Beyond Challenger: a new age of deep-sea science and exploration

The voyage of HMS Challenger from 1872 to 1876 is often credited with laying the foundations of modern oceanography, as a consequence of its global scope and multidisciplinary approach, which opened up the "sealed interior" of the oceans described by Matthew Fontaine Maury two decades earlier. But the Challenger expedition did not spring fully formed into existence; it built on knowledge and experience obtained by earlier expeditions, such as the Royal Society's charters of HMS Lightning in 1867 and HMS Porcupine in 1868 and 1869 for scientific investigations in the northeast Atlantic. Obtaining government backing for a global voyage of exploration also involved considerable lobbying by William Carpenter, through public talks and mobilising the support of notable 19th century scientists including Charles Lyell, Thomas Huxley, John Tyndall, and William Herschel. The eventual award of £200,000 for the Challenger expedition, equivalent to around £29.5 million today, was driven by promised vistas of scientific discovery and the importance of understanding more about the ocean floor for laying submarine telegraph cables. In this talk Dr Copley will outline the circumstances that gave rise to the Challenger expedition, and how it secured a lasting legacy among other voyages of ocean exploration during the same period.

Dr Jon Copley, University of Southampton, UK

Dr Jon Copley, University of Southampton, UK

Dr Jon Copley is Associate Professor of Ocean Exploration and Public Engagement at the University of Southampton. His research investigates the ecology, biogeography, and life-history biology of species occupying island-like habitats on the ocean floor, such as hydrothermal vents and cold seeps. He has more than twenty years of experience in exploring the deep ocean, including leading expeditions aboard research ships, using remotely operated vehicles and human-occupied vehicles, and discovering new species of deep-sea animals. Jon is also the first British ‘bathynaut’ to dive more than 5 km deep, and member of the team that made the first dives in minisubmarines to reach 1 km deep in the Antarctic for the filming of BBC Blue Planet II. He is a previous recipient of the Royal Society of Biology Science Communication Award for Established Researchers and the British Science Association Charles Lyell Lecture Award.

In the early days of deep-sea exploration, it was quite acceptable in the scientific community to wonder if any animals at all can live in the deep sea, and if they were there, what on earth they might look like. Ancient lineages of life that have long since gone extinct in our shallow seas? Giant monsters with peculiar adaptations to the cold and dark? Today these old-fashioned questions would probably not pass through a grant-awarding committee. Simply knowing what is there is not enough. Science demands numbers, functions, genomes, applications. But the simple truth is that every deep-sea biologist, waiting on the back deck of a ship for their samples to come up, or watching the screen of an ROV, still ponders these questions - with a remarkably open-mind as to what on earth they might find. It is a common refrain to hear that ‘most of the deep-sea is unexplored’. However, this is not entirely true. We do actually have rather a lot of samples and knowledge of the deep sea. The main issue is that those samples, and the treasures they hold, are not being described, archived and communicated in the comprehensive manner that so defined the Challenger expedition. In my talk, I will propose a 21st century approach to an old problem - what lives in the deep sea?

Dr Adrian Glover, Natural History Museum, UK

Dr Adrian Glover, Natural History Museum, UK

Dr Adrian Glover leads the Deep-Sea Systematics and Ecology Group at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London (www.nhm.ac.uk/deep-sea). The group is an active research group dedicated to the highest-quality deep-ocean and polar research, with emphasis on molecular systematic and ecological approaches to fundamental questions in biology. The deep-sea is the world largest and least-explored ecosystem, and Adrian’s group undertakes regular oceanographic expeditions to sites across the world, from the poles to the tropics. The group uses the latest DNA taxonomy methods to describe new species, study their evolutionary origin, investigate their ecological interactions and test general theories in biodiversity sciences. The deep-ocean is the world’s largest new resource frontier and is currently being actively explored for marine mineral extraction, new hydrocarbon industries and deep-water fisheries. The group is committed to providing the highest-quality scientific data to support the sustainable management of these new industries through national and international regulatory bodies. The NHM receives in the region of 5 million unique visitors per year, and Adrian contributes extensively to a range of public engagement activities to showcase his group’s research, the remarkable collections housed in the NHM Darwin Centre and the importance of sustainable solutions to ocean management.

Hydrothermal vents form ephemeral deep-sea habitats that occur along seafloor spreading centres and subduction zones as well as in association with volcanic seamounts. Diverse chemotrophic microbial communities form the base of the food web. These bacteria take advantage of redox disequilibria and a variety of carbon sources to gain “energy” for growth and cell maintenance. Ultimately, this chemosynthetic primary production supports localised, high metazoan biomass in relation to the surrounding deep-sea. Stable isotopes are often used by geochemists, microbiologists and ecologists to understand geochemical processes and “energy” flow through biological systems. Ecologists require an understanding of the basal and primary producer stable isotope dynamics in order to place in context the stable isotope values of metazoan consumers. However, there are often spatial and temporal mismatches in sample collection within many hydrothermal vent fields which hinder our understanding of trophic interactions and “energy” flow from the mantle to the consumer. There is currently a requirement for synthesis within the stable isotope literature that will identify key data gaps, which may bridge disciplines, to be filled. This will allow the development of multi-level isotopic landscapes or “isoscapes” over hydrothermal vent fields which will provide better understanding of the primary production utilised by consumers. Moving forward, these “isoscapes” need to work in parallel with the development of processed based models that will allow analysis and prediction of key biochemical processes that shape the “energy” landscape within hydrothermal vents.

Dr William Reid, Newcastle University, UK

Dr William Reid, Newcastle University, UK

Dr William Reid is an ecologist interested in the structure and dynamics of complex systems with particular emphasis on how microbes and metazoans interact with one another and their environment. Over the last 15 years, a large proportion of Dr Reid’s research has involved investigating energy flow and trophodynamics in Antarctic and deep-sea benthic systems. This has progressed from analysing stomach contents of Antarctic fish whilst working for British Antarctic Survey to the biochemical analysis of animal tissue samples collected from Antarctic hydrothermal vents during Dr Reid’s PhD at Newcastle University. Now, his post-doctoral research is looking at integrating data from different disciplines in order to model ecosystem processes at varying scales. This reflects Dr Reid’s interest in taking an interdisciplinary approach to research.

Expanding global interest in the extraction of living and non-living resources from Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction creates both opportunity and challenge. Opportunity for economic benefits from the deep sea juxtaposes challenges in sustainable use of the Earth’s largest, most pristine, and least known habitats. The deep ocean faces stressors from distant sources as climate change warms, acidifies and de-oxygenates deep waters in which microplastics and other human waste are now nearly ubiquitous. Fortunately, new technologies paired with developments in marine conservation and area-based management tools, such as marine protected areas (MPA), offer potential pathways to effective strategies for sustaining deep-sea ecosystems. Rapidly emerging technologies (genetics, imaging, sensors and observation platforms, data and modelling) can inform effective MPA design and management in deep-sea environments, drawing on new approaches to map habitats, evaluate their spatial extent and connectivity, and informing size and spacing elements. Collectively, these tools can help address the unique conservation issues for deep-sea biota (sparse data, low population size, many rare species, examples of late reproducers with limited fecundity) and ecosystems (lack of habitat maps, expansive habitat types interspersed with discrete and sometimes rare and specialized habitats) that require considerations beyond those that drive MPA design in terrestrial and coastal habitats. This discussion will draw from MPA examples in which we consider the need to include a 3D dimension in “protection” when addressing deep-sea ecosystems.

Dr Paul Snelgrove, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Dr Paul Snelgrove, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Dr Snelgrove is a Professor of Ocean Sciences and Biology at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. He received a BSc Hons in Biology at Memorial in 1984, an MSc in Oceanography from McGill University in 1987, and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1993. He held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rutgers University Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, and a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Oceanography at Dalhousie University. Since 2008 he has been Director of the NSERC Canadian Healthy Oceans Network, a national research network in Canada that has already trained some 100 students working on all three of Canada’s oceans to develop new tools and approaches to support sustainable oceans. He also currently plays the role of Associate Director of The Ocean Frontier Institute. From 2003-2013, Dr Snelgrove held a Canada Research Chair in Boreal and Cold Ocean Systems, and prior to that an NSERC Industrial Chair in Fisheries Conservation. He led the synthesis of the International Census of Marine Life research program, where he was a member of the program’s Scientific Steering Committee. Dr Snelgrove published the book “Discoveries of the Census of Marine Life: Making Ocean Life Count” with Cambridge University Press in 2010 and was a TED Global speaker in 2011. He was awarded the 2013 Timothy Parsons Medal for Excellence in Marine Sciences in Canada.

This talk will describe insights gained from a decade of autonomous marine systems development at the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Field Robotics. Over the course of this time, this group has developed and deployed numerous underwater vehicles and imaging platforms in support of applications in engineering science, marine ecology, archaeology and geoscience. The group has operated an Australia-wide benthic observing program designed to deliver precisely navigated, repeat imagery of the seafloor. This initiative makes extensive use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to collect high-resolution stereo imagery, multibeam sonar and water column measurements on an annual or semi-annual basis at sites around Australia, spanning the full latitudinal range of the continent from tropical reefs in the north to temperate regions in the south. The program has been very successful over the past decade, collecting millions of images of the seafloor around Australia and making these available to the scientific community through online data portals developed by the facility and affiliated groups. These observations are providing important insights into the dynamics of key ecological sites and their responses to changes in oceanographic conditions through time. The group has also contributed to expeditions to document coral bleaching, cyclone recovery, submerged neolithic settlement sites, ancient shipwrecks, methane seeps and deepwater hydrothermal vents. The talk will also consider how automated tools for working with this imagery have facilitated the resulting science outcomes and will explore opportunities to extend these techniques to the study of deep-sea science and exploration.

Professor Stefan B Williams, University of Sydney, Australia

Professor Stefan B Williams, University of Sydney, Australia

Stefan B Williams is the Professor of Marine Robotics and Head of School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at the University of Sydney. He is a member of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics where he leads the Marine Robotics group. He is the head of Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Facility and has led cruises to locations around Australia and overseas, focusing on collecting visual habitat mapping data in support of studies in ecology, archaeology and geoscience. His research interests include Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping in unstructured underwater environments using visual and acoustic sensing, autonomous navigation and control and classification and clustering of large volumes of data collected by robotic systems. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2002 and completed a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1997.

There are many applications in marine science and monitoring that require high-resolution images of the seafloor to be obtained. However, the resolution of underwater observations are often at a trade-off with the extent over which they can be made, and this limits their usefulness in non-uniform seafloor environments where the distribution of features varies over spatial scales much larger than the footprint that can be observed, for example in a single image frame. This talk will describe recent efforts to address scale relevance in seafloor imaging applications by using autonomous underwater vehicles instrumented with systems that can image the seafloor from different altitudes, and build multi-hectare 3D visual reconstructions of the seafloor with resolutions with sufficiently high-resolution where needed. This allows continuous wide-area, multi-resolution 3D reconstructions of the seafloor to be generated, allowing patterns to be explored and interpreted over a large range of spatial scales that would not otherwise be possible. This approach will be described giving examples of data recently obtained in deep-sea hydrothermal vent and gas hydrate fields.

Dr Blair Thornton, University of Southampton, UK

Dr Blair Thornton, University of Southampton, UK

Dr Blair Thornton is an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton with 15 years of international research experience in marine autonomy and sensing. His research focuses on improving the observational capabilities and perceptional awareness of underwater robotic systems through the development of novel in situ optical sensors and intelligent data processing methods. He is dedicated to fielding systems in real environments and overcoming bottlenecks in the flow of information from data-collection through to generating human insight. Blair holds an EPSRC innovation fellowship and is PI of NERC BioCam for the development of scalable seafloor imaging technology. He has participated in more than 45 ocean research expeditions (27 of which as principal investigator) and has spent over 380 days at sea.

AI in general and machine learning in particular have created a great deal of recent interest, not to mention hyperbole. In this talk, Jeremy Wyatt and Mohan Sridharan will give a whistle-stop tour of the current state of AI. The speakers shall describe fundamental algorithmic advances in perception, reasoning, manipulation and learning. The emphasis will be on the nature and properties of algorithms that may have utility in deep-sea exploration. Although the speakers are not currently working on AUVs, they will discuss some case studies from their own work and that of others. The talk will also cover the obvious challenges in practical deployment and some ways that these challenges may be overcome.

Professor Jeremy Wyatt, University of Birmingham, UK

Professor Jeremy Wyatt, University of Birmingham, UK

Jeremy L Wyatt is an Honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1997. He led the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Birmingham for 22 years. He has published more than 100 refereed articles, edited three books, received two best paper awards, and supervised a winner of the 2004 BCS distinguished doctoral dissertation. He led two major international projects in intelligent robotics: CogX on robot learning and planning in unfamiliar worlds and PaCMan on robot manipulation. He has also participated in twenty other national and international research projects. He works on machine and robot learning, robot task planning, cognitive architectures, robot manipulation and machine vision.

Dr Mohan Sridharan, University of Birmingham, UK

Dr Mohan Sridharan, University of Birmingham, UK

Dr Mohan Sridharan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham (UK). Prior to his current appointment, he held faculty positions at The University of Auckland (NZ) and at Texas Tech University (USA), and he continues to hold honorary positions at these institutions. Dr Sridharan received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin (USA). His research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning, computational vision, and cognitive systems, as applied to robots and software agents collaborating with humans. His research and educational efforts have been supported by grants from the US Office of Naval Research, US National Science Foundation, and the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development.

A severe bottleneck exists in the ecological study of our oceans and seas. This has arisen because net-sampling, having been the mainstay of biological oceanographers for over a century, has not provided sufficient data of the distributions, dynamics and populations of important taxa to answer questions posed by researchers today and in the future. In the last decade or so, in-situ, towed or ship-based imaging instruments have been developed that potentially may be able to address the shortfall. These instruments can, and will, provide denser spatial and temporal sampling that is more cost-effective than is possible with net sampling. However, there is problem. We do not have enough skilled people to identify the video and photographic hauls from the water.

Artificial Intelligence has been mooted as the solution, automating identification using the latest ideas in Deep Learning. However, to be successful in using computers to automate taxonomic identification of organisms, the machines will have to learn from the vast literature that describes our natural world. Deep learning is beginning to revolutionise computer-based visual recognition, but it must be tied to natural language and the descriptions that people make in the scientific literature to be able make the transition from laboratory-sized machine classifiers to globally useful tools. We must integrate the existing taxonomic knowledge that is written and drawn with emerging AI tools. Culverhouse will explore this issue.

Dr Philip Culverhouse, Plymouth University, UK

Dr Philip Culverhouse, Plymouth University, UK

Phil Culverhouse is an Associate Professor in Computer Vision in the Centre for Robotics & Neural Systems at the University of Plymouth. He researches computer-based identification of natural objects, where he specialises in automated identification of marine species. Culverhouse has over 40 academic publications on automating identification of marine biota, and led a number of EU and other projects on plankton identification. Culverhouse convened a SCOR Working group on automatic plankton identification. He is currently interested in low cost high volume sampling and automated taxonomic processing for ship-based application.