Aboard the Nautilus: Go to great depths with telepresence

 Editor’s note: This is the second in a series by Ventura resident Melissa Baffa, who returns to Exploration Vessel Nautilus as a science communications fellow. In the third edition of Aboard the Nautilus, she shares her land and sea adventures here.

From the seafloor to your computer or mobile device – in 20 seconds. For a place so dark and uninviting, for depths once measured by nuggets of lead and fathoms of rope, to have this view into a world so alien is a thing of wonder.

It is fitting that early science fiction writer Jules Verne wrote of the Nautilus, an incredible piece of machinery that enabled people to pierce the mysterious veil of the ocean, 100 years after James Cook performed some of the earliest scientific exploration of the sea. A child named Robert Ballard, restless and dyslexic, devoured this tome and was inspired to ply the seas and come to know the nature of the equally restless earth he explored so avidly. Nearly 140 years after Verne imagined the unimaginable, Ballard’s own Nautilus set sail, doing even more than Verne had dared to dream.

Dr. Robert Ballard's Exploration Vessel Nautilus is traversing the waters of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, lifting aside the veil that obscures the mysteries of the ocean's depths and sharing this extraordinary adventure live through the internet at www.nautiluslive.org. The technology that makes this possible is a marvel of vision and engineering, employing a concept called telepresence that enables the public to discover alongside seasoned explorers.

Human bodies are remarkably well-adapted for a terrestrial life. And despite the on-surface achievements of certain humans (I’m looking at you, Michael Phelps), we are definitely unsuited for a life aquatic. We are air-breathers, soft and squishy and easily damaged. The ocean is too cold, the deep sea so vast and difficult to reach, the pressure so great – exploring the ocean "in situ" is dangerous. It's also pretty inefficient because the human body eats and breathes and needs to sleep and eliminate waste. Robots, however, can work for days on end, never tiring and never needing a bathroom break.

At the heart of a Nautilus dive is a pair of them: ROVs, remotely operated vehicles, called Argus and Hercules. They work in tandem, tethered to the ship by a long fiber-optic cable. Everything revealed by the ROVs' sensors, lights and high-definition cameras is transmitted back up to the ship, beamed out to a satellite in orbit and to the Inner Space Center, housed at the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. From there, it is broadcasted live to the web, where you can watch and send in questions during exploration.

Telepresence, as Ballard named it, allows scientists from around the world, as well as the general public, to participate live and in real time. This is a dramatic development that empowers experts and armchair scientists alike. A ship only has so many berths during an expedition. Telepresence increases the opportunity for participation exponentially. Discoveries grip the world in real time, as the 2015 sighting of a juvenile sperm whale in the Gulf of Mexico or the 2016 sighting of a googly-eyed stubby squid demonstrated, when each went spectacularly viral. The intersection of science and social media is a strange and wonderful thing.

My job as a science communication fellow is to help manage the intersection between live discovery and the global audience. We take the questions submitted by viewers around the globe and weave them into the conversation accompanying the video feed you see online.

What you hear is called the science party line, SPL, and it includes a mix of operational conversation about the dive. For example, the science team and ROV pilots work together to accomplish an objective or the navigator communicates with the bridge to make an adjustment to the ship's position. Other times, it's the general – and sometimes goofy – conversation of a group of science-oriented people hanging out together, getting to know each other as well as a lot of questions and answers.

We talk about what we are doing and why, the things we are seeing, how we got on the ship, how the science and technology work and more. Watches last for four hours, and there are three watches on the schedule, which means an individual is “on watch” for eight hours per day. When we are not on watch, we often have other work to do, according to our roles. Science communication fellows host live ship-to-shore interactions, including those the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History is offering while I am at sea – at the Tales and Scales Halloween Festival on Oct. 27 at the Sea Center on Stearns Wharf.

As Ballard likes to say, instead of traveling to the bottom of the sea in person, we take the human spirit. ROVs allow us to explore deeper and for longer, and to take the world along. Please join us online at Nautilus Live and send us your questions and comments. We can’t wait to explore with you!

Melissa Baffa serves as a development officer at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Since 2015, she has been a science communication fellow with the Ocean Exploration Trust, exploring the deep sea as part of Dr. Robert Ballard’s Corps of Exploration.

Read past articles here:

• Aboard the Nautilus: Ventura resident sets out on next ocean adventure
• Explorer from Ventura dives head first into survival training
• Ocean exploration in Southern California’s backyard reveals bustling ecosystem
• Nautilus draws Ventura resident for a second tour of exploration