‘70% of our planet is oceans – Maybe we should call it Planet Ocean instead of Planet Earth’

How did you decide to work at the intersection of environment and technology?

I am basically what some people refer to as a field roboticist. When I entered graduate school, it was as part of a program that worked on robotics and their use in oceanographic settings. So, from the very beginning, the idea was to build robots for underwater applications and most applications underwater are related to the environment. Over the last 25 years I have worked on technologies that have been used for exploring and mapping a variety of phenomena. The guiding philosophy has always been to live at the intersection of robotics (how to build the next generation of underwater technology) and to do so in the context of questions that need to be answered in the real ocean – whether it is looking at Sea Ice dynamics, how penguin populations are changing due to global climate change or helping fisheries managers understand the state of the entire fisheries ecosystem so that they can manage them better.

What led you towards embarking on these marvelous expeditions?

The first time, a scientific colleague of mine talked to me about the possibilities of working with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (our underwater robots) under ice to study the Marine Geology at the Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic. We were funded by NASA and NSF for the expedition. After we had built up our reputation for working under ice, we were able to work with international collaborators from the UK and Australia. There is a process involved with identifying the problem we want to work on, and the technology that makes the most sense to use, and then building up a team to go out and do the work and finally to publish everything in the peer reviewed literature so that we can share our scientific and technical achievements.

Please share with us a little bit about the journey itself… what was it like to travel to the poles?

Typically, our team will send all our gear ahead of time to a port near where we want to go. So if we are working in the Eastern Arctic we might ship everything to a northern port in Norway such as Tromso. We would then fly there as a team, get on board the icebreaker and make sure all our gear is there and that the robot is working before we set sail. Then depending upon where we are going it might take us eight to ten days of sailing on the icebreaker to get to the location that we are interested in studying. Similarly, if we are working in the Antarctic, we might fly to Punta Arenas in Chile, or Tasmania in Australia, or the Falkland Islands depending upon our science plans and collaborators.

Did you gain any special insights into the immense natural world that thrives underwater, or at the poles?

The work we did was to explore vast sections of the seafloor in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. In the Arctic, we found microbial mats oozing out from the seafloor close to an area of recent underwater volcanic activity. In the Antarctic, the imagery we collected was analyzed by biologists on the cruise to build a better understanding of fishes of the Western Antarctic Peninsula, as well as to trace the movement of invasive crab species into Antarctic waters.

Robots and robotics are often seen as evil, anti-environment, or like an antithesis to nature… What is the role of emerging robotics in research & conservation efforts, vis-à-vis the environment?

There is a perception that robots are going to take over jobs or in science fiction accounts- take over the world. The reality is that robots are doing work that is dull, dirty, and dangerous, or otherwise difficult and expensive to do with humans or manned vehicles. If we were to try and survey penguin colonies, the drones that we use are very inexpensive, and get superior imagery as they can fly lower without disturbing the colony. The concept of human beings working at 4100 metres deep under sea ice is scary and not worth the risk. We do want to make measurements at the edge of carving glaciers but it is not worth risking our lives to go there. Instead, a cheap robot is a far better alternative.

Did the expedition throw up any positive findings? Does humanity have a reason to be hopeful about the planet’s future?

The expeditions we have been on have really pushed our knowledge about the natural world forward. Several of the fisheries surveys showed that some of the fish stock were rebounding due to the efforts of the fisheries program managers. We also found one very large, healthy penguin colony of around 1.5 million penguins, when previous estimates of the colony suggested far fewer, perhaps in the tens of thousands.

What are your thoughts, learnings, and observations about nature’s bounties? Did this project influence your views in specific ways?

We are the only country in the world to have an ocean – the Indian Ocean – named after us. One of the most important phenomena that affects almost all Indians is the South West Monsoon, which is primarily an oceanographic phenomenon. So whether we think about it daily or not at all, the oceans play a major role in the life of every Indian. 70% of our planet is oceans – maybe we should call it Planet Ocean instead of Planet Earth.