More than 75% of the Earth’s oceans remain unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored. Dr Jyotika Virmani, Director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, is on a mission to enable scientists to embark on voyages of discovery.
“People get excited about the discovery life on another planet but it’s just as exciting to explore the ocean and it’s right here – no rockets required,” she says.
“I like to describe my career as a downward trajectory – from space to oceans,” laughs Virmani. When she started her Bachelor of Science at Imperial College in the UK her focus was astrophysics; looking out to the stars. But during her degree she realised her real passion was for climate and weather. So she decided to do her masters in atmospheric science at Stony Brook University, where her advisor suggested she take a couple of courses in oceanography. “That’s where it really clicked – it’s both the ocean and atmosphere working together that control our weather and climate system,” she says.
Before joining the Schmidt Ocean Institute, Virmani was the Executive Director, Planet & Environment and Prize Operations at XPRIZE, a not-for-profit that uses large-scale global incentive competitions to crowdsource radical breakthroughs to benefit humanity. She first joined in 2014 as the technical director for the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE.
“Back then we all knew the climate was changing and that was impacting the ocean including ocean acidification, but we didn’t have robust and accurate sensing capabilities. Scientists would go out on a vessel and bring back water to analyse it in the lab, it was very expensive. And you couldn’t leave something out for a long period of time.” The US$2 million dollar prize competition resulted in the development of affordable and accurate pH sensor technologies that could be left in the sea for many months to measure changes in ocean chemistry. “This technology is now being deployed all over the world,” says Virmani.
Through her time at the XPRIZE, Virmani found the transformative impact that competitions have on collaboration and inspiration. “While the prize money was the initial carrot, when you survey the teams at the end, they all say it wasn’t the money at the end of the day, it’s about making a difference, you know. Like climbing Mount Everest – it’s the human achievement, changing the world for the better, meeting like-minded colleagues who come from all walks of life. There’s the lasting efforts that come out of this, that go well beyond what the competition was aimed to achieve.”
And critically, there was also the ongoing legacy. Says Virmani, “we said at XPRIZE that the day of the award is just the beginning – 10 years after you make the award is where you really see the impact.”
Mapping the seabed
In 2015, then XPRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis pointed out that we had better maps of Mars than we did of our own planet’s seafloor. While massive investment has been poured into exploring the Red Planet, efforts to explore Earth’s greatest unexplored frontier had received little investment or other support. That’s where XPRIZE stepped in, launching the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE in December 2015, to support the development of new technologies and exploration.
The vision is that these new technologies will enable the discovery of new ocean species, geological features, and safer methods of exploring and managing the deep sea, while illuminating the mysteries of the deep and discovering what has remained unknown since the dawn of time,” says Virmani.
Having a complete map of the ocean will support the protection of biodiversity too. “Right now, for example, we’re saying that this area needs protection and that area needs protection, but for all we know around the next corner might be something that’s even more amazing or unique or contains species we’ve never seen before,” she adds.
Initially, the immensity of the task was sobering. Virmani told The Brilliant: “In late 2015, the estimate was it would take 200 to 600 years with the technology of the day to map the sea floor at a high resolution. ” Incredibly, the impact of new technologies means that “globally, we are now all working to have it to fully mapped by 2030,” she says.
Schmidt Ocean Institute
After six years at XPRIZE, Virmani joined the Schmidt Ocean Institute in February 2020 as its first Executive Director. Philanthropists Wendy and Eric Schmidt founded the Institute in 2009 to create a “new kind of collaborative marine science community” with the purpose of accelerating ocean exploration, discovery, and knowledge, and catalysing the sharing of information about the oceans.
“It emerged that one of the pinch points is the expense of going to sea, in that it is super expensive to go out on a vessel. So, the approach is to provide the vessel, the Falkor, operational support and the technology that scientists need at no cost to the scientists so they can go out and do their research. The scientists fund themselves through grants for travel and for the research, but a big part of their expenditure is funded philanthropically through the Institute,” says Virmani. The Institute also provides the same capability to technology developers to enable them to test their equipment at sea.
In exchange, we ask that scientists make their data freely available because it really does help the world. We also collect seafloor maps which we make freely available. And that’s the point – to get the data, make it broadly available, and speed up the rate at which scientific discovery happens to ultimately improve the health of the ocean.”
As Executive Director, Virmani plans to continue to help navigate the technological and data transformations that have, in part, been accelerated by the XPRIZEs, so that scientists can focus on addressing the more complex questions not just in the sea floor but also throughout the ocean.
“In the last four to five years, we’ve seen this huge shift towards unmanned autonomous technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s all happening so fast, technology is changing at an exponential pace and people can’t get their heads around how quickly that is happening. The new technology is great because it will help – there is so much to discover and explore on our planet,” says Virmani.
Communicating science
Just as open sharing of scientific data is part of the Institute’s DNA, so is communicating their work to the general public. When they discover something new, the public literally see it at the same moment. If you follow them on YouTube, you can watch the livestream of their dives.
Virmani says the ocean community has much to learn from the optimism and sense of wonder generated by the space community. “They tap into that sense of human achievement. It’s like, ‘Wow! Someone went to space!’, which we tend to lose with our voyages to the ocean world. We need to liven up our language and engage people with the sense of possibility. There are extraordinary new discoveries we are making all the time in the deep sea. People need positive stories.”
With so many films and TV shows set in space, Virmani also sees an enormous opportunity for more ocean-based films. “We always see cutting-edge, futuristic technology in space-based movies. But for the ocean movies, generally speaking, they are backward-looking to the old romantic days of sailing vessels and pirates. So there’s nothing that kids can latch on to. They are our future engineers and this inspires them.”
In a world where people are being fed a doomsday narrative around the environment, Virmani urges us to stay engaged and not give up. One of her favourite sayings, adapted from John F. Kennedy, is “The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need people to dream of things that never were.”
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Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo credit: Photo supplied