submarines | Southern Fried Science

High octopuses don’t love you back, sextants in space, protect our ocean monuments, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: September 24, 2018

Posted on September 24, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

Logo for Monday Morning Salvage.

Foghorn (a call to action)

After a decade spent expanding marine protection throughout the US EEZ, the federal government is going to war on healthy oceans: The Trump Administration’s New Attack on Marine Monuments.
Want to work for COMPASS in DC? One of the nation’s preeminent science communications institutions is hiring, and trust me, DC needs you.
If fleeing to Canada is more your style (David (¬_¬) ), Ocean Watch is hiring a manager to plan, manage and execute the Coastal Ocean Health Initiative.

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Gulper Eels are amazing. Amazing.

This is an amazing series of visualizations from the Guardian. Seven endangered species that could (almost) fit in a single train carriage.

There are approximately 30 vaquitas left in the world
Illustration: Mona Chalabi

There are sextants on the International Space Station and I can’t stop thinking about it.

The rise of low-cost ROVs and community submersibles

Posted on September 20, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

The following appeared this Monday on the DSM Observer, the only trade journal committed to covering all aspects of the emerging deep-sea mining industry. Though written for the deep-sea mining community, the subject is broadly relevant to a host of ocean industries, so we reprint it below.

The submarine Noctiluca cruises across the surface. Photo Courtesy Shanee Stopnitzky.

As a community, we discuss mining, management, and monitoring, as well as the regulations that shape them, in terms of governments, major corporations, and research institutions. The deep-sea mining community is small and the complexities of working at abyssal depths engenders collaboration, cooperation, and, in the case of exploitation, compromise. While there are many stakeholders potentially affected by deep-sea mining, only a small proportion of them will ever directly engage with the deep seafloor.

A few extremely wealthy individuals have access to private submersibles and ROVs and have on occasion made them available for research and exploration, but they are the exception. The tools necessary to reach the depths of a hydrothermal vent or polymetallic nodule field are simply too expensive.

That may soon change.

The real deep reefs of South Carolina, dolphin chatter, autonomous starfish killing robots, an exciting submarine discovery, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: September 3, 2018

Posted on September 3, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Robots versus Aliens is my favorite genre of conservation technology. Sea-Star Murdering Robots Are Deployed in the Great Barrier Reef.

Fish Bombardment is my other. Video: Utah Officials Restock Remote Lakes by Plane.

The Gam (conversations from the ocean-podcasting world)

Speak Up for the Blue with two great recent episodes.

Shiver me whiskers! What would it cost to fund the Octonauts’ undersea adventures?

Posted on March 11, 2018 by Andrew Thaler

Octonauts live in the sea. Hardware’s their specialty. While ocean grants are a struggle… their source of funding, it really is a puzzle!

Explore! Rescue! Protect! The Octonauts have an ambitious undersea mission and an equally ambitious fleet of marine vehicles. How they pay for it is a mystery. Are they backed by the federal government? The UN? Is Professor Inkling financing this venture by selling genetically engineered vegetable-fish hybrids? Is a billionaire film-maker backing the venture? One thing’s for certain, an Octonaut-level research program does not come cheap. So how much does this operation actually cost?

Actuaries! To your stations!

The Octopod

With 4 housing/laboratory units and a central command bay, the Octopod would be the largest and most sophisticated underwater research station ever operated. There’s nothing in the marine research world the even comes close. Aquarius Reef Base is currently the only working undersea research laboratory. I can’t find the initial budget to build and install Reef Base, but a modern (albeit unrealized) aquatic residential habitat comes with a $10 million startup costs. Reef Base itself has a wildly variable annual budget, with a baseline around $1 million per year. The Octopod, on the other hand, has four Octo… Pods? each of which is similar in function to Reef Base (though the whole structure more closely resembles the extremely French Galathée Underwater Laboratory).

Galathée Underwater Laboratory

The central command bay is both the core of the Octopod and its power supply. Not much is known about where the Octopod gets its seemingly limitless power, but if the Octonauts are anything like the US Navy, there’s a nuclear reactor in the, somewhere. Meet Nerwin. NR-1 was the USA’s only nuclear-powered, deep-diving research submarine. With room for 16 crew and scientists and a multi-month endurance, Nerwin could hand both covert and scientific missions. The NR-1 was equipped with a wheeled base, allowing it to roll across the sea floor. Unfortunately, NR-1 was a strictly off-book asset for most of its life, so we don’t really know what it cost, but the initial build estimate was $58.3 million. As the military is not often known for bringing projects in under budget, that seems like a reasonable baseline. For annual operating costs, we might as well assume the upper end of Reef Base at $3 million to start. It’s almost certainly much *much* higher.

Cost to build: $98.3 million.

Annual operating cost: $7 million.