REV Ocean, the scientific ‘aircraft carrier’ for deep sea exploration
An interview with biologist Alex Rogers on ocean exploration and the future quest for knowledge with the biggest research superyacht in the world.
Behold REV Ocean — the world’s largest superyacht, but one dedicated to science.
An awesome ship, in any terms. At 183 meters, it’s the world’s largest ‘yacht’ — but even more impressive will be its technological and scientific abilities. REV Ocean is actually a state-of-the-art research laboratory, capable of hosting up to 55 scientists, along with a 35 men crew, and a lot of modern science equipment.
Named, for now, from the initials of Research Expedition Vessel, the ship will hopefully start its adventures next year, after a total investment of about 350 million dollars — the vessel and the foundation were imagined and funded by Norwegian billionaire businessman Kjell Inge Røkke.
I witnessed, as a journalist, the launch of this impressive vessel from the VARD Tulcea shipyard in Romania, where the steel hull was built, dreaming of maybe someday going on a scientific adventure onboard this modern Nautilus.
“It’s like an aircraft carrier, that can have a whole range of different equipment: autonomous underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, submersibles, drones, automated surface vehicles, autonomous surfaces vehicles”, explains famous biologist Alex Rogers, former Professor of Conservation Biology at University of Oxford, and REV Ocean’s Science Director.
“It’s also kind of like a science city almost, in that we have all the components we need to do this multidisciplinary and very holistic science out in the ocean.”
Passionate about the natural world, science, and exploration, Alex Rogers is a talented ‘spokesperson’ for the fascinating world of the seas. Among his many outreach efforts, he also worked as a science consultant for the superb nature documentary Blue Planet II, narrated by David Attenborough.
I asked him to tell us about his new mission with the REV Ocean Foundation, deep sea exploration, and how truly alien this world really is.
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‘How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.’
Arthur C. Clarke
Alex Rogers: I also use this word, Ocean, because all of the oceans and the seas are all connected. It’s all one system. We are Planet Ocean.
But we have better maps of Mars, or the Moon, than we do for the bottom of the ocean. The reason for that is quite simple. We can map Mars and we can map the Moon using satellites and observation. But, because water is opaque to satellites, beyond 50 odd meters, we can only get a rough idea of what the bottom of the ocean looks like, using gravity mapping. And that’s not a very accurate way of mapping the seabed.
Obviously, in terms of life, we know more about life in the ocean than elsewhere in the universe, but it’s true to say that for many parts of the ocean we’ve only explored a tiny fraction of it. For example, the deep seabed. We probably only explored about 0.0001 percent of the deep seabed and the deep water column. For some deep sea ecosystems, such as canyons, we probably explored even less, in terms of the proportion of them which we’ve actually visited, surveyed, and looked at. Our knowledge base about the ocean is still very, very poor. This is really part of the reason why we keep making mistakes when we’re trying to manage human activities in the ocean, because it’s very difficult to make the right decision about what to do, or what not to do, in the ocean when we’ve got so little knowledge.
Our mission, at REV Ocean, is to find practical solutions to the many problems that the ocean is facing today. The ocean is incredibly important in terms of the Earth’s system, from regulating the atmosphere, the gases in the atmosphere, to the temperature of the Earth, providing us with food through fisheries, and so on. But it’s become very clear that the ocean is suffering severe degradation at the moment, mainly as… well, entirely as result of human activities. These are things like overfishing, environmentally destructive fishing, climate change impacts, impacts from coastal development, invasive species, pollution… So REV Ocean is about undertaking fundamental research that increases our understanding of these impacts, but also looks to find solutions to them. This is really what the organization is all about.
I think we will have a significant impact on our knowledge of the ocean, the knowledge of where life is, what animals live where, how they’re connected between different areas, and so on. The reason for that is that we will be able to get to and operate in areas of the ocean which have not been sampled previously.
We’re going to discover a lot of new species! Every time I go out and sample the deep sea, I find new species. And because of where this vessel will be operating, it’s inevitable that we’ll find probably hundreds, if not thousands, of new species as we progress through our work over the years. When we visited the vents in the Southern Ocean, every single animal there was new to science. There were probably two dozen main species living on the vents. They were new species, some were new genera, some were even new families. The level of taxonomic novelty in the deep ocean is very, very high. And that’s because it’s been very poorly explored.
We’re open to collaborations with the global scientific community. I have a big stack of CVs from biologists, that’s growing all the time. The important thing about the way we’ll operate the vessel is that we will put out calls for people to put in proposals to use the ship. Any scientist, anywhere in the world, will be able to apply to work on our ship. And the vessel will be free for them to use. Scientists everywhere, marine biologists, could apply to use the vessel, say, in the Mediterranean, or in the Black Sea, or wherever it may be. We would get independent referees to look at that proposal. And if the science is good and fits with our themes, in terms of solving these problems in the ocean, then that science would be supported.
The other important thing about the ship is that, because it’s so large, we can take up to 50 scientists to sea at any one time. That means we can have very international and very multidisciplinary expeditions. It really will have a big impact on science, globally. For many countries, particularly developing countries, where they don’t have this sort of big infrastructure to investigate their own seas, this ship is going to have a really major impact.
This vessel is special for me. I’ve learned from my experience that, to actually learn about life in the ocean, where it is, and why it is where it is, you have to run multidisciplinary cruises. You can’t just have the biologists on the ship. You’ve got to have oceanographers, you’ve got to have chemists, and even social scientists and people who are able to translate that knowledge, so that the public and politicians can understand it. Because of its size and its capabilities, it means that we can put all those people together on the ship and broadcast to the world what we’re actually doing.
It’s like an aircraft carrier, that can have a whole range of different equipment: autonomous underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, submersibles, drones, automated surface vehicles, autonomous surfaces vehicles. It’s also kind of like a science city almost, in that we have all the components we need to do this multidisciplinary and very holistic science out in the ocean.
The ship itself is magnificent — the biggest research vessel in the world, at about 180 meters long. And we will be operating globally. The first trip will probably be to the Arctic, but after that the vessel will work all over the world. It has some unique capabilities which enable it to do that. It has a very long endurance — it can be at sea for 114 days and it can go around the whole world on a single tank of fuel. This means that we will be able to get to places in the ocean that many other research vessels basically can’t go, or just can’t afford to go because their fuel consumption.
The vessel is really fitted out for multidisciplinary ocean science. We can do marine biology, physical oceanography, we can work on the seabed and in the water column. We will be equipped with a remotely operated vehicle, a robot that will be able to work down at depths as far as 6,000 meters. We can map the ocean to a depth of 8,000 meters, using multibeam mapping systems on the ship.
The vessel will also be equipped with a very unique trawling system for working on animals in the water column. Of course, we don’t trawl on the seabed because it’s so damaging to marine life. So that system will essentially allow us to pump samples directly from the net onto the ship, without actually bringing the net on board, which means that we’ll be able to get very good, intact specimens of animals. It’s also likely we’ll have the special stereo camera system in the net which means that we’ll be able to actually survey the animals coming through the nets and release them, so we can actually do a lot of our studies without even capturing the animals and harming them. Essentially, the vessel will be capable of almost any type of marine science.
Usually, the depressurization kills the animals. It does depend a lot on the animal. The yeti crabs, for example, are very, very tough and they will remain alive on the ship for several days. But many other organisms don’t survive at all. To live at those depths, they have to be adapted in every way to cope with the high pressure, so the structure of their proteins, their cell membranes, all of their biomolecules are all specially evolved and adapted to work at high pressure. So when you bring them up and you decompress them, then all of their enzyme systems and membranes, and so on, essentially break down because they can’t operate at atmospheric pressure. In many cases, the animals do die fairly quickly. The other thing is that the deep sea is very, very cold. And, again, that requires special adaptations to live at low temperatures. So as you bring the animals up through the water column and they warm up that also tends to do them in as well. There are devices which you can deploy to actually collect animals under pressure and then bring them up and keep them in high pressure aquaria. But that is very specialist equipment. And you would normally only do that to look at the physiology of an animal, the way is living and adapting to the depths of which it’s found. Although we may buy equipment like that, if it’s needed in the future, at the moment that’s not part of our plans.
We will also have telepresence on the vessel, which means that the public will be able to see what we’re doing live, as we’re doing it. That’s very cool and very useful, I think, because you cannot care about something that you don’t know, that you don’t see and don’t have the chance to be impressed by.
Popular science is really important. The Nautilus program, for example, employed very successfully this type of technology to allow the public to see their robots or what their robots were seeing when they were down to the seabed. I’ve also worked with a project called the Nekton Foundation, where we put out a lot of media around an expedition to Bermuda, and that reached a lot of people. I can’t remember the exact figure, but I think it was about 700 million people. It’s really important to have that whole public communication aspect as a part of the work, right from the beginning.
I was also an adviser for the big Blue Planet II documentary. I worked with the BBC team in Bristol, the BBC Natural History Film Unit. We were helping to make sure that all the facts the program was talking about were accurate, checking David Attenborough’s manuscripts before narrating the program. That was a great documentary!
The deepest dive I’ve done was on the Japanese submersible Shinkai 6500, to depths of about 3,380 meters, on the Central Indian Ridge in the Indian Ocean. That really is, I guess, as close as you can get to being in space without being in space. You’re in a titanium capsule about three metres across, with recycled air, and you’re looking out the very small porthole into an environment which is like being on another planet. In our case, we were on the ridge, so you could actually see where new rock was being formed. We see these pillow lavas on the seabed made out of black basalt. The first animal we saw when we got to the seabed was a giant shrimp, probably 30 centimetres long. And then there were the odd deepsea fish, some of which had these glowing fluorescent patches on the tops of their heads. I was a really remarkable dive and very, very exciting for me.
It’s an alien world, full of fascinating species. I remember the work that we did discovering the first deep sea hydrothermal vents, in the Southern Ocean. That’s where we found the most exciting animals. We had a project to look for these vents because they were important in terms of understanding the biogeography, or distribution of life, on vents globally. And when we found the vents, they had a completely unique fauna, they were surrounded by heaps and heaps of these animals called yeti crabs. Up to about 17 centimetres long, pale white, with no eyes, and with chests covered in fur — hence the name yeti crab. These animals live by combing and eating bacteria off the fur. They’re farming bacteria, that get their energy from hydrogen sulfide from the vent fluids, which they oxidize to produce energy and then use that energy to fix carbon and grow. And then the crabs eat those bacteria. For me, those were the most fascinating animals that I saw. They feature quite heavily in one of the chapters of my book, The Deep, about some of my explorations of the ocean, but also the problems in the ocean and how to solve them.
The deep is a really alien world. One of the things that really drilled this home to me was a special diving experience. I was in a submersible, one of these Triton subs, off the coast of Bermuda. We always dive with two submarines in the water. After we’ve completed our work on a dive on a seamount called Argus Bank, I just happened to look up and I saw the other submarine way, way in the distance, like a toy almost. It was so far away, that the water was gin clear, and I saw its lights illuminating this huge submarine cliff. It was a strange moment, almost a blurring of reality, because I suddenly thought ‘God, that could be a spacecraft working on an asteroid, or on another planet.’ It just had that look about it, surrounded by darkness, with just this blue light coming from it and illuminating this cliff. It just gave you this idea of scale of the underwater landscape compared to this tiny submarine that we were working in. That, for me, more than anything, really conveyed the alien nature of being underwater and how much alike it is to space exploration really.
I’ve never actually read any Jules Verne as a young man, but I do have a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in my library at home. And I’ve often dipped into it when I’ve been looking to see how visionaries in the past looked into the future. And Jules Verne, and other science fiction writers, made some quite accurate predictions about what might be going on in the future.
When I was young there were some amazing programs on TV, things like Sting Ray, for example, which really excited me as a kid. I was fascinated by that whole idea of working under the sea and living under the sea. Of course, we have this amazing inspiration in the 1970s from people like Jacques Cousteau. All of that added up and helped me to make up my mind to be a marine biologist. But I think the most important influence was my grandfather, who was a fisherman. I used to go out in the fishing boat with him when I was on holiday.
And now, in many ways, I live the future imagined by writers. I love actually being out at sea, doing this work, and seeing the animals, new animals especially. The ‘job’ is a real pleasure for me.
PS The vessel hasn’t been named yet. REV stands for ‘research expedition vessel’. After the ‘disaster’ in the UK when they had a public competition to name the ship and came up with Boaty McBoatFace, I don’t think we’ll be having a public competition on that. (laughs)
Hi there! I’m Vasile Decu, science journalist, amateur astronomer, professional bookworm. And I need your help:
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