Dr Monty Graham - USF Deep Sea ROV

The University of South Florida is rolling out a new underwater remote vehicle with a 4K camera that can go two and a half miles deep. Only one other US University (Hawaii) has anything like it. We speak with Dr. Monty Graham, director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography, about what this means for deep-sea exploration. 

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Gordon Bird here Beyond the News.The University of South Florida and the Florida
Institute of Oceanography have a new toolfor deep sea exploration, a remotely operated
vehicle attached to a research vessel stationedat the USF Marine Science Laboratory in Saint
Petersburg. Doctor Monty Graham is directorof the Florida Institute of Oceanography and joins

(00:22):
us now on Beyond the News.Doctor Graham, welcome, Thank you Gordon.
It's good to be here. Nowtell us about this. It's called
the Taurus, it's called an ROV, a remotely operated vehicle. What are
the capacities? How deep can thisvessel go? What does that mean in
terms of the types of research andthe types of discoveries you could potentially make

(00:44):
now that maybe you couldn't before.Yeah, that's the ROV itself is you
know, just like the name wouldimply, it's completely uncrewed, so people
don't go inside. It's not auh a submersible. And you know,
the the unfortunate events last year aroundthe Titan submersible, which you know,

(01:08):
ultimately the fate of Titan was discoveredand and the wreckage of it was pulled
up by remotely operated vehicles. Sothat's that's what we're talking about. You
know, these vehicles were also instrumentalin in doing the deep water work around
the deep sea when the deep WaterHorizon incident happened. And so people when

(01:32):
they when they think r o V, that's that's what we're talking about here.
This is an unusual UH science ro V. It's it's really it's
it's not just like when you know, typically the oil field has these big,
monstrous r o vs, but theydo very specific tasks and and they're

(01:53):
not really doing scientific work. Andand this one is this one that we
have and we just had built forus is a science ROV and it's the
only deep water and by deep water, I mean four thousand meters that's two
and a half miles deep. It'sthe only deep water four thousand meter ROV

(02:16):
in the uh In Idiot University exceptfor the University of Hawaii. So we're
on a ship. It's called theresearch vessel Western Flyer, and the Western
Flyer was purpose built for an roV. It used to be operated by

(02:37):
the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute outin Monterey Bay, California, and they
were gracious enough as they're building anew ship and this one still had a
lot of life in it that theygranted us the vessel, and we're building,
you know, a program around that. We can talk about that in
a little bit. But the vesselitself is spectacular. It's a twin hole

(03:00):
design. It's not really a catamaran. It's called a swap vessel, but
that small water plane area twin holeswhat swath means you don't have to remember
that will be no test later.But that vessel is very stable. It's
one hundred and seventeen feet long,but it is rides like a three hundred

(03:21):
and fifty four hundred foot ship.It's so very stable and in its designed
and that makes operating this ROV outof it a real unique marriage between ship
and ROV because the ROV actually descendsby a cable through the middle of the
ship and what we call the moonpool, and this essentially two big garage

(03:44):
doors that open up and you're lookingstraight down at the ocean and you just
drop the ROV from this garage that'sin the middle of the ocean down through
the ship. And so if you'reout fishing and you see the vessel just
sitting there we may be doing atwo mile deep ov dive and you didn't
even know it because you couldn't seethe the ro o V operating off the

(04:05):
side. So really kind of aspecial setup that we have here, and
we're the only university on this sideof the United States that has one.
Now, of course, when wethink of the deep ocean, our awareness

(04:26):
and our knowledge have really been advanced, and kind of that unknown nature of
the deep ocean has been pushed backa lot in the last generation thanks to
research like this and thanks to vehicleslike this one. And you know,
you mentioned the potential to discover newspecies, and that's that's certainly possible.

(04:51):
And what are some of the otherthings that you could also discover in this
kind of deep ocean work that havea direct application to the way we live
here on the surface. Yeah,that's a great sort of lead into,
you know, how the ocean worksin the first place. As you know,

(05:14):
we are air breathing animals. Andwhen we talk about the ocean,
the vast majority of us relate theocean from say the beach, and we
think we're looking at the ocean,but really what we're doing is looking at
the top of the ocean. We'renot looking at any part of the ocean
underneath, and that ocean, youknow, close to shore, can be

(05:38):
shallow. We can walk out andtouch the bottom, but we don't have
to go very far before all ofa sudden we're over our heads and you
keep going out, and all ofa sudden we're two miles or four miles
or even in some of the deeperplaces, we can get up to you
know, ten you know almost youknow, ten miles of ocean depths,

(05:58):
and that's you know, who doyou think about where humans can go.
We can't really get down except forthat very top skim of the ocean and
really understand it. So ultimately we'vehad to use ships that have a wire,
a long wire, and we justdrop instruments down and it's kind of

(06:18):
like you know, taking your fingerand dipping it way down deep in the
ocean and going, okay, it'sthis cold down here, it's the salty,
it's got these chemicals in it.And then we try to derive what's
happening to the entire ecosystem, andthe deep ocean can't do it without actually
having eyes and the ability to doexperiments, and it's too costly in terms

(06:43):
of money, and it's too riskyto send people down that deep. So
having technologies like this make it muchmore accessible. So having said that,
you know, let's just look atour country alone, and most people don't
realize that half of the United Statesis actually below the ocean in depths deeper

(07:04):
than two thousand meters. And that'sbecause we all countries have agreed that they're
borders out to two hundred miles inthe ocean are the exclusive economic zone for
that country, and they get toutilize the resources out to two hundred miles

(07:29):
the way that that country wishes touse those resources. And so we have
a lot of you know, itcould be fishing resources in the deep sea,
or it could be mineral resources asa very hot topic, or it
could be living resources that we wantto explore in ways to find cures for
diseases, you know, cancer treatments, things like that. We call it
bioprospecting. And so the tools thatwe have now available for this can can

(07:55):
contribute both to our economies and cancontribute to the human health and well being.
And we can just find new thingsthat are scientifically relevant as well or
culturally relevant you know, we're doinga lot of you know, shipwreck archaeology
or ancient shoreline work, you know, in regions that were very important for

(08:18):
you know, say indigenous peoples ofFlorida when their ancestors were first arriving ten
to thirteen thousand years ago. Sothis is a tool that will help not
just the oceanographers, but will helphumans and society and ways that we couldn't
have imagined. Now we know aboutthe camera, obviously you can go down

(08:39):
and see things. I believe youhave an HD camera a four K camera
that you're able to work with.Here. What are some of the other
capacities. Can you actually bring upa sample of seawater or a sample of
the ocean floor and bring it backup to the surface as well? What
are some of the capacities that youhave? Yep, So we can do

(09:01):
just about anything that a human cando with their own arms. So we've
got the eyeballs in the camera thatyou mentioned, and then on the front
are two arms called manipulators, andthey're very sophisticated. They've got full functionality
of an arm like with our wrist, and so they can do very intricate
things. Below the ROV is ayou know, for lack of a better

(09:24):
way to describe it, as adrawer that will, you know, hydraulically
pushes out and on that drawer youcan have whatever tools you needed to take
down. So it could be asediment sampling core, or it could be
a biological collector, or it couldbe you know, a place to store
your samples. And so we cango down and spend twelve hours, sometimes

(09:46):
twenty four hours, you know,because we operate with crews that will we'll
shift in and out as they pilotit, so we can stay down for
very long periods of time and wecould sit and observe, or we could
collect a sample and set it,you know, in our in our on
our shelf to bring it back,or we could put experiments down. And
so we can do just about anythingthat a human can do using these sophisticated

(10:11):
collect you know, collectoring tools andarms and cameras. So it's it's pretty
interesting set up. You mentioned thevalue that we could derive from this sort
of research, and obviously this isa pricey piece of equipment here. I
don't know if you happen to havethe figure off hand, but uh,
how was that covered? How isthat cost covered of bringing in and building

(10:37):
such a sophisticated device. Yeap.So we have been working with the United
States Navy. It's the it's actuallynot the operational side, you know,
the ones with the gray ships andthe big guns. We work with the
Office of Naval Research and O andr's we call them. Is very interested

(10:58):
in a couple of things. Oneis, we are now back into a
you know, a security time wherethe deep water, you know, submarines
and things like that are important forthe Navy. So it's the big blue
deep ocean is re emerged as aas an area of importance. So the
Navy is is keen on that andthey like having this kind of technology,

(11:22):
but they more they like having newstudents and a workforce that's trained around the
deep ocean to be, you know, part of the ecosystem that the Navy
supports. And so the Navy.Navy provided the funds through a grant,
actually through two grants to build ther V and to operate to fund a

(11:46):
bit of the operations of the rV off off of the ship. So
we've got just a terrific partner withthe Office of Naval Research. They're they're
very keen on the workforce development programsthat we we have because you know,
they very well may hire our students, and they're very interested in the technologies
and support of science. That's that'scritical to them. And that workforce development

(12:11):
that you mentioned was a part oftoday's events. As you did your engineering
test on the Taurus, you hada student and a career development program at
your institute. Yep. So werun a program. We call it peer
side and it's spelled p e er s I d E, so well

(12:33):
play on words, and it isa cohort based peer to peer mentoring and
also what we call near peer mentoring. What that means is that we take
groups of students out and they havea mentor that's a very established person,
but they also have people that arevery close in age to them. And

(12:56):
it's it's kind of interesting in thisworld of training students that they get the
most out of an experience if they'vegot somebody they can look up to that
is very close to them an ageand has just gone through it. You
know, I would like to saythat I have an impact on them,
but you know, I've been it'sbeen thirty years since I was a student,

(13:16):
and so it just doesn't mean asmuch, you know that thirty years
of separation. So we take groupsof students out and then we give them
experiences at sea and we train themin a variety of different technologies. But
then throughout the year we give themcareer development tools and they work on a
project that at the end of theprogram they can take their project and it

(13:39):
is a marketable thing, you know, it is you know, they learned
a skill and they can put iton their resume and use it and we
use our network of people that arepart of this program to help get them
jobs. So it's it's really astrong program. And we had great support

(14:00):
from the Schmid Ocean Institute, whichis of Eric and Wendy Schmid of Google
have helped us in establishing this program. So we've we've been super fortunate to
have terrific help in setting this workforcedevelopment program up. Well, now that
you have this amazing capacity, thisamazing vehicle, what are some of the

(14:22):
what are some of the types ofmissions that you are looking at using it
for here now that now that it'sonline. Yep, So this year we
are going to have two expeditions comingup very soon. It's really going to
be part of what we call sciencevalidation and verification of the of the r
o V and the and the hipoperations, and on those we're going to

(14:46):
be doing. Some of the workis going to be on deep water corals.
Deep Water corals in the Gulf ofMexico are a very important ecosystem and
during the deep Water Horizon oil spill, there was quite a bit of damage
to deepwater corals and so there's abit of effort in trying to figure out
what restoration of deep water corals lookslike, how do you do it?

(15:09):
And in order to do it,you definitely need tools like this ROV to
work in that environment. And we'realso working on deep water sharks and this
is going to be a really coolexpedition where we have opportunity to study deep
water sharks just by looking at them. But we're also working with some community

(15:31):
college students out of California who havebuilt a for lack of a better word,
it's like a tiny little spear gun, but it doesn't kill the shark.
It just pokes them and pulls outa bit of tissue sample so that
you can study their DNA or youcan do some nutritional chemistry work on their

(15:54):
tissues to kind of determine what they'reeating in the deep sea. So very
cool couple of projects. Later inthe year, we'll be supporting more deep
water coral work, some workoff ofLouisiana exploring how mud flows are potentially carrying
shipwrecks deeper into the Gulf. Andnext year there is the likelihood that we're

(16:21):
going to be working on the Eastcoast around deep seam minerals on what's called
the Blake Plateau, which is offof Georgia and North Florida. There are
nodules of manganese that have formed andare just laying on the seafloor and they've
been a topic of potential mining activity, and very little ecological work has been

(16:44):
done to explore what the impacts ofsuch activities might might be. Well,
they all sound like cool projects andall very interesting and will certainly follow as
you bring forth the results of yourORCA