Cross Word

No Wi‑Fi Underwater, Still Plenty Of Drama

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 143

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Connect with Michele at https://www.bookclues.com

What if the most important maps we’ll ever draw are hidden under miles of water and thousands of PSI? We sit down with physicist and exploration roboticist James Bellingham to trace a life spent pushing past pressure, busting tethers, and building the autonomous systems that make the deep sea knowable.

We start with the physics that rule the depths: hydrostatic pressure that crushes air spaces, why small pressure vessels survive better than big ones, and how neutral buoyancy and material science set the limits of human and machine. That frame sets up the cautionary tale of the Titan submersible—why carbon fiber shines in tension but falters in compression, how storage and certification matter, and what fast‑moving tech cultures miss when the ocean sets the terms. From there, we cut the cable. With radio waves blocked by conductive seawater, true autonomy became the only path. James explains how AUVs navigate without GPS, conserve energy, and work without ships, opening doors to safer, cheaper, and vastly wider exploration.

The payoff is discovery. Only about 26 percent of the seafloor is mapped with modern bathymetry, so AUVs deliver first looks: mid‑ocean ridges where new crust is born, hydrothermal vents that power sunless ecosystems, and trench habitats that most of us will never see yet shape global cycles. We revisit shipwrecks as time capsules—Endurance and Titanic rendered in crisp 3D—and walk through crisis missions that advanced science: Deepwater Horizon’s deep oil plumes metabolized by microbes, and the MH370 search that produced exquisite seafloor maps even without the plane. Each story underlines a simple truth: every dive, even the “unsuccessful” ones, expands the ocean’s blueprint.

Looking ahead, James sketches an ocean filled with quiet robot fleets running experiments, mapping chemistry and biology at scale, and building predictive skill for climate, fisheries, and coastal safety. The same playbook reaches outward to Europa and Enceladus, where subsurface oceans and likely hydrothermal vents could host life built on chemistry rather than sunlight. If the deep teaches anything, it’s that curiosity thrives without Wi‑Fi—and that exploration gets smarter when we let machines take the pressure.

If this journey into the hidden 70 percent sparked your curiosity, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves science, and leave a review with the deep‑sea question you want answered next.

The Beatles:

In the town where I was born lived the man who sailed to sea. And he told us of his life in the land of submarines.

Michele McAloon:

Sorry, folks, couldn't resist. This is Michele McAloon with the podcast Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And today we are speaking with a MIT physicist to talk about exploration under the sea. This is why I really love doing this podcast because of authors, of people doing really cool things in the world, and Dr. Bellingham is doing something really cool in the world. Hope you enjoy this. If you like my episodes, please like and subscribe. And you can find out more about me on bookclues.com. Thank you. God bless. Happy listening. Okay, today we have a super treat because we are talking to a physicist with a PhD from MIT. So he's probably the smartest man we've had on the show yet. And what we're gonna do is talk about his book, How Are Marine Robots Shaping Our Future? And I would like to introduce James Bellingham. He's the executive director of the John Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy and the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Exploration Robotics for more than 30 years. He's been a global leader in the development of small, high-performance, autonomous underwater vehicles. They're called AUVs. And he really has he's done this for the military, industry, science communities, and he's sort of been all over the world doing this. Dr.

Dr James Bellingham :

Bellingham, welcome to the pleasure to be with you and with your audience.

Michele McAloon:

Oh well, thank you. It really is because I didn't your book is filled with a lot of tidbits about the ocean and sea exploration. One point that we need to start off with, and I if you could explain it to us, how does pressure work in the ocean? Because this is something lethal, and this is something that it really is what we say in the military, it's the long pole in the tent. And it is the major obstacle that you have to deal with or that anyone has to deal with when they are exploring the ocean. So can you explain that to us in layman's terms about pressure underwater?

Dr James Bellingham :

Pressure in this case refers to sort of the force that the body of water that you're submersed in exerts on you. And uh we call it a hydrostatic pressure. It's it's a static pressure and it push pushes in on all of your surfaces. If you're trying to put people into the ocean, certain parts of the human body are not particularly compressible. So, you know, we're made mostly of water, and so the parts of us that are water tend to not, you know, they'll shrink a little bit under pressure, but not a lot. But where we have airvoids, air is very compressible. And so airvoids tend to be the parts of us that would, for example, as you go down deep, you would feel the most pain associated with that pressure pushing in. So you have air inside of your ears, and as you were to go down, say a little more than 30 feet in the ocean, you would basically double the pressure, the atmospheric pressure. And you can kind of think of that as if I took a balloon from the surface and I took it down to 33 feet, it would be half the size, right? It would shrink half the size because all of that water pressure would push in and cause it to shrink. If I were to take it down instead of to 33 feet, if I were to uh take it down to 330 feet, right, then you would have, in effect, 10 times that pressure, and that and that sphere would shrink yet again. And so as a consequence, things with airvoids in them shrink a lot under pressure. And of course, the ocean is very deep, right? If you think about Mount Everest at 33,000 feet, it's it, you know, you could drop it into the ocean and there would be nothing above water as it settled to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. So you get the impression that the amount of pounds per square inch, which is how we measure pressure, increases roughly one atmosphere or 15 pounds per square inch for every 30, roughly 33 feet. The consequence, you go down there to that full ocean depth, which now you're talking about depths which are many miles down, then those pressures uh can be 6,000 pounds per square inch, even 11,000 pounds per square inch at the deepest uh in the deepest parts of the ocean. And and so these uh these pressures are really uh prohibitive, right, in terms of humans functioning there. For us, you know, you'll get you'll feel pain in your ear, right, if you don't equalize, if you don't equalize pressure, even if at a few feet water's depth. And as you go deeper in the ocean, other physiological changes occur in in your body. So, for example, carbon dioxide from your lungs will get pushed into your bloodstream, and so you'll have higher levels of carbon dioxide in your body, and those will end up in your tissues, which is not really a problem when you're adept. When you come to the surface, all that carbon dioxide wants to go back to its gaseous form and it causes a phenomena called the bends, which is incredibly painful for divers and can cause physical damage. So this is why you have uh depressurization when divers have to come to the surface. As you go deeper, uh nitrogen starts acting differently in your body, and it acts a bit like a narcotic. So for divers, you know, if you're breathing an air mixture, a normal air mixture, it's 70% nitrogen, and we, you know, refer to it as sort of one martini, you know, per 50 feet, roughly. So every time you go down, you know, it's kind of like you're getting a little bit drunker. By the time you're at 300 feet, you're pretty toasted. And uh, you know, there's stories of divers trying to give their regulators to fishes and things like that that go on at those depths. So they then switch to mixed gases. So the story is for people to go into the ocean, that pressure causes a range of challenges to us, depending on how much further you go. And you have to do more and more sophisticated things to adapt. And even then, there's limits as to as to how far that uh the deepest uh you can dive. And when you go down there, by the way, one of the big challenges coming back, because you've done all this adaptation, you're mixing, you're breathing mixed gases, and now to come back to the surface, you kind of have to reverse all that process. And you'll see in movies people living in these compression chambers where basically they come up, go into this chamber, which keeps them at that higher pressure, and they slowly let that pressure bleed off to let them equilibrate to back to atmospheric pressure. And so that's why we have submarines, right? Things which allow us to keep working at normal atmospheric pressures at depth. But of course, that means those submarines have to be strong enough not to crush under those external pressures, right? This becomes the engineering problem of keeping humans alive underwater. And it's one of the reasons why robots are so attractive. Because number one, you know, we can cut corners and if something bad happens, we haven't killed people. And number two, it's easier to make small things hold up to that pressure than it is big things. So it's one of the drivers. You're right. So absolutely right.

Michele McAloon:

Right. Interesting, be and I hate to be macabre, but you what happened with the ocean quest in 20, I think it was 2023, that it went down to go see the Titanic and had people and it exploded, right? Down.

Dr James Bellingham :

Yeah, or imploded. Yes, you're right. So the ocean, yes, this is the ocean gate Titan submersible. One of the things that happens, right, when you build things to go underwater. Um, so have you ever scuba dived or snorkeled? Sure, yeah. Yeah, so when you know that when you go down, one of the things are is sort of in our normal state, we're a bit buoyant, right? So we want to float to the surface. When you're down on the bottom of a swimming pool or doing a shallow snorkel dive, right? You know, the air in your lungs and everything want to drag you back. And so you have to kick your fins to stay down. Now, you can balance that by putting on lead weights, and those lead weights will hold you at depth. And that's what a scuba diver does. And a lot of scuba diving is meaning what we call neutral buoyancy. And what that is is it's kind of get the combination of weights and air and your buoyancy compensator to the right level. So you don't want to float, but you don't want to sink. For underwater vehicles, it's the same thing. You want your underwater vehicle to be neutrally buoyant. If it's not neutrally buoyant, then it's going to be burning energy the whole time. It's kind of like flying like a helicopter underwater, either keeping itself from bobbing to the surface or sinking to the bottom. And by the way, the first one's a lot better than the last one, right? If you want things to fail, you want them to go to the back of the surface, right? So here's the problem. The problem is to make something which will hold those pressures at bay and not crush, as you go deeper and deeper, requires a thicker and thicker pressure vessel. And eventually you get to the point, depending on the material you're using, if it's steel, it's pretty soon. It's like at a thousand meters or so. Uh that pressure vessel weighs more than the water it displaces. Archimedes' principle the buoyancy you generate is equal to the weight of the water you displace. If you weigh more than that, you're going to sink. That means you don't even have any payload to carry batteries or passengers or all of the other things that you need to take with you, the motors for propelling it and all of the navigation systems. So, what you want is you want your pressure vessel to be light enough that it displaces ideally much more water than it weighs. And that will give you sort of the ability to pack it with batteries and people. That was a challenge the Ocean Gate folks had. They're going down to about 4,000 meters, which is about the depth of the Titanic. And they needed to have a very light pressure vessel, and it needed to be a cylinder because they wanted to take a lot of people. What this meant was uh the normal materials don't work for that. The normal materials you could make a vehicle like that, but it'll be really big. It'll be bigger than they could see realistically getting on and off a ship. It just wasn't a feasible economic solution.

Michele McAloon:

It would have to be a submarine size.

Dr James Bellingham :

I mean, uh, yeah, you'd end up with something really big. And so the story is they said, well, you know what, if if we use these other materials, these other specialty materials, we can make a pressure vessel which is light enough that we can do all of these great things. And so what they did was they decided they would take a material which is very widely used, for example, in aviation, which are which is basically a carbon fiber uh composite. It's little fibers of this carbon, basically thread, right, encased in epoxy. Now that is super strong in tension, right? If you put these carbon fibers are very strong if you try to pull them, right? It doesn't matter how strong the string is, right? If you push it, it's a string, right? It collapses on itself. So the only reason that it has any strength under compression is if the surrounding epoxy matrix holds it straight. What you're doing is you're making a pressure vessel that depends very greatly on your being able to lay these little threads up in a way that they'll stay bound to the epoxy. And that external pressure won't cause them to pop loose. And I can tell you that there's experience with this. So I actually did a bunch of testing of uh pressure vessels on behalf of a company that was interested in making a robot which would have a carbon fiber pressure vessel. And I I do not know how many pressure vessels we collapsed in the case. Really? Wow. Okay. Wow. And these things would come out as dust, right? When they would implode, it would be such a violent implosion that you would just have shrapnel and dust left after the pressure vessel had collapsed. So they had an idea which looked really good on paper. It was really problematic from the perspective of making a real pressure vessel. And so this was this was the challenge of a tech company, right? You take on some risk by moving to an advanced tech. And normally, you know, if things fail, you can find another solution or whatever. They were very committed. Their entire business model was really structured around this. They had a very tough time walking away from it. So he had a series of people who recognized this wasn't working. They ended up leaving the company. He fired them. If you spoke up, he just got rid of you. Uh, there's a whole uh Coast Guard report on this out, by the way, which is, I think, a couple hundred pages long. It makes fascinating reading. So these things are all released for public consumption. It was tragic, right? So he built a pressure vessel that wasn't safe, and then he didn't store it properly. He stored it in a wet environment. This wet environment, if you can imagine the epoxy being a little porous, right, as the water gets in, and if you're in winter, right, it freezes and thaws and freezes. And so the same thing that happens to your road, right? When you break the road up, as water gets into the road in winter and you get potholes. Well, this is the same thing you worry about happening with a pressure vessel like this that has the ability to wick moisture into its interior. And in fact, uh the failure occurred on the really the first deep dive after that winter storage. So he kind of ignored all of the warning signs. He also avoided, in the maritime industry, we have uh pretty good regulatory processes for building ships, for building underwater vehicles. And there's a number of different organizations you can choose to work with on achieving sort of community-approved levels of safety. And he avoided those. He felt that they were too conservative and they would slow him down. And uh, so he paid the price. This is kind of what we talk about a lot in the book is this tension between going fast and you know doing sort of the responsible thing. In some senses, you know, we have similar challenges in terms of managing our interactions with the ocean as well, but it's kind of a human story.

Michele McAloon:

But you really show the arc of, so you start off, I think it was in what, 1992, 1993, you had your first AUV, autonomous underwater vehicle. It was really kind of limited, and you talk about, you know, it's it ends up in some place you don't know where it is, and this is all in the Antarctic. Two, now you have networks of AUVs that are out there. So that's been a pretty quick time span, what, 20, 30 years now?

Dr James Bellingham :

Um yeah, about I guess about 35 years. I hate to say it, but yeah.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, so you really have so what the advantage of a marine robot is is one, it can go deeper, you can make it smaller, and it doesn't have people, right? And also really interesting, it doesn't have a wire. Why is that important?

Dr James Bellingham :

That's yeah, yeah. First of all, uh another thing, like you said, you know, pressure, one of those big driving factors for designers of underwater vehicles. Another one is the fact that radio waves don't penetrate seawater. So seawater is a conductor. So think about all of the things that you depend on for radio waves. We use it for Wi-Fi in our house. It's how we connect things. To know where we are, we connect to the GPS system. We connect to it with our mobile phones. So kind of so much of our connected lifestyles depends on being able the fact that radio waves can go through air. Well, imagine all of those disappearing. So as soon as our robot goes underwater, it has no radio connection to the outside world. It cannot connect to those GPS systems. And so you can't do, you can't build drones like the drones that people will fly around, which have little Wi-Fi connections, right? And so they can sort of see what the drone is seeing and they can fly it. All of those things are really impossible in the underwater environment unless you have a wire attached. So what happens is the initial underwater robots uh that were really used uh widely in the underwater world all had uh tethers. And these tethers range from, you know, pretty small to something about the size of a garden hose for larger vehicles that might go down to depths of, say, four miles, four mile uh operational depths. They carry electrical power down and they allow us to command them and they allow us to see what the robot is seeing. Now, the problem is that tether connects you to a ship, and that ship is really expensive. Yeah. And so and so what happens is you have this really marvelous robot out there, but you still have this very expensive ship with all of the people on board, maybe in very rough weather. And so, what you'd really like to do is, you know, your robot's not a low-cost robot if it requires a high-cost ship to run it. So if you really want to bring the cost down, if you want to make this economically feasible and you want the ocean to be really accessible, you got to figure out a way to, in effect, operate independent of ships. And so cutting the tether became a bit of a mantra for our community. There was a fellow Dick Blidberg back in the 70s and 80s, who used to make these buttons that said cut the tether. And they were, and in order to do that, we had to make robots that could take care of themselves, that knew how to navigate in the underwater environment, they could figure out where they are. And back in those days, that was all stuff we dreamed of having, not something that you could go and pick up a catalog and order. So all of these things had to be developed along the way and actually still are being developed, right? Because these are tough problems. So there's this whole interconnected story in the technology world of different people contributing to making these capabilities possible by developing these different pieces, right? And those of us who build vehicles are kind of sitting at the point where we're pulling them all together and building larger systems and then deploying them against various exciting missions that you might do out in the ocean.

Michele McAloon:

Something very interesting in your book, and I didn't realize this only 26% of the ocean floor is actually mapped. That seems incredible. That is, and and this is what these AUVs are doing. They're mapping the ocean floor. That's teeny. Yeah.

Dr James Bellingham :

It's amazing, right? We like to say that we have better maps of the surface of the moon and Mars than we have of the world's oceans. And it it gets even worse if you think about imagery. So, what fraction of the seafloor have we actually seen via video or cameras? And the best guess there are something like 0.001%.

Michele McAloon:

That's amazing. What do we not know? Isn't that interesting?

Dr James Bellingham :

Yeah. I mean, we if you asked, well, I'm going to go and I'm going to visit North America. I'll visit it only at night because the bottom of the ocean is dark, right? So I'm only going to visit at night and I'll only visit 0.001% of North America. Do you think you'd see a bear? Do you think you'd see, you know, do you think you'd see gophers? You know, what do you, what would you see? And what would you have missed? What part of this story would be completely opaque to you because you'd only seen such a small fraction? So I think to me and to most of us working in this field, it's this is what makes it so exciting, right? You know, if the ocean was already mapped and we knew everything about it, I'd go find something else to do. But, you know, this is sort of a period of incredible discovery in this marvelous part of the world. It covers most of the world, right? We're mostly a blue planet. It's 70% of our planet, and we've only seen this very small fraction of it. So there just has to be exciting new stuff out there that we'll we'll discover. And in fact, new organisms are being discovered all the time. It's a great time.

Michele McAloon:

I even on the surface, I've been a fisher, I've been a fisher person my whole life, a fisherman my whole life. You know what? And I'm always pulling up stuff that like, what what's that? You know, so I mean, and the family lore of fishing, and like, oh, you know, no one knows what this thing is, and this is in shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico. So I really liked crab. That's what I really like to do.

Dr James Bellingham :

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, that's a Baltimore thing, you know. That's what at least for Baltimore, you know, we think of our blue crab as that's right.

Michele McAloon:

That's what there we go. The blue crabs. But most of the innovation in the uh in understanding the sea has actually come through a lot of sort of tragedy and mishap. I was surprised actually looking at the bottom of the sea or trying to prove that it was not exoic. The HMS Challenger, it was from archaeologists, right? And it was the first time that they believed that there was something at the bottom of the sea, because at a certain depth, below that depth, people believed there was nothing at the bottom of the sea.

Dr James Bellingham :

Yeah, so this is yeah, this is kind of the history in a way of of discovery, right? You know, you've never been there, and so you assume there's nothing there. So if you look at early maps of the seafloor, they're flat. I picked up various maps all along the way, old atlases, for example. And it's fascinating, right? Because of course you have large fractions of the planet are actually quite well mapped, even you know, in the 1800s. You know, those are the terrestrial parts, and then you come to the ocean and it's completely boring. Well, that's actually backwards, right, in a way. The seafloor, there are the abyssal plains, and the abyssal plains cover about, you know, about half of the planet. But the largest mountain range, basically, the largest volcanic mountain range actually is on the seafloor, and it spans all the way from the Arctic Ocean through Iceland, down through the middle of the North Atlantic, down through the South Atlantic, makes a right turn under Africa, goes into the Indian Ocean, takes a little jog, sort of makes a fake towards Antarctica, then sweeps up through the Pacific Ocean and comes ashore about around Baja California. And it goes under the North American continent and then it pops out a little bit off of Seattle and Oregon. And that is the place where new seafloor is being created. So it's kind of ironic, right? But if you think about what is the youngest part of our planet, the youngest part of our planet is actually being created right now at these volcanic hotspots. It's where combination of mantle circulation and a very thin crust is allowing this magma to come up to the level of the seafloor where it encounters water and it cools down and it pushes literally these ocean plates apart. In the Atlantic, the spreading rate is a few centimeters a year. It goes anywhere from one to five centimeters a year, sort of depending on where you are. And those are literally what are pushing the continents, which are kind of light fluffy rock riding on top of this heavier basement, which is basically seafloor. And where it goes down under the continents is a lot of times where you get a lot of volcanic and earthquake activity, like along the west coast of the U.S., all those volcanoes through, you know, Oregon and Washington State, and then all around the Ring of Fire through Alaska and the western Pacific, those are all sort of driven by this creation of seafloors. So the oldest seafloor is, you know, somewhere around 300 million years old, whereas you think about the oldest rocks on the continents as being about, well, billions of years old, perhaps for some of the oldest, oldest rocks that have have been found on land. So these are things that you kind of wouldn't realize that all the all the action is undersea. And of course, that action is connected to just wild new forms of life, many of which weren't discovered until recently.

Michele McAloon:

So Yeah, you talk about the wild the life around the vents that Yeah, so this is a fabulous story, right?

Dr James Bellingham :

In the late 70s, a group of geologists, and this includes Bob Ballard, the fellow who founded Titanic, had this puzzle they were trying to figure out. And the puzzle they were trying to figure out was if you calculate the rate of cooling of the earth, right? Because the, you know, the earth you sort of notionally think was a molten ball at one point, and then it gradually cooled down. And so you should be seeing cooling from the interior of the earth at a certain, at a certain rate. And in land, you kind of see it. They call it the lapse rate, as you take a drill hole and you drill into the earth. At some point, the temperatures start getting higher. And deep oil drill holes, for example, can be very hot. It's one of the things that you have to build electronics, special electronics that will survive at the high temperatures down at the bottom of those oil wells. Now in the ocean, it turns out that we weren't seeing or they weren't seeing the same levels of cooling. So they weren't seeing the heat coming out of the interior of the planet. And one hypothesis was well, maybe it's all coming out in special spots. And so they went out to a particular area, East Pacific Rise, looking to see if they could see places where there was perhaps warmer spots that might reflect this some release of heat from the interior of the Earth. And they found some. They found, and it turned out it wasn't a lot. They saw a few degree temperature change, but in the deep ocean, which is kind of the same everywhere, it was significant. And they happened to be in the area where Alvin was diving nearby. Alvin is the deep diving submersible that's operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic. It's a real workhorse of the scientific community. And they asked the folks over on the Alvin dive if they would go down and take a look and see what they saw. And the Alvin folks went down, and uh what they found was our first glimpse of hydrothermal vent sites. And so, to kind of appreciate the significance of this, you have to realize at that particular point in history, right? This is late 70s, we thought all life was driven by the sun. We thought that the sun drove photosynthesis, which converted sunlight into chemical energy. Plants did that, phytoplankton did that in the ocean, and then animals eat plants, and that powers our entire ecosystem. What happened when they went down to these spots, these are now, you know, two and a half kilometers, three kilometers, four kilometers down into the ocean, depending on where you are. They were visiting life forms which had never seen the sun, right? So they were born in the dark, they live in the dark, they die in the dark. They're not powered by the sun. It turns out what they're powered by was the heat coming out of the interior of the earth. So they had this microbial organisms down there that apparently facilitate this conversion of the heat and nutrients coming up in these hot water vents, which, by the way, can be very high, hundreds of degrees centigrade. And those feed these strange tube worms, these weird blind crabs, these shrimps with photoreceptors on their back, you know, strange-colored octopi. Uh, there's a it's it's a crazy world down there. And that became a major focus of study for scientists over the never next several decades because this was perhaps where life began on Earth. There's a lot of different hypotheses for it, but you know, this is one is that they they were actually born when the Earth was much more volcanic, and and this might have been sort of the most likely place for for those first microbes to begin to form.

Michele McAloon:

That's really cool. That's really let me ask you a question. If you went down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the seven mile that goes down, I think it's what, off the coast of the Philippines or off somewhere?

Dr James Bellingham :

No, Challenger Deep, yep.

Michele McAloon:

Okay. If you went down to the bottom of that thing, what I mean, what would your AUV see down there? It would be dark and cold. Is there life down there at the bottom of the There is life down there?

Dr James Bellingham :

There is life down there. So it it does tend to, when you get down to the the the abyssal plains, there's a lot of mud, and occasional, depending on where you are, some parts of the Pacific and the Abyssal Plains have, you know, little manganese nodules. They're things that kind of nucleate out of the high metal content, the relatively high metal content in the seawater. If you go down to the Mariana Trench, you do see organisms down there, but it's a place that's been visited so very little, we don't really have a clear picture of what the ecosystems are like down there. They cover maybe 1% or 2% of the surface, 1% of the earth, maybe, maybe 2% of the earth. These are what we call the hatal zones. And so we're really just beginning to explore those regions of the planet. But we do know from the few visits, which have been mostly by human-occupied vehicles, the first one was Trieste back in the 60s. Those we do know that there are animals down there. So there is life, even in the deepest part of the ocean or in the sediment, right? So that's kind of the thing, the thing that you find, right, when you go to these benthic ecosystems is there's a lot of stuff burrowing under the surface. So when you dig things up, you'll see things there, and you'll see microbial communities in the sediments as well, because in much of the ocean, although I've said that you know they never see the sun, it is true that things up at the sea surface do get powered by the sun and they die, and a lot of them end up on the seafloor. And so the seafloor tends to be where all of the debris, if you will, from life at the surface will eventually will eventually end up. And indeed, uh powers, in effect, part of the ecosystem down there. A colleague uh Bob Vereinhook, back in my Ambari days on the West Coast, uh, studied whale falls. So he would look at sort of the succession of organisms that would uh take over the carcass of an uh of a whale which had died and ended up on the seafloor and he'd go back and visit it over years and see how that carcass decayed and what organisms were coming there and colonizing it. It's a fascinating world.

Michele McAloon:

Professor Bellingham, how clear are your pictures that you're getting f on your AUVs? Can people go like to YouTube and see what you're looking at? Or is there a place where you're posting what is at the bottom of the sea?

Dr James Bellingham :

Well, so I would say that, you know, probably for for folks, some of the most exciting things to look at, and I definitely was excited about this for a while. Well still am. I just not working on them at the moment, but shipwrecks. Right? You know, shipwrecks are kind of snapshots of history from the past, sometimes the near past, sometimes the distant past, that fall to the seafloor and are kind of preserved, you know, preserved for us to discover them for the future. And so one of the things robots are doing are allowing us to s discover all of these shipwrecks and things that have fallen to the seafloor. And early on when you took pictures of this, you got very flat black photographic maps, which you know, kind of if you looked at the pictures, it was hard to make out what you were looking at, right? You know, it's like, oh yeah, that's sort of the side of a ship. And shipwrecks in shallow water, by the way, get overtaken by biologics. I had a good friend who is a marine archaeologist. He took me to one of his sites in the dry tortugas. And so we would go out swimming over the bottom and I would go, well, it looks like all coral to me. And he would go, no, no, no. You know, he'd you say, you know, you can see there's he would start pointing things out and you realize, oh, wait a minute, those are ballast rocks. Oh, that's the shape of a ship. Oh, if I look down between the coral heads here, I can see part of the hull. And you know, you just had to be an expert to see it. In some places on the seafloor, these things are just sitting there still intact. And two great ones where they've taken modern visualization technology and begun to create full 3D reconstructions of them are the Titanic, which National Geographic now has a data set that that they're putting out and and the endurance. And the endurance was Shackleton's ship. So if you haven't read this, this is like one of the great adventure stories of all time. Endurance is a book by uh by Lansing and uh it's a story of this Arctic exploration group. They're on their way to Antarctica and they're going to try to cross Antarctica from one side to another since uh the Norwegians managed to manage to get to the the pole first so they figure, well, they'll do a crossing. Well they get stuck on the ice on the way there, their ships get gets crushed and you would think that would be all over they would all die. They're on you know the far side of the planet no one's going to come and help them how are they possibly going to get out of there and they manage to survive and it's an incredible story. Everyone survives in it, right? Not to ruin the end. But you know there's like multiple stages along there when they should have all died but Shackleton who is the leader somehow manages to pull things out and keep them all going and keep the team cohesive. It's a great story. And of course the ship captain there was a great navigator and they were beside the ship when it sank and he had plenty of time to navigate it in so we knew exactly where it was and so a group went down there found that ship and then documented it and it was pretty pristine on the bottom with you know riggings still up. So these are kind of fabulous you know fabulous discoveries and snapshots sort of our past in this case our exploration past kind of frozen in time down there on the seafloor. So I will tell you by the way if people want to see imagery from the ocean pretty much every oceanographic institution around the world has cruises going on at any given time. So I was you know just back in Mbari and a lot of my colleagues were headed off to the Arctic. Mbari's Monterey Monterey Monterey yeah and so they were so they were uh going up on a actually uh as ride alongs on a Korean ship typically when a cruise like this happens people post things and they get posted back on the oceanographic institution sites and so people and and they there's nothing hidden about this they're kind of sharing this news everyone's excited about it and you know they might be on a Facebook page they'll probably be on the institutional webpage if you go look and see you know what's going on at Woods Hole, they'll probably have news from whoever's at sea and whatever Alvin Cruz is out now. This stuff is kind of all over the place. And I will say NOAA has something where they have an ROV that they take down and dive their ocean exploration group will run those video feeds live so people can literally sort of watch while this ROV is on the bottom and hear hear the ROV drivers talking with the scientists and people speculating about you know what the organism is and what they're seeing. And like anything there's long periods of boredom uh and then something exciting happens you know so yeah so you are you're the president of a company of Bluefin right? I well at one time so I I co-founded Bluefin with a friend uh back in my MIT days we sold it it's now uh part of General Dynamics and I was actually only president for a short period it became very clear to me early on that Frank my my close friend was the better guy to be president we had a big fight over that each of us thought the other one should be president and uh I won't flufin was basically you were making AUVs right for commercial for commercial use I think for the Navy too for the oil industry for different purposes right this was sort of at a period where the AUVs that were being built by my laboratory at MIT so I was at MIT at the time they were getting in demand and I was you know the Navy was asking me to build them for other research groups so I had done that for a bit. When you're a researcher you want to go build the next vehicle you don't want to keep building the last vehicle and so we realized at some point that well maybe we should just commercialize this. In fact I will say the Navy was very strongly I I want to say in support but it was more like they were twisting my arm. This is all great stuff we're like you know we're we're glad we funded it but now we need to be able to buy it. You know we can't keep doing that from your lab so you know get off your butt Bellingham and start a company. Okay. You know it didn't go exactly like that was kind of came across so the O and Rice of Naval Research has really been responsible for the creation a lot of of a lot of the advanced technology and so virtually all of the early AUV groups ours was one of the first but there were several more that came along after that came out of projects which were funded by O and R. And then O and R helped uh smooth the road to turning those into commercial entities and in a current commercial entity of course you can take on all of the problems of you know you take that one product and you make it really good and really reliable and you worry about service and you worry about you know having a back you know all of the parts and you know you do all of the things that you would never want to do if you're in a research environment. So that was a a great period of my life which I learned a great deal about you know you always think you're the smartest kid on the block when you've invented something that everyone wants and then you realize that you realize that no there's there's been a there's a lot of value. You know it's it these things take a team right they take a they take you know a group of people who've been through the manufacturing route that understand service that you understand how to finance companies you know it's it's a big enterprise and the technology is this part of it.

Michele McAloon:

Right. We're always smarter together than we are in the indeed yeah we just really are well okay let me ask you I want to there's two things I want to ask you. Deepwater horizon this was uh when was that 2010 when the BP is that right when the BP oil spill happened and it happened the Gulf Coast. I mean it it affected us personally because I have a house on a barrier island in the Gulf Coast. It's called Dolphin Island. I I realize you're not a marine biologist, but where did all the oil go? We never saw it. I mean that was the weird thing about that.

Dr James Bellingham :

Yes you know sort of the big question through much of that period. So I will say so my boss uh who had recruited me to go to Mbari, Marsha McNutt uh so she was a president of Mbari for I don't know the first seven or eight years I was there, maybe longer than that, maybe first 10 years I was there. Uh and then she went off to head up USGS and became chief scient chief scientist for the Department of Commerce and she became the administration's point person in Houston for the whole response effort. And and so through her we you know we would get requests of not for support, just for information. Through that we got exposed very early on to the fact that they were struggling with understanding how much oil was coming out of the seafloor. Right. It took them a very long time to really get a handle on that. There was an early estimate made by some folks who kind of specialized in understanding you know reservoir dynamics and they did some sort of first principle calculations which led to very high estimates. And then sort of initial attempts to measure it came in with much lower numbers. And what happened was is the measurements got better and better and better. Eventually there was a fellow Rich Camelli at Woods Hole who really managed to figure to figure this out they basically ended up matching that original sort of first principle calculation and you're right you know one of the problems was you could look at how much oil was making it to the surface and it wasn't all that oil. So where was the rest of the oil? And it turned out that a lot of that oil was mixing into the water column at depth. We actually very early on sent out one of the vehicles that I had had a role in developing early at Umbari so a vehicle called Dorado and Dorado had these water samplers on board and so the idea was to go down deep and see if you could find evidence of oil at depth which you can detect with a a a special fluorescent sensor and then take water samples of it and bring it to the surface. And we had already developed all of the technologies to do that largely attempting to to characterize phytoplankton in the upper water column. So we had all of the pieces we just had never done that and Yan Wu Zhang who's one of my close colleagues went out there. He had developed most of that software he was out there while they ran that and they got a number of samples down deep. Now the problem was and this is a little speculative on on my part I don't know exactly what was going on internally in way of decision making process but basically our samples got tied up for a very long time. So we didn't get to analyze them because we were collaborating with some other entities out there to you know have for ship access and everything. And you know part of the problem was that if you looked ahead to the liability that you were going to have on you know that liability was probably going to be proportional in some sense to the amount of oil that came out. There was certainly an incentive for that number to be lower, right? And if less of it was getting to the surface and a bunch of it was ending up at depth then that, you know, you'd rather not talk about all that oil that was left left at depth. But there was a large effort that ended up funded by BP, the Gomery effort, which which looked at all of these issues and funded science for exploring this I I wasn't part of it, but a a lot of colleagues really worked in this area in this oil spill, you know, understanding what the consist of the oil spill was both on the shoreline and the coastal areas and also in the deep ocean. And one of the things that it appeared to happen is there were quite a few things down there that metabolized oil, right? Because you know this is an area where oil actually seeps naturally from the seafloors. Right. So it's not that there's never any oil there. Right. Right. This is just a lot of it in a very short period of time. So you you can imagine that those parts of the ecosystem thought thought they had died and gone to heaven. Uh and uh Wow meanwhile it's choking out every meanwhile it's choking out everything everything else. But you know those are the things it's crazy right because you don't understand them. You don't actually know what the right ways are to respond. Poor people out there who are first responders are like should you know should we at put the additives into the effluent from the bottom which is going to cause the oil to break up and go into solution or is that all going to make things worse? There's strong arguments on both sides of that, right? And so those are things that if you don't have the scientific foundation you're guessing and you might guess wrong and we do guess wrong at doing the best you can. Again, you know the science is something you want done ahead of time.

Michele McAloon:

You don't want to be doing it after the fact absolutely and you know when I stand on my beach in Dauphin Island I can look out and I can see I can see five or six oil rigs, natural grass gas rigs and we you know we understand the nation needs them but we need them to it needs to be safe too for for everything that makes the beach wonderful and and beautiful and to support the sea life. One last question what happened to Malaysia Airlines what happened to that one you actually uh bring that out in your book because you guys there there was some sea discovery on that and you a lot of lessons learned from that.

Dr James Bellingham :

Yeah once again we probably learned more about the ocean than we learned about the Malaysian airliner from all of that because uh that was an enormous search effort. So what happened was that Malaysian airliner disappeared over the Indian Ocean it's never been clear why the the aircraft has never been found uh bits and pieces of it have washed ashore uh on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean by the way so it is seems very likely that it ended up that it did in fact end up in the ocean but despite us deploying the best technology that we have for searching the seafloor we haven't found it. And early on that best technology kind of consisted of a number of ships and one AUV. So Bluefin, our old company was testing a vehicle I think in Hawaii at the time. And so it was a vehicle that was it was going through what we call acceptance tests prior to being delivered for a customer. And we realized that well, you know we could actually mobilize the vehicle and get it out on site in the Indian Ocean very quickly the customer agreed the vehicle was mobilized and went out there. So this is kind of a vehicle that's still it's a very young vehicle shall we say and then there were a lot of ships looking out there as well a number of problems in the early phases of the search but one of them was just our maps of the area out there were terrible. The place where the vehicle was deployed was the place where they most thought it was most likely the aircraft had gone down. They thought they were hearing acoustic pings from it. It turned out that was later erroneous the vehicle in fact was in water depths that were a half a mile deeper than they that than the chart said they should be and in fact deeper than the depth rating for the vehicle fortunately the vehicle is smart enough. Yeah you know the operators tried to kill it but it had safety things put in so it comes back to the surface and the engineers decide that uh there's enough safety margin that uh that it can go all the way down but uh they didn't find anything and by the end of the search uh they were searching with as many as eight AUVs eight of these robots at a time building these fabulous uh never before maps of never before parts seen parts of the seafloor again it's a story where ah we thought that was kind of a boring area a little bit of relief it turns out it's it's fabulous it's uh mountains, canyons it's a very geologically rich environment down there which is virtually completely unexplored uh which which for the first time we you know had these fabulous maps of it's a shame that it takes a loss of an aircraft like the Malaysian airliner to do that but it is on the other hand good that something good came out of it.

Michele McAloon:

Something good came out of it yeah oh wow well one quick question what's the what's the future where do you see this going? You talk about possibly space exploration and and there's a lot with the you're right there's a lot between NASA and and the ocean and where do you see in your lifetime of where this going to well so you know the dream is that we'll have an ocean full of robots and these robots will be observing the ocean in a you know an environmentally friendly way.

Dr James Bellingham :

You know a lot of our techniques involve leaving instrumentation behind. We don't leave our robots behind we go get them back. So the idea is we will have much better maps of the ocean we'll have a chance to observe the ocean in ways that we couldn't you know 10 or 20 years ago and that we will finally begin to be able to run even perhaps simple experiments, scientific experiments like a biologist would run in a laboratory, we'll be able to do those in the ocean and begin to unravel these microbial communities. And what that would lead to is some level of predictive skill where we could predict how the ocean would change to for example warming surface temperatures or increasing acidification. And we wouldn't have to kind of guess and extrapolate from the few data points we have. Beginning to fill in that picture of a scientific understanding of the ocean just by being there and observing it and being being able to run these experiments, I think would be an enormous contribution to human understanding and to making a human life on the planet more prosperous and safer. So I think that's the thing that we've all been working towards and we do expect to have some fun along the way. You know there are some absolutely fabulous experiments particularly with biologists right you know I'm a physicist but I got very enamored of microbes. I have to say if I was starting my career again I would probably be all about microbes. You know they're that they're they're just so cool right as living organisms so prevalent right the ocean is literally alive right every drop of ocean has tens to hundreds of thousands of these little critters in it transforming it chemically the whole chemical makeup of our planet would be different if they went away I find that that whole story really exciting and then you're right this all carries to space right it would be a longer story to tell but the the short version is we now know there are big, big oceans under that icy shell of Europa out around Jupiter. Yeah that was interesting in your book Enceladus on Titan maybe even on Pluto and those places probably have hydrothermal vents down on the seafloors under them and maybe they have life like we do at our hydrothermal vents. So maybe there's life to be discovered in these oceans in the outer solar system around the gas giants. It's kind of crazy you know again you know if you were to go back to the 60s that would be the realm of crazy science fiction like the kind of science fiction no one would believe. Who would have thought there's oceans out there but yeah ocean exploration is going to move to space is what's going to happen. And uh that's another a fabulous challenge and source of exciting new science for the next uh probably several generations.

Michele McAloon:

I tell you I'm so glad there's people like you in this world that are smart and have the curiosity to ask why, to ask how do we do this to ask hey let's go out and see it. You are an explorer in every sense of the word that we've seen over from the Vikings and the their little dugout canoes going across the ocean. You are truly an explorer and that is it's an amazing to be able to talk to you. This book folks is good. It's a short book it's not a hard read it's called How are marine robots shaping our future by James Bellingham and it really is a good book. It's got pictures in it you've got you know there's a few little there's a lot of tidbits in it that you don't know about the ocean. I really encourage everybody to to read the book it's put out by John Hopkins their wavelengths it's their university press it's really good. Dr. Bellingham I really thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule and you are a busy man from your book to talk about your book and I hope if you uh produce anything in the future you stay in touch with us especially if you find something like really fabulous down on the bottom you know a finding Nemo type creature.

Dr James Bellingham :

So we would love you are so kind thank you it's been a pleasure it's been a pleasure chatting with you. As you figured out it's hard to shut me up I I love this stuff.

The Beatles:

That's all right oh my gosh you have so much to talk about but thank you sir you bet in the town where I was born lived the man who sailed to sea and he told us of his life in the land of submarine so we stay to the start till we found yellow stops on the submarine we have a submarine we have a submarine we all independent submarine we have a submarine