In 2015, Melissa Omand, a thirty-four-year-old oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, began preparing for a six-day research expedition. For the first time, Omand would be the lead scientist—an important professional milestone. She would be supervising eleven other researchers studying how the movement of carbon through the oceans shapes the global climate. Many of them would be using advanced instruments that had never before been deployed in the field. The expedition was set for October. In April, Omand learned that she was pregnant.
Personally, she was overjoyed. Professionally, the picture was complicated. While UNOLS, the governing body of the major U.S. research vessels, had no formal policy about pregnant cruise participants, discussions with colleagues led Omand to temper her expectations of going to sea. And yet delaying the cruise wasn’t an option. The data that Omand hoped to collect could boost her career. Her students planned to study it during her maternity leave, and other scientists were depending on the expedition for their own work. Many stars had aligned to make the expedition possible. They were unlikely to do so again.
Omand discussed the situation with her mentor, Kathleen Donohue, a scientist who studies ocean circulation. Donohoe had a surprising suggestion: the cruise could incorporate telepresence. Thanks to advances in satellite coverage and telecommunications technology, ships can now communicate with shore-based participants in real time, via streaming audio and video. The University of Rhode Island was also home to the Inner Space Center (I.S.C.), a “mission control” for telepresence-enabled expeditions around the world. For more than five years, the I.S.C. had been conducting brief educational broadcasts from ship to shore and helping marine researchers tune in to transmissions from sea-based assets. But its larger goal was to convince scientists to try exploring from afar. Omand’s expedition could be a test run.
On a cool October morning, the eleven other researchers Omand would have supervised in person boarded the hundred-and-eighty-five-foot Research Vessel Endeavor. Lugging bags full of electronic equipment, two I.S.C. technicians boarded with them. Omand watched from the shore. “I just stood on the dock and they sailed away,” she said. “I waved. It felt sort of romantic.”
The next day began like any other. She made her usual commute, driving an hour from her home, in Swansea, Massachusetts, to the I.S.C. Bean, her pug–French bulldog mix, sat next to her in the front seat. Omand walked to the front of the control room and, coffee in hand, sat down at a desk. She opened her laptop, arranged her microphone, and turned to the live streams displayed on the wall-size screens. It was then that she was struck by the complexity of the task ahead. The Endeavor’s new instruments were having their first trials at sea; the scientists onboard would be looking to her for guidance. Omand, who had never before led an expedition, would need to manage everything remotely. “I was pretty worried,” she recalled. It was as though she were mounting two expeditions: the first, into oceanic carbon flows; the second, into the future of exploration.
Water can be a nuisance for marine biologists. It obscures the creatures and landscapes they want to study, and it is time-consuming and expensive to explore. Traditionally, marine scientists have got close to their quarries by crawling into human-occupied vehicles, or H.O.V.s. Staring, wide-eyed, through portholes, they collected samples with robotic arms.
Eventually, in the nineteen-eighties, fibre-optic cables made it possible to send data through tethers. Today, most deep-sea research is done from the safety of a ship. Remotely operated vehicles, or R.O.V.s, are controlled by shipboard pilots using joysticks. Thanks to R.O.V.s, anyone on a ship—not just the scientists inside a submersible—can participate in deep-sea exploration. But space on expeditions is limited, and many researchers lack the funds, connections, or time to go to sea.
It’s long been obvious that, in theory, video from an R.O.V. could be transmitted all the way back to shore, allowing marine scientists to explore from their offices. But live transmissions from sea face daunting technical obstacles. To communicate with satellites while being tossed on the waves, a ship needs an expensive, gyroscopically stabilized tracking antenna; its signal must reach a satellite network accessible from the middle of the ocean. Only a few service providers, such as HiSeasNet and Inmarsat, maintain such networks. Data costs mount quickly.
Onboard, a telepresence operation requires cables, switchboards, cameras, microphones, headsets, and technical staff to troubleshoot when, inevitably, service is interrupted. It also gives researchers access to land-based troubleshooters. On Omand’s first full day in the I.S.C., one of the shipboard instruments—a holographic camera capable of capturing individual plankton and sinking particles—stopped working. (A graduate student aboard the Endeavor delivered the bad news to Omand over the video link.) During an expedition, Omand told me, “It’s really not very rare that something goes wrong. You’re usually just left to MacGyver it yourself on the ship.” From her desk, Omand called the camera company and asked the technician to tune in to the YouTube stream. The three of them talked through several different options; in the end, the camera was beyond repair. But the potential of remote consultations was suddenly obvious. At a moment’s notice, and from a great distance, anyone can weigh in.
When I first visited the seafloor—inside the H.O.V. Alvin, in August of 2010—I was a first-year graduate student astonished by my good fortune. Onboard, the night before my dive, I couldn’t sleep; I tossed and turned in my bunk, buzzing with the nervous excitement that comes from fully committing to a risky undertaking. The next morning, our three-person crew—a pilot, another biologist, and me—removed our shoes and crawled into the titanium sphere. I gave a perfunctory, sheepish wave to the rest of the crew as the hatch was sealed behind me.
Inside, I shifted in my small seat, trying to get comfortable. A crane lowered us off the ship and into the water. Bobbing on the surface, my excitement turned to nausea. Then we started sinking, and stillness set in. Dave Walter, our newly minted pilot, dimmed the lights and turned up the mood music (the groovy jazz-pop song “Les Étoiles,” by Melody Gardot). Outside my porthole, blue faded to black. Bioluminescent specks of plankton ignited like shooting stars. The isolation was thrilling. Within our tiny pocket of air, we were on our own.
On the seafloor, an alien world came to life. We pirouetted through methane bubbles and scooped up flocculent microbial samples. Soft purple corals cast shadows onto the craggy pinnacles of carbonate rock that loomed ahead. I took rapturous, adjective-ridden, marginally helpful notes. I was charged with insuring that the cameras mounted to Alvin’s exterior were capturing the action; I twisted knobs on the video system, panning and focussing, checking the monitor above my head to make sure that I had the salient features in frame. I pitied future viewers—no aspect ratio, I thought, could contain the splendor.
Suddenly, Alvin kicked up a cloud of sediment. It obscured our windows. For a moment, a rising panic transported me back to a white-knuckle drive through a blizzard in the Colorado mountains. Slowly, the particles settled, blanketing the rocks. The dive was dream-like, and it has become more so in retrospect: we rarely appreciate formative experiences in real time.
Cindy Van Dover, a professor of biological oceanography at Duke University, may have more experience than anyone with the various modalities of deep-sea exploration. She has made ninety dives in Alvin—piloting the submersible on forty-eight of them—and has sailed on seven R.O.V.-based cruises; in 2016, she spearheaded a telepresence-training program for marine scientists, in which I took part. Being in a submersible has benefits, she told me: “It’s the ability to see in 3-D. If you’re on the seafloor, you get a sense of scale.” Submersibles are also handy recruiting tools: “The enthusiasm and inspiration are worth a lot.” Nonetheless, she said, the H.O.V.-versus-R.O.V. debate is a non-starter. “I’d much rather use an R.O.V.,” she said. “Everyone can watch. Geologists will know what’s going on, biologists can contribute—specialists for this or that can ask for the exact samples they want.”
This “doctors on call” effect, as Dwight Coleman, the director of the I.S.C., frames it, is amplified during telepresence exploration. Coleman likens an expedition to an emergency room: “You have to equip your E.R. with expertise and tools to handle almost anything that walks in the door,” he said. “On an expedition, we’re not sure what we’re going to find. So we build this network of scientists that are connected through telepresence, and they span the multidisciplinary nature of ocean exploration.” They may span the globe, too. Marine science is a traditionally insular field; telepresence could be a democratizing force, allowing participants from developing nations to join the scientific exploration of the oceans.
Telepresence may change deep-sea exploration in other, subtler ways. Nira Liberman, a psychologist at Tel Aviv University, studies the phenomenon of psychological distance—the tendency to feel more detached about things that are far away and more concretely about our immediate surroundings. When exploring the deep sea from the comfort of our offices, she told me, we might experience it more abstractly. “We might expect people to be more theory-oriented and less description-oriented,” she said. A scientist on the seafloor might wonder at the biomechanics of an individual worm as it twists its body to burrow into the sediment; her counterpart at the I.S.C. may contemplate the global effects of such burrows on oxygen-free habitats. Our emotional reactions to animals may differ, too. “Do you individuate them?” Liberman asked. “Or do you see them as exemplars of categories?” People are more willing to help individuals than groups—a single whale, for example, elicits more sympathy than whales in general. (Psychologists call this the “identifiable victim effect.”)
On the other hand, Liberman speculated, it might be good if explorers were less emotional. The overwhelming swirl of feelings and sensations an in-person explorer experiences could compromise his objectivity. Studies have shown that, in clinical diagnoses, graduate-school admissions, and parole decisions, in-person interviews produce less balanced results; faced with another human being, we are unduly influenced by the color of a shirt or the hint of a smile. In-person exploration might be similarly derailed by irrelevant details. It might be wiser to explore at a remove.
In August of 2017, a research ship was sampling a recently discovered methane seep off the coast of Malibu. From my office, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I joined the live stream, to request samples. The hum of office activity didn’t exactly evoke deep-sea adventure. Compressed by streaming-video codecs, the microbial mats had lost their spectral glow. Spreadsheets and heavily edited manuscript drafts filled my other monitor, suggesting a false equivalence that, in a way, cheapened what I knew to be a remarkable scene at the bottom of the sea. “The desirability of something is inversely related to its ease,” Liberman told me. To be sure, more data seen by more people will lead to better theories; a new species remains a remarkable discovery whether it’s seen through a porthole or a browser window. All the same, I couldn’t help feeling a little melancholy about a future in which many marine scientists rarely see the ocean, and in which robotic emissaries do jobs that were once risky, wondrous, and embodied.
How fundamental is in-person activity to exploration? When Neil Armstrong overrode the autopilot to guide the Apollo 11 lunar module to safety, he flew on instinct, deftly targeting scientifically valuable terrain while managing a dwindling fuel supply. When the first humans arrive on Mars, they will already have mapped their landing site with satellite imagery; a flotilla of robotic rovers will likely have preceded them. Eventually, technology may cleave adventurism from exploration altogether. Perhaps the solar system will be explored by R.O.V. operators wielding joysticks on Earth. Through telepresence, our senses will extend out into the universe, and more of us will join in the adventure. And yet the meaning of exploration will have changed.
We may get used to it. Omand’s daughter is now three years old. She’s obsessed with “Octonauts,” a British cartoon about animals who live in an underwater base called the Octopod, exploring the ocean in futuristic submersibles. Omand herself is still poring over the data from the Endeavor. She and her team used the results to secure funding for four additional projects, involving multiple expeditions, through which they have further developed their carbon-tracking technology. She sometimes forgets that she wasn’t on the cruise.
