The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

Author:Laura Trethewey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The Robot Revolution at Sea

1.

What does the future of mapping the seafloor look like? If you’re Richard Jenkins, the founder and CEO of Saildrone, it looks like sitting in a sunny conference room overlooking San Francisco Bay, drinking a cup of coffee as you watch an icon on a computer screen move across uncharted seafloor a hundred miles offshore.

That was what I was doing one morning while visiting the start-up’s headquarters in Alameda, California. The day before, Saildrone had sent its 72-foot ocean drone, the first of a class called Surveyor, on a testing mission offshore. As Jenkins and I chatted, the Surveyor quietly ran a set of perfectly spaced survey lines back and forth across a stretch of seafloor 100 or so miles off the coast of California.

Occasionally, Jenkins leaned forward in his chair to tap at the little Saildrone icon moving across the Pacific. He checked in on the Surveyor’s “engine room,” where a dashboard of gauges showed the remaining charge of the onboard solar panels, the diesel reserves, and the wind power and direction. Another page showed a firehose of data streaming in from the Surveyor’s sensors, tracking wind speed and direction, as well as wave heights. The Surveyor’s more compact cousin, the Explorer, at 23 feet long, is basically a gigantic ocean-measuring machine with twenty-some sensors tracking ocean temperature, salinity, relative humidity, barometric pressure, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll, and much more. (The company’s motto: “Any Sensor, Anytime, Anywhere.”)

On another screen, Jenkins scrolled through pictures taken from every angle on board the Surveyor, picture after picture streaming in fresh and refreshed each minute. Over the years that the various drones have spent at sea, Saildrone has amassed tens of millions of pictures in what it calls the largest collection of ocean imagery in the world. Those pictures have been annotated by humans and fed into a patented algorithm that trains the drones to assess the situation based on what they’re seeing. Should the drone change course around an incoming cargo ship? Report a suspicious boat to border control? These questions are relayed back to flesh-and-blood human operators on land, who then make the final call. The goal, Jenkins explained, is to decrease the need for humans to go to sea and chart the ocean floor and make ocean mapping faster, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly.

Jenkins toggled over to a real-time view from the top of the Surveyor’s sail 50 feet above the water. “The goal here is to give you the same domain awareness you could get from standing on a bridge of a ship but sitting in a chair [on land] drinking coffee,” Jenkins said, his English accent so buttery soft that I had to lean forward in my seat to understand him. Finished with the demonstration, he leaned back in his chair. The Surveyor was doing fine, he said, and we picked up our thread of conversation again. Weirdly, the future of ocean mapping felt a lot like checking social media or doing anything else on your phone these days.

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