capturing vivid imagery of cryptic
organisms at and beneath the ocean floor
and that’s what we do we use innovative
technology to image the seafloor but we
don’t just take pictures of the seafloor
that’s true Steve we use these images to
make quantitative analyses that allow us
to better understand the functioning of
the sea floor within the larger
perspective of the ocean and then we use
the data that we collect to make
innovative data visualizations that
allow anybody not just scientists like
ourselves access to this unique and
interesting ecosystem wait Steve let’s
take a step back before we delve too
much and to the innovative work that we
do it’s important that people understand
how critical the ocean and the sea floor
are for the speck of space dust we call
our planet we humans are terrestrial
creatures and as a result much of our
perspectives about the earth are shaped
from our interactions and visual
observations on land however when we
take a step back and look at the earth
as a whole we realize that the earth is
a pale blue dot and that’s because
despite our terrestrial eccentric
mindsets much of our planet is covered
by the ocean given the vast spatial
extent of the oceans on earth surface it
should come as no surprise that this
vast body of water plays a key role in
life on our planet including the lives
of humans ocean processes influence all
of humanity where the residents of the
coast or inland via the regulation of
climate local weather patterns economic
impact and food security among others we
are inherently dependent on the help of
a global ocean ecosystem
which beneath its surface exists at a
far greater scale than its visible on a
globe and at the very bottom of the
ocean is the seafloor I’m predominant
habitat serving a variety of functions
and hosting its own brand of unique and
interesting life if the oceans cover
seventy percent of our planet then
inherently seventy percent of the
earth’s surface is the seafloor and in
the larger scheme of the ocean the
seafloor holds great importance for
ocean health the seafloor is home to
many unique and diverse environments
such as seagrass Meadows kelp bars then
communities and coral reefs these
dynamic areas service safe haven
nurseries for young ocean life and
contribute greatly to ocean productivity
however despite their well-documented
importance these habitats are not the
predominant bottom type of the seafloor
coral reefs make up less than point one
percent of total ocean bottom put that
into perspective that’s roughly half the
size of the country of France and
combined coral reefs sea grasses and
kelp bars make up less than one percent
of the total seafloor so what else is
there what makes up that 99% most of the
sea floor looks something like this it’s
a habitat of soft sediment that’s
largely composed of small scale features
such as tubes burrows and mounds but
despite this relatively muted appearance
this large area of Earth’s surface holds
huge importance for the functioning and
help of the ocean think of the soft
bottom sea floor as the lungs of the
ocean these areas serve as a sump for
ocean pollutants and a recycling plant
for ocean nutrients it’s easy to
conceptualize the importance of seafloor
environments
kelp forests and coral reefs because we
can easily visualize the complexity and
diversity of the structures and
organisms that exist there however when
we compare those areas to the soft
bottom sea floor while there are some
features on the seabed most of the
structural complexity exists beneath the
opaque surface of the sea floor making
this cryptic environment and it Taurus
Lee difficult to observe but if you’re
fortunate enough to peek beneath the
seafloor you observe a dynamic world
full of complexity and diversity one
which is often not immediately obvious
when viewing the seafloor from only the
surface the best way to think about what
you’re seeing is to imagine you’re at
the bottom of the ocean and you’re
peering into the sea floor from a
profile perspective analogous to as if
you’re holding up an ant farm and
looking through the side and when you
look beneath the seafloor you see
animals burrowing through and excavating
the sediment tubes being formed and
destroyed at the sea floor surface and a
number of physical and chemical changes
occurring in the sediment column we can
see from the changing colors in the
sediment that has these animals weave
their way to the sedimentary fabric the
influence and effect that they have on
sediment quality think worms in a garden
to put it into a familiar context so we
know that the sea floor is important but
what are the methods that we employ that
allow us to better study and understand
this environment most of the seafloor
exists at ocean depths that are far
greater than that which we can send a
diver down to and very little ocean
science actually involves physically
sending someone down to the bottom to
overcome the fragility of the human body
the development and application of
remote sensing techniques was a
necessity in order to better understand
this
environment for 150 years we largely
sampled the seafloor bolide
traditionally if we wanted to understand
what was going on with the animals in
the sediment we would have to collect a
sediment grab and lead lines would be
lowered to the bottom and a length of
the line documented to determine the
depth leta pas graffia the seafloor
these methods are reductionist and offer
very poor resolution but advances in
technology have allowed us to make a
more holistic assessment of our seafloor
observations single beam and more
recently multi-beam sonar offer much
higher resolution imagery of the depth
and topography of the sea floor and the
development of a sediment profile
imaging camera or spy cam allows us a
more clear picture of what’s going on
with the animals in the sediment now
I’ve already shown sediment profile
images in this talk but to give you a
better sense of how the system works as
the spy system is lowered to the seabed
a weighted trigger activates the camera
capturing a plan view image of the sea
floor the system continues to the sin
until contacts in the bottom upon
contact tension is released from the
cable allowing a weighted camera prism
to lower and penetrate the sea floor an
undisturbed profile image of the
sediment column is captured allowing
scientists to document biological
activity chemical processes and physical
changes at and beneath the ocean floor a
huge benefit of this technology is that
it allows us to document and observe the
functioning and behavior of the
organisms without removing them from
their habitat the sea floor and when we
do that we’re able to make really
distinct observation about sea floor
help typically healthy sea floors are
characterized by a rust red brown color
that extends deep beneath the sea floor
surface indicating these areas are
oxygen rich and contain large and
diverse life by contrast unhealthy sea
floors
our dark gray black color these areas
contain little to no oxygen lack
diversity and have very little to no
large organisms now I can show you a
graph or table indicating why the sea
floor to the left is healthy and why the
sea floor to the right is unhealthy or i
could couple that data with images and
make that point much more succinctly and
that’s what we do we take our
quantitative data and we paired with
images and we give people a better
understanding about how the sea floor is
functioning when we do that we’re also
able to assess how the sea floor
responds to and recovers from
disturbance this movie is depicting an
area of the sea floor that’s
experiencing was commonly known as an
ocean dead zone or an area of the sea
bottom where there’s little to no oxygen
when oxygen is removed from the sea
floor bacteria take over the bacteria or
the filaments white lines you’ll see
moving through the sediment on the sea
floor surface and on the face plate of
the prism these bacteria thriving during
this ocean dead zone which is
prohibiting larger organism from
surviving and you can tell how happy the
bacteria are by the amount of organic
matter they’re producing which you can
see sloshing down the base plate of the
prism so over time when oxygen returns
to the seafloor these bacteria scurry
back down into the sediment and these
areas we populated by larger organisms
such as worms clams and crustaceans this
profusion of new technology has led to a
flood of data that we can now mine such
as the example at Kersey just presented
well Steve we are after all visual
organisms and the true power of this
technology is that it allows us to
present our work about the seafloor and
a format that everyone understands a
picture now in the past when we would
send our equipment down and explore some
new area of the ocean we would recover
it and then spend weeks months sometimes
even years combing through this data by
hand eventually compiling it together
into thick bound reports like this I
think my friend Steve heat could
recognize that if you’re trying to
explain something about the seafloor to
someone who doesn’t have a PhD in ocean
science this probably isn’t the best way
to do it these are important for
scientists and regulators because it has
information relating to our field
methods complex explanations of
chemistry but when it comes to a
narrative device to tell a story about
our oceans they fall tragically short
and even worse when these documents are
delivered to a client they sit in an
archive on a shelf gathering dust locked
away from people that might be
interested in the information that they
contain I mean I do this stuff for a
living and I don’t want to read this
kersey do you want to write this not in
the least bit I didn’t think so in 1998
one of our Ted for father’s name David
Gallo presented a talk in monterrey
during this talk he showed us some
wonderful video that come from his Elvin
and Jason submersibles he showed us
bioluminescent jellyfish giant sulfur
vents at the bottom of the sea floor
spewing gas from the Earth’s core into
the ocean he showed us giant tubeworms
that colonized these sulfur vents but
one of the really interesting things
that Gallo hit on happened when he was
showing us a 3d reconstruction of the
sea floor and one of his submersibles
driving through it David said that he
wanted to take this seafloor environment
back to the laboratory because right now
we see it in bits and pieces we see the
other a sound or photographs or as video
or as data from a chemical sensor but we
haven’t yet put it together into one
interesting
and that’s exactly what we’re trying to
do instead of seeing the pages from some
report we want to show people the
synthesis of that data because as it
turns out flipping through pages of
report cross-referencing figures tables
different data points and charts that
we’ve printed it’s not the most
intuitive way to explore something as
vast or complex as the sea floor now
we would print maps and use these a
storytelling tool we present them next
to charts and data xand captions and
maybe have a little paragraph next to
explaining something about this map but
so here you see a map of Massachusetts
Bay just north of us and instead of just
placing the data down next to it we’ve
made this map interactive so that I can
click on different areas in it and I can
see where we’ve sampled and I can see
those sediment profile images that
kersey discuss with us earlier in
context I can see the next two
biological chemical geological data I
can even see shipwrecks and I think
that’s pretty cool this sort of
visualization has served as the
workhorse for our analysis team it
serves as the primary storytelling tool
or us to explain our findings to an
audience but it falls short because it’s
too deep and as we know the c-4 is not a
two-dimensional flat surface and
certainly the volume of water that sits
on top of the sea floor is not flat in
fact it’s two miles deep on average
across our globe so what we’ve done here
holds a lot of potential because it
contours and ridges in the ocean it
allows you to see things in three
dimension and make connections that you
might not otherwise do it contains all
the same data that are two dimensional
map did but it allows us to go beyond
that go into the third dimension it
allows us to draw the picture upwards
and talk about the water column it lets
us see temperature differences from the
top to the seafloor it lets us see
changes in salinity which is essentially
the saltiness of the ocean and the
really cool thing about technology like
this is that it’s built using basic and
common building blocks things that you
can find in your web browser so I don’t
need to spend thousands of dollars on an
expensive computer system I don’t need
to buy complicated software licenses I
can just look at it much like Google
Earth
I can just pull up a webpage and see it
I can even bring it up my phone and see
it on the go and if I’m really clever I
can bring it into a virtual reality
framework looks like Kersey’s exploring
the sea floor on the TEDx stage right
now whoa wave of the future dude as you
can see this is a truly immersive
experience this is important because we
can now put our data in the hands of the
interested citizen no longer are we
content to allow our efforts to sit on a
shelf and collect dust that information
can now be made public for anyone
interested to explore for themselves
bringing a dark and mysterious world
into clear focus wherever you are we
love showing people this habitat but
bringing them down to the bottom of the
ocean in person is an expensive and
dangerous endeavor and it’s likely most
of us are not going to go there but now
i’m proud to say that by using advances
in technology we can bring that
mysterious ecosystem back up to you
thank you very much [Applause]