TECHNOLOGY QUARTERLY March 10th 2018 OCEAN TECHNOLOGY Blue-sea thinking 20180310_TQOceanTechnology.indd 1 28/02/2018 14:26 TECHNOLOGY QUARTERLY Ocean technology Listening underwater Sing a song of sonar Technology is transforming the relationship between people and the oceans, says Hal Hodson N THE summer of 1942, as America’s Pacific has always been. The subsurface ocean is inhospitable fleet was sluggingit out at the battle ofMidway, to humans and their machines. Salt water corrodes ex- the USS Jasper, a coastal patrol boat, was float- posed mechanisms and absorbs both visible light and ALSO IN THIS TQ ing 130 nautical miles (240km) off the west radio waves—thus ruling out radar and long-distance UNDERSEA MINING coast of Mexico, listening to the sea below. It communication. The lack of breathable oxygen se- Race to the bottom was alive with sound: “Some fish grunt, others verely curtails human visits. The brutal pressure Iwhistle or sing, and some just grind their teeth,” reads makes its depths hard to access at all. FISH FARMING the ship’s log. The discovery of the deep scattering layer was a Net gains The Jasper did not just listen. She sang her own landmark in the use of technology to get around these song to the sea—a song of sonar. Experimental equip- problems. It was also a by-blow. The Jasperwas not out MILITARY ment on board beamed chirrups of sound into the there looking for deepwater plankton; it was working APPLICATIONS depths and listened for their return. When they came out how to use sonar (which stands forSound Naviga- Mutually assured back, they gave those on board a shock. The Jasper‘s tion And Ranging) to spot submarines, and thus help detection charts said she was in 3,600 metres (2,000 fathoms) of to keep ships like those at Midway safe. water. But the time it took the soundwaves to bounce Sonarresearch has been mostly military ever since, BRAIN SCAN Wendy Schmidt back said the bottom of the ocean was just 450 metres as have various other forms of high-tech ocean sens- below the ship’s hull. ing. But the new sensorium allowed an exploration of MEASURING THE SEAS The instruments were not wrong. The interpreta- the ocean’s depths that became crucial to science and Gliders on the storm tion was. The Jasper’s crew had found a new ecosys- commerce. Sea-floor surveys undertaken in the 1950s tem so dense with aquatic life it appeared to their rudi- and 1960s discovered a chain of underwater moun- OCEAN INTERNET mentary sonar to be solid—a “phantom bottom” to the tains snaking through the oceans like the seam on a Sailing the wired seas ocean. Unlike the sea’s true floor, it moved, its billions baseball. This discovery helped transform the contro- of inhabitants rising en masse to feed at night, then versial notion of continental drift into the far more sinking away from predators during the day. This powerful and explanatory theory of plate tectonics. “deep scattering layer”—named for the way it was Modern industrial fishing and offshore oil and gas found by the scattering ofsound waves—is not local to benefited in similar ways: seeing the seas and their Mexico. Present in all the oceans, it is one of the largest contents mattered. ecosystems in the world. Its daily rise and fall is their In the pastdecade, remote underwaterobservation heartbeat, an unseen spectacle ofplanetary extent. has moved to a new level as sonar technology has be- That such a mass of animals should go undiscov- come more advanced. Computers have become pow- ered for so long shows quite how inscrutable the sea erful enough to turn the apparent gibberish that is 1 The Economist March 10th 2018 1 TECHNOLOGY QUARTERLY Ocean technology 2 created by numerous sound sources at various frequencies into “When data start to inform decisions, very interesting things high-resolution “sound pictures” of underwater objects. And happen,” says Bilal Zuberi, a partner at Lux, a venture-capital firm. smaller, cheaper electronic components using less power—a gift These things include investment in infrastructure. Mr Zuberi envi- from the smartphone boom which kickstarted progress in drones, sions herds of wind turbines moving around the seas autono- robotics and small satellites—are now putting to sea. They may be mously, grazing on winds which offer the most power. The pos- just as transformative there as in the skies and in space. sibility of mining previously inaccessible seabeds may become a reality. So may the farmingoffish in the open ocean. As befits their Darling it’s betterdown where it’s wetter origins, the new technologies have military implications, too, as All this change promises to bring about a transformation in the improved undersea surveillance makes it harder for submarines way humans interact with the oceans. For most of history, people to hide, thus denting their second-strike capabilities. have had a hunter-gatherer relationship with the seas. That ap- Jacques Cousteau, a French conservationist, called in 1971 for a proach no longer works. If overfishing continues at the current shift in how humans see the oceans. “We must plant the sea and rate, the seas will run out offish. One response to this would be to herd its animals…using the sea as farmers instead of hunters,” he decry the technological change that has made such overfishing said. “That is what civilisation is all about.” It has taken half a cen- possible. Another is to ask how the latest technology can be used tury and a technological revolution, but the means of realising in ways that improve things, undoing the damage of the past and Cousteau’s vision are now here. This quarterly will examine the making the old hunting ground a new realm, one that is more pro- technologies that are enabling this virtual ductive and more sustainable. settlement of the seas, and the impact it One crucial change brought about by the new technology is a will have. It will also examine the perils reduction in the number of people involved. Until recently, using such changes could bring. sonar was an expensive business, requiring a ship with a crew, Modern civilisation has not shown towing equipment through the depths behind it. Now underwa- much restraint in the use of technologies ter drones (such as the one being launched in the picture on the which make extracting resources from the previous page) can move around as fast as ocean currents flow, earth or the seas easier, as the current over- which means they can go wherever they want and stay there if fishing crisis shows. The new develop- needed. They can communicate acoustically, with each other or ments will make it even simpler to drill or with a mothership. Theirlithium-ion batteries—one ofthose tech- mine or fish in ways that could seriously nologies smartphones have greatly improved—can provide pow- “Some fish damage the environment. er fordays. grunt, But the choice is not between taking By removing the expense ofkeeping humans alive on or under these risks and taking no risks. It is about the sea, these technologies vastly expand the volume of the ocean others judging those risks against the capacity for which can be monitored and measured, whether it be for fishery wise regulation to reduce the risks already management or weather prediction. They enable the better study whistle or being taken—and to lessen the harm al- of icebergs, underwater volcanoes and every living creature un- ready being done to the seas, their inhabit- der the sea. And drones will soon be able to transferdata on all of sing” ants and those who rely on them. That ca- this instantly back to shore from the middle of the ocean, over pacity for good is also one that the new newly built internet infrastructure. technologies will increase. 7 2 The Economist March 10th 2018 TECHNOLOGY QUARTERLY Ocean technology Undersea mining were notreliable enough to operate atsuch depth, so the company imagined two Archimedes screws to drag its vehicle through the mud. (Lockheed’s deep-sea mining expertise was later used in a Race to the bottom CIA operation to recover a Soviet submarine which sank in the CCZ in 1968.) At the time there was hyped speculation that deep- sea mining would develop rapidly by the 1980s. A lackofdemand (and thus investment), technological capacity and appropriate regulation kept that from happening. The UN Convention on the Law ofthe Sea (UNCLOS), which set up the ISA, was not signed un- Mining the ocean floor is about to go mainstream til 1982. (America has still not ratified it, and thus cannot apply to the ISA forsea-floor-mining permits.) ATANIA ONE sits in a large shed on the outskirts of Ant- Mr an Nijen and his competitors think that now, at last, the werp. Green and cuboid, with an interior steel frame, time is right. DEME is currently building Patania Two, or P2, in an rubberised treads and pressure-resistant electronic in- Antwerp shipyard. It will be deployed to the Pacific in 2019. Where nards, it is about the size of a minivan. In May 2017 it be- P1 was basically a deep-sea tractor, P2 is a full-blown prototype. A came the first robot in 40 years to be lowered to the sea sweeping nozzle mounted on its front (which gives it the look of a floor in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), about 5,000 combine harvester) will suck up tonnes of nodules every minute; Pmetres beneath the Pacific ocean near where the Jasper did her the poweritneedsto do so will flowdown a thickumbilical from a pioneering sonar work.