okay good afternoon I’m here to talk
about diving which is really the art and
science of putting a person underwater
to live and to work in and oftentimes to
play now that’s something that’s going
largely unchanged for the last half a
century or more and largely because we
have we have this this idea of
limitations with the human body with
physiology what I’m proposing today is
that we can see past that in a very big
way and start to make progress in kind
of rejuvenating steps towards a renewed
life in the sea so to speak I had my
inspirational moment in ocean
exploration on May 28th 2002 and it may
as well have been yesterday I just
graduated college and you know I very
much valued my degree in marine biology
I wasn’t all that challenged I finished
a four-year program in three years I
didn’t drop out I finished ahead of
times to get it over with
and you know I actually started to
publish peer-reviewed material at that
plant I was looked at by my advisors as
somebody that really had some promise in
academia and I said well that’s that’s
great but I made 28 2002 I did this dive
to 300 feet with my advisor and in it
was incredibly stressful time right
because when you’re diving at these
depths you’re consuming tremendous
amounts of breathing gas all right so
you know you’re under a lot of stress
but in an eight-minute period of time in
an area about the size of our famous
rectangle a that the world’s perfect
quadrat right for all the field people
out there
we collected what turned out to be a
dozen new species of marine sponge okay
a tremendous amount of biodiversity and
space that big right I mean it’s a it’s
a neat it’s a needle in the haystack
really later studies revealed that half
of those specimens provide a chemical
clues into Cabana cancer and other
diseases so I know I said look at the
potential look at the promise of putting
people in the ocean to to explore and
discover and innovate make make this
process easier and share that with the
world I said what about that nine-minute
what if I was able to reach outside the
box for just one minute and really
changed the world so you know I had an
offer to pursue a PhD at that point and
I said you know this isn’t about being a
scientist that’s using diving as a
2-lane war this is about being at being
a diver right that is the tool to do the
job so I turned down this offer to
pursue a PhD much to my parents dismay
and I said I’m chasing the dream and
going after this up its ninth minute and
of course at age twenty that sounds like
a good idea so now I started following
trends in diving scientific diving over
about the past decade and a few things
become incredibly obvious and I
anticipate this would happen this is the
adoption of advanced technologies to
improve human performance in the ocean
so things like breathing mixed gases and
using rebreathers or devices that
recycle our gas supplies techniques in
decompression which allow us to stay
down for longer amounts of time so we’re
kind of trending towards wanting this
scientists want to spend more time in
the water it makes perfect sense
unfortunately there’s two things that
are not happening this is the decline of
the remnants of our previous life in the
C programs right so back in the 60s and
70s there’s this boom to live and work
on the seafloor projects like Sealab and
hydro lab in today’s what’s left the
Aquarius program which is in in dire
dire shape right now scientists aren’t
using that technology this top-down
approach of massive infrastructure
that’s only affords an opportunity or
very small handful of people just
doesn’t make sense in today’s paradigm
we want to be mobile we want to pick up
travel remote part of the world in it
and do our work the other thing that’s
not happening are many scientific dives
below about 190 feet despite our having
the technology place to do that so I set
out to figure out why and being the
entrepreneur that I am I said I see
these trends starting to move and age 23
I thought it was a really great idea to
go out and I raised almost a half a
million dollars in financing and in a
variety of creative ways I then fell
flat on my face okay I failed big time
and it was scary and then my girlfriend
dumped me and I was in a really big
trouble
so when you’re in this kind of
predicament the one thing you do is you
leave the country right and I I took off
to the Bahamas where the one place where
I’ve been able to find solace in all
this this journey and I was able to
spend a lot of time looking at
environments like this these are deep
vertical walls that you start in the
shallows you know in 60 or 70 feet war
and they they drop precipitously down to
the abyss and it’s just really dramatic
breathtaking underwater environments you
know it’s really a cross-section through
time I mean this ledge that we see it
was sculpted when sea level was much
lower during the last glacial maximum
this is there’s amazing geology here let
alone the biological promise that this
environment showed back in 2002 so spent
a year there and it’ll come back to
Rhode Island for a couple years working
again as a diver and then in 2000 2008 I
had a ray of hope
okay this environment army Zaphod at
coral ecosystems depths of say 200 500
feet these middle light environments
became an international science priority
okay the research community s and I said
I’m in the position to do this I just
dedicated a huge part of my life to put
the technology in place that techniques
in place and really you know reengineer
my psyche to be able to perform in this
environment not just died to the desk
but get something done right so that was
that was exciting so I tried to raise
money again apply for grants of course
at this point I’m kicking myself I
should have stayed in school right I
need a PhD to to get money out of NSF or
somebody like that they’ll say it didn’t
work I sat around until 2010 and said
finally we’re doing it I find out so I
pulled together my partner and a group
of science colleagues across a whole
array of disciplines put together a
science strategy and said what kind of
information can we extract from this
environment to do some good work and
still no bites on funding I said that’s
it I’m going maxed out all my credit
cards yet again and and we went to work
I finance an expedition fortunately when
we arrived on site I got an email that
night from the way grants program saying
congratulations so
thank you wait grants program for
allowing me to breathe about that
particular night so not only did we get
that ninth minute in that tenth minute
and then 11th in the 12th minute we were
able to spend upwards of 45 minutes
below depths of 250 feet and working to
450 feet over the course of two
expeditions we’ve done dozens of dives
like this they’re incredibly productive
and successful and we’ve documented
things like an amazing amount of new
biodiversity a range extensions of known
species coral disease at depths where we
didn’t expect to see these kinds of
diseases invasive species at depths
where we wouldn’t expect to see these
these species so all this information is
slowly trickling through the peer-review
process now and is being published and
then we’ve also found things like new
species anything you’ve spent enough
time doing the work you love they start
naming animals after you right so maybe
if I shaved it looked a little bit more
like me but very exciting nonetheless so
I said you know all these great
anecdotal kind of discoveries and we’re
doing great work now why I expected this
kind of mass migration from the shallows
and the scientific dying vegan community
down to the debt down to the depths and
it wasn’t happening I said why right
well it’s because we still have this
misperception of diving to a deeper
depth and spending a certain amount of
time there’s limits there so rather than
do that let’s look at productive time
versus unproductive time this yellow bar
represents a time of 42 minutes as it
happens 42 minutes is the average dive
time that any diving scientist spends
underwater doing work this is a micro
sized snapshot of an environment right
we’ve got 42 minutes that’s that’s a
fact
okay that’s as good as it gets that’s
easy to do in the shallows because we
can ascend without required
decompression it gets harder as we go
down deeper at 190 feet for example if
we spend 42 minutes we incur about four
hours of decompression so you have to
make the investment of four hours of
idle time wasted time to get 42 minutes
of work done doesn’t make sense as it
happens this 190 foot dive for four
hours that maximizes today’s
off-the-shelf life support capabilities
so to do much beyond this we need new
technology right makes sense if we look
at doing a 300 foot dive for 42 minutes
we need we have 800
minutes of decompression no scientist in
their right mind that invested
tremendous tremendous mental time
resources to to get to remote location
spend time in the field will spend 800
minutes of the day doing nothing to get
42 minutes of work done it doesn’t make
sense
now when I when I start plotting my work
in this zone to see what’s happening
I work in all these outlying areas I’ve
been willing to accept the challenges
and the risks that come with that but we
need to figure out a way to afford
science access to that routinely that
fits this commodity style approach of
picking up and going diving so to do
that I said let’s remove the diver from
the unproductive environment and put
them in a productive one so I’ve
developed what I believe to be a new
class of underwater habitats talk about
data visualization this is terrible
right I definitely like that
collaborative innovation grant like
let’s let’s connect right so so you know
I sketched out this idea for an
underwater habitat I pulled together
partners in industry and academia and I
said let’s let’s build a bubble let’s
take the diver out of the environment so
this needs to be totally autonomous
system we can pack it up in sukie’s we
can travel so this a little bit better
right we spent about a year developing
this system it’s about a 5 foot diameter
circle about five foot tall some bench
seats and life support integrated sounds
very simple we can take this in the
field deploy it in 20 feet of water we
need to decompress and decompress we
deployed this in 2012 thanks to a second
grant through the CRE program this time
and we did several dives to 400 feet and
decompress in the habitat and what do
you know I pop up in this thing and I’m
talking to my partner and I said this is
the first time we’re making productive
use of unproductive time right look at
what else we can do now we can we can
have a snack we can take no seriously I
mean we can read a book we can take a
nap we can sift through the bag of
goodies that we collected and start
processing samples we’re taking
advantage of unproductive time that’s
what it comes down to the other
important thing that came from this is
that rather than look at diving as in
limitations in diving as a function of
diving to you know over depth and for
our amounts of time I’m looking at
diving in terms of accessible ocean
space this box this is our 42 minute
industry standard that
excepted for the last 50 or 60 years the
very simple perspective in looking at
the ocean this is what’s happened over
the last 10 or 12 years right look these
rebreather technologies mixed-gas
technologies give us a slightly broader
view of what’s going on but don’t
necessarily give us the depth this idea
of a habitat or setting up these
portable outposts all over the
continental shelf which happens to be an
area the size of Texas just off the US
alone this is paradigm changing right
and we can leave the beach and spend a
day a week a month a living and working
underwater again and in a way very
different than what we did in the 60s
and 70s oh this is today this is
happening what’s even more exciting is
that the technology to take the next
step already exists this is the the next
generation atmospheric diving system
that’s been developed over the last
decade really by new co research this
has far superior capabilities in
previous 80s systems an incredible range
of dexterity and movement the ability to
pick up and actuate tools and and make
informed decisions on site as a thousand
foot depth capability doubles what we
can do wet diving right now and the
project was financed by the jfy
contracting company and I formed an
alliance with jf Wade over the past year
and I’ve been so fortunate to be dubbed
the test dummy and definitely not the
the test pilot test dummy that will make
the first use of this for scientific
exploration right this gives us a huge
amount of access to out to the
continental shelf and beyond in a man
capacity I’m very very exciting the
system’s been wet tested by technicians
at new Co that’s going through pressure
testing literally right now like this
week and the first training activities
with the Sioux are going to take place
in July I’m gonna be a part of that
they’re after or proposing an ambitious
series of expeditions to make use of
this technology and really demonstrate
what we can do as a human in novel ocean
environments for the first time so we’re
really gonna leave our shores an
entirely new way leave these
misperceptions and
you know depth and of time and of human
physiology behind and and set out on
what it really is a new era in human
ocean exploration and you know that
future literally starts today so thank
you
you
about diving which is really the art and
science of putting a person underwater
to live and to work in and oftentimes to
play now that’s something that’s going
largely unchanged for the last half a
century or more and largely because we
have we have this this idea of
limitations with the human body with
physiology what I’m proposing today is
that we can see past that in a very big
way and start to make progress in kind
of rejuvenating steps towards a renewed
life in the sea so to speak I had my
inspirational moment in ocean
exploration on May 28th 2002 and it may
as well have been yesterday I just
graduated college and you know I very
much valued my degree in marine biology
I wasn’t all that challenged I finished
a four-year program in three years I
didn’t drop out I finished ahead of
times to get it over with
and you know I actually started to
publish peer-reviewed material at that
plant I was looked at by my advisors as
somebody that really had some promise in
academia and I said well that’s that’s
great but I made 28 2002 I did this dive
to 300 feet with my advisor and in it
was incredibly stressful time right
because when you’re diving at these
depths you’re consuming tremendous
amounts of breathing gas all right so
you know you’re under a lot of stress
but in an eight-minute period of time in
an area about the size of our famous
rectangle a that the world’s perfect
quadrat right for all the field people
out there
we collected what turned out to be a
dozen new species of marine sponge okay
a tremendous amount of biodiversity and
space that big right I mean it’s a it’s
a neat it’s a needle in the haystack
really later studies revealed that half
of those specimens provide a chemical
clues into Cabana cancer and other
diseases so I know I said look at the
potential look at the promise of putting
people in the ocean to to explore and
discover and innovate make make this
process easier and share that with the
world I said what about that nine-minute
what if I was able to reach outside the
box for just one minute and really
changed the world so you know I had an
offer to pursue a PhD at that point and
I said you know this isn’t about being a
scientist that’s using diving as a
2-lane war this is about being at being
a diver right that is the tool to do the
job so I turned down this offer to
pursue a PhD much to my parents dismay
and I said I’m chasing the dream and
going after this up its ninth minute and
of course at age twenty that sounds like
a good idea so now I started following
trends in diving scientific diving over
about the past decade and a few things
become incredibly obvious and I
anticipate this would happen this is the
adoption of advanced technologies to
improve human performance in the ocean
so things like breathing mixed gases and
using rebreathers or devices that
recycle our gas supplies techniques in
decompression which allow us to stay
down for longer amounts of time so we’re
kind of trending towards wanting this
scientists want to spend more time in
the water it makes perfect sense
unfortunately there’s two things that
are not happening this is the decline of
the remnants of our previous life in the
C programs right so back in the 60s and
70s there’s this boom to live and work
on the seafloor projects like Sealab and
hydro lab in today’s what’s left the
Aquarius program which is in in dire
dire shape right now scientists aren’t
using that technology this top-down
approach of massive infrastructure
that’s only affords an opportunity or
very small handful of people just
doesn’t make sense in today’s paradigm
we want to be mobile we want to pick up
travel remote part of the world in it
and do our work the other thing that’s
not happening are many scientific dives
below about 190 feet despite our having
the technology place to do that so I set
out to figure out why and being the
entrepreneur that I am I said I see
these trends starting to move and age 23
I thought it was a really great idea to
go out and I raised almost a half a
million dollars in financing and in a
variety of creative ways I then fell
flat on my face okay I failed big time
and it was scary and then my girlfriend
dumped me and I was in a really big
trouble
so when you’re in this kind of
predicament the one thing you do is you
leave the country right and I I took off
to the Bahamas where the one place where
I’ve been able to find solace in all
this this journey and I was able to
spend a lot of time looking at
environments like this these are deep
vertical walls that you start in the
shallows you know in 60 or 70 feet war
and they they drop precipitously down to
the abyss and it’s just really dramatic
breathtaking underwater environments you
know it’s really a cross-section through
time I mean this ledge that we see it
was sculpted when sea level was much
lower during the last glacial maximum
this is there’s amazing geology here let
alone the biological promise that this
environment showed back in 2002 so spent
a year there and it’ll come back to
Rhode Island for a couple years working
again as a diver and then in 2000 2008 I
had a ray of hope
okay this environment army Zaphod at
coral ecosystems depths of say 200 500
feet these middle light environments
became an international science priority
okay the research community s and I said
I’m in the position to do this I just
dedicated a huge part of my life to put
the technology in place that techniques
in place and really you know reengineer
my psyche to be able to perform in this
environment not just died to the desk
but get something done right so that was
that was exciting so I tried to raise
money again apply for grants of course
at this point I’m kicking myself I
should have stayed in school right I
need a PhD to to get money out of NSF or
somebody like that they’ll say it didn’t
work I sat around until 2010 and said
finally we’re doing it I find out so I
pulled together my partner and a group
of science colleagues across a whole
array of disciplines put together a
science strategy and said what kind of
information can we extract from this
environment to do some good work and
still no bites on funding I said that’s
it I’m going maxed out all my credit
cards yet again and and we went to work
I finance an expedition fortunately when
we arrived on site I got an email that
night from the way grants program saying
congratulations so
thank you wait grants program for
allowing me to breathe about that
particular night so not only did we get
that ninth minute in that tenth minute
and then 11th in the 12th minute we were
able to spend upwards of 45 minutes
below depths of 250 feet and working to
450 feet over the course of two
expeditions we’ve done dozens of dives
like this they’re incredibly productive
and successful and we’ve documented
things like an amazing amount of new
biodiversity a range extensions of known
species coral disease at depths where we
didn’t expect to see these kinds of
diseases invasive species at depths
where we wouldn’t expect to see these
these species so all this information is
slowly trickling through the peer-review
process now and is being published and
then we’ve also found things like new
species anything you’ve spent enough
time doing the work you love they start
naming animals after you right so maybe
if I shaved it looked a little bit more
like me but very exciting nonetheless so
I said you know all these great
anecdotal kind of discoveries and we’re
doing great work now why I expected this
kind of mass migration from the shallows
and the scientific dying vegan community
down to the debt down to the depths and
it wasn’t happening I said why right
well it’s because we still have this
misperception of diving to a deeper
depth and spending a certain amount of
time there’s limits there so rather than
do that let’s look at productive time
versus unproductive time this yellow bar
represents a time of 42 minutes as it
happens 42 minutes is the average dive
time that any diving scientist spends
underwater doing work this is a micro
sized snapshot of an environment right
we’ve got 42 minutes that’s that’s a
fact
okay that’s as good as it gets that’s
easy to do in the shallows because we
can ascend without required
decompression it gets harder as we go
down deeper at 190 feet for example if
we spend 42 minutes we incur about four
hours of decompression so you have to
make the investment of four hours of
idle time wasted time to get 42 minutes
of work done doesn’t make sense as it
happens this 190 foot dive for four
hours that maximizes today’s
off-the-shelf life support capabilities
so to do much beyond this we need new
technology right makes sense if we look
at doing a 300 foot dive for 42 minutes
we need we have 800
minutes of decompression no scientist in
their right mind that invested
tremendous tremendous mental time
resources to to get to remote location
spend time in the field will spend 800
minutes of the day doing nothing to get
42 minutes of work done it doesn’t make
sense
now when I when I start plotting my work
in this zone to see what’s happening
I work in all these outlying areas I’ve
been willing to accept the challenges
and the risks that come with that but we
need to figure out a way to afford
science access to that routinely that
fits this commodity style approach of
picking up and going diving so to do
that I said let’s remove the diver from
the unproductive environment and put
them in a productive one so I’ve
developed what I believe to be a new
class of underwater habitats talk about
data visualization this is terrible
right I definitely like that
collaborative innovation grant like
let’s let’s connect right so so you know
I sketched out this idea for an
underwater habitat I pulled together
partners in industry and academia and I
said let’s let’s build a bubble let’s
take the diver out of the environment so
this needs to be totally autonomous
system we can pack it up in sukie’s we
can travel so this a little bit better
right we spent about a year developing
this system it’s about a 5 foot diameter
circle about five foot tall some bench
seats and life support integrated sounds
very simple we can take this in the
field deploy it in 20 feet of water we
need to decompress and decompress we
deployed this in 2012 thanks to a second
grant through the CRE program this time
and we did several dives to 400 feet and
decompress in the habitat and what do
you know I pop up in this thing and I’m
talking to my partner and I said this is
the first time we’re making productive
use of unproductive time right look at
what else we can do now we can we can
have a snack we can take no seriously I
mean we can read a book we can take a
nap we can sift through the bag of
goodies that we collected and start
processing samples we’re taking
advantage of unproductive time that’s
what it comes down to the other
important thing that came from this is
that rather than look at diving as in
limitations in diving as a function of
diving to you know over depth and for
our amounts of time I’m looking at
diving in terms of accessible ocean
space this box this is our 42 minute
industry standard that
excepted for the last 50 or 60 years the
very simple perspective in looking at
the ocean this is what’s happened over
the last 10 or 12 years right look these
rebreather technologies mixed-gas
technologies give us a slightly broader
view of what’s going on but don’t
necessarily give us the depth this idea
of a habitat or setting up these
portable outposts all over the
continental shelf which happens to be an
area the size of Texas just off the US
alone this is paradigm changing right
and we can leave the beach and spend a
day a week a month a living and working
underwater again and in a way very
different than what we did in the 60s
and 70s oh this is today this is
happening what’s even more exciting is
that the technology to take the next
step already exists this is the the next
generation atmospheric diving system
that’s been developed over the last
decade really by new co research this
has far superior capabilities in
previous 80s systems an incredible range
of dexterity and movement the ability to
pick up and actuate tools and and make
informed decisions on site as a thousand
foot depth capability doubles what we
can do wet diving right now and the
project was financed by the jfy
contracting company and I formed an
alliance with jf Wade over the past year
and I’ve been so fortunate to be dubbed
the test dummy and definitely not the
the test pilot test dummy that will make
the first use of this for scientific
exploration right this gives us a huge
amount of access to out to the
continental shelf and beyond in a man
capacity I’m very very exciting the
system’s been wet tested by technicians
at new Co that’s going through pressure
testing literally right now like this
week and the first training activities
with the Sioux are going to take place
in July I’m gonna be a part of that
they’re after or proposing an ambitious
series of expeditions to make use of
this technology and really demonstrate
what we can do as a human in novel ocean
environments for the first time so we’re
really gonna leave our shores an
entirely new way leave these
misperceptions and
you know depth and of time and of human
physiology behind and and set out on
what it really is a new era in human
ocean exploration and you know that
future literally starts today so thank
you
you
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