring them up. It takes about two hours to lower that instrument from the surface to the bottom. It takes about another two hours to bring that instrument back up to the surface. You can imagine how time-consuming and how energy-consuming and how expensive it is just to make a simple little measurement like that in one part of the ocean.

If you make many such measurements, you can begin to view the ocean as a three-dimensional entity. This is a block of water. Temperature of a block of water in the Fram Strait, which is the narrow inlet and outlet to the Arctic Ocean that exists between Greenland and Spitsbergen. And it was created by making hundreds of lowerings with an instrument such as the one you saw in the previous picture.

And to give you some idea of what the interior of the ocean looks like and how complicated it is, you can, with a computer, produce an image like this. And you can begin to peel away layers of water.

If you peel away water that is above a certain temperature, say above 6 or 7 degrees centigrade, you're left with only that water that is colder.

If you begin to peel that away and only leave water that's 3 or 4 degrees centigrade, you achieve an image like this. And in order to do that, if you look at that slide, you see these vertical lines. Each one of those vertical lines represents a lowering of one of those instruments. It took many hours to do this. It took many days to complete this survey.

In fact, the ocean that was being measured at the beginning of the survey was probably very different than the one that existed at the end. And so instead of seeing a photograph of the interior of the ocean, you're seeing a blurred, smeared picture.

Well, what has man done? What have we done as oceanographers to get away from this, having to use ships? The first step, really, was to use ocean moorings, which was to replace a ship with something that's fixed in the water.

This is an example of an ocean mooring. It's a wire that extends basically from the surface to the bottom with an anchor at the bottom and instruments all along it. There are hundreds of these in use today. They are a tool with the oceanographer users, but they are fixed in place. And they only measure the ocean in one particular place.

Here we see an ocean mooring being deployed. Those yellow things are glass balls which are used for flotation. And they are really something, a piece of technology that was largely developed by an MIT graduate, Sam Raymond, who was actually a student of Doc Edgerton that Sylvia spoke about.

Not all moorings are beneath the surface, some are above it. And here's an example of an ocean mooring, a ship basically fixed in position that is used to measure temperature, salinity. This is a mooring that is installed in the Southern Pacific Ocean along the equator. It has a transmitter to transmit its data directly from the mooring through a satellite back to shore. So the oceanographer can sit in his laboratory, not on a ship, and receive data that way.

Not all oceanographers sit in laboratories, not all of them are on ships. Some are even on moorings in the middle of the ocean.

That particular mooring is one of an array that exists, as I said, on the equator in the ocean. It's designed to measure the southern oscillation, the El Nino, that occurs in the Pacific. The phenomenon that occurs because the winds that are generally running from the east towards the west pile up warm water on the Western side of the Pacific. And then for some unknown reason that we don't understand, every now and then those winds relax and that warm water sloshes back across the Pacific Ocean, up against the West Coast of both the United States and South America. It's what destroys the anchovy fishery.

It happened last year. It wreaked havoc with the salmon fishery on the West Coast. And in fact, people believe it may have been the cause of many of the storms that occurred in Southern California last year.

You can see the number of moorings that have to be put in the ocean just to measure a simple little phenomena like that. You can see the kind of data that those moorings bring back.

This is a plot of temperature depth. The red is warm, the blue is cool. And if you look, you can see periods where the Pacific Ocean warmed up. It warmed up during the early '80s, an El Nino year. It warmed up in the mid-'80s, another El Nino cycle. And then again just last year, the El Nino cycle that I just spoke about.

Not all moorings are successful. Here's an example of one that came up a bit of a snarl. Not all instruments work all the time.

As high as our technology is, here's an example of an instrument that simply imploded due to the pressure at depth. Not all moorings are buoyed up from the bottom. Some are actually suspended from the ice.

Some are actually put in by MIT people. And maybe you recognize some of your classmates here.

Not all instruments are moored on the bottom. Some just sit on the bottom. This is an example of a typical bottom-measuring instrument. It's a little tripod, a little tower that sits on the bottom. It has lots of devices on it. This particular one has devices to measure currents. It has devices to measure suspended sediments. It has devices to measure biological activity on the bottom.

Another example of a bottom instrument shown here is one that has been designed to measure the heat diffusion rates within ocean sediments. It was an instrument that was used to determine what would happen if we disposed of nuclear waste at sea. And the canisters in which the waste were held broke, or leaked. How would the radioactive material diffuse through the sediments?

Well, we had ships that got men sick and only measured things in small places. And we had moorings and things on the bottom that were fixed in position and only measured small parts of the ocean. And then we took a step forward, about 20 years ago, to produce instruments such as this one, which drift freely in the ocean. They are ballasted to be neutrally buoyant at certain depths. They drift with the currents at those depths. They measure the ocean temperature and pressure and salinity at those depths. And they transmit that information back to shore, sometimes acoustically. Sometimes, they bob to the surface and transmit the data by satellites. So we've replaced the ship basically with an unmanned, autonomous, freely-drifting instrument.

To ballast these things at neutral buoyancy is a very critical and I think interesting technological feat. They generally have to be balanced to within about a gram. Otherwise, they will rise to the surface if they're too light or sink if they're too heavy. And the balancing has to be done at the surface where there is no pressure and where the temperature is certainly different than it is at depth. So one has to know the characteristics of the materials that are being used to predict how that instrument will behave when it is at its in situ temperature and depth.

This is an example of the kind of data that's returned from instruments like this. These are the tracks or the pads of these floats that have been drifting around the Atlantic Ocean now for the order of 10 years.

Not all floats transmit their data acoustically. Some, as I said, actually bob to the surface. This is an example of one that goes up and down 10, 12, 15 times in the course of its life. Records data when it's beneath the sea, transmits the data through satellites when it reaches the surface.

Well, those are the instruments that are in the ocean. The real revolution, I think, is going to take place with instruments that are above the ocean with satellites. And they're not new. They've been observing the earth for a long time. What is new is the fact that over the next decade, over the next 15 years, we have scheduled, here in the United States and worldwide, the launch of over a dozen satellites with instruments that are devoted specifically to measuring the ocean. For the first time, we will really be able to see the ocean basically all at once.

This is an infrared image that was taken with a satellite. You can see the Gulf Stream very clearly. In fact, you can see Cape Code very clearly.

Radar scatterometers. Basically, radars on the satellites allow you to measure ocean winds. Allow you to understand something about the interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean and the exchange of gas and heat and chemicals that occur at the ocean surface.

Radar altimeters allow you to measure the height of the ocean's surface. The top of that view graph shows the surface ocean height measured from a satellite. And the bottom of the view graph shows the bottom of the ocean that was measured over a period of hundreds of years with ships.

What actually happens is that the ocean's surface conforms to the shape of the ocean bottom. Using a satellite, a remote sensor, we see the bottom of the ocean from 1,000 kilometers in space.

Something as lowly as a camera on a satellite can tell us something about the ocean that we wouldn't otherwise know. Here, you can see waves entering the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean. These waves are inside the ocean. They're not on the surface. You wouldn't see them if you were on the surface.