Four Examples of New Data Shedding Light on Our Oceans
In order to administer first aid, you must first expose the wound.
In wilderness first aid, there is a series of steps to follow when you arrive on the scene. While the first ones, the ABCs, are related to addressing those immediate, life-threatening variables of breathing and bleeding to death, you eventually get down, expose the wound, and take a look at what's really going on.
Sometimes, the problem is apparent when you arrive on the scene. Other times, you have to look under a shirt and… whoa.
I've had a chance to put some basic wilderness first aid education into practice by volunteering with my local search and rescue group. This idea of exposing the wound is a crazy one.
After all, maybe you've got a person who seems to be doing okay, but when you go through the checklist and it's time to take a look, you better be ready.
Given the vastness of our oceans, it has been challenging to expose the wound. There are simply so many people and activities happening that it is mind-boggling.
The technology to monitor them all is still evolving and is not available to everyone, even every government.
The earliest images came from melting ice, those profoundly impactful before-and-after photos of polar ice caps and glaciers. But today, the data is beginning to pour in, and machine learning and AI are helping to process it all.
As with first aid, we're finally able to expose the wound. Sometimes it's nothing, and sometimes it's worse than expected.
From oil spills and methane detection to the worst sources of plastic pollution, tracing illegal fishing activities to mapping the ocean floor, here are some examples where new data and the tools and computing power to process it give us a much better understanding of the wound.
And while it might make us a little queasy by the scope of it, there's no way we can properly treat the problem without taking a look.
Where the Oil is Dumped
"If unscrupulous ships' crews and owners think they can get away with dumping oil in certain parts of the world they'll do it"
~Retired US coastguard Rear Admiral Fred Kenney
When we think of oil slicks, we think of an accident that led to an oil tanker discharging its cargo into the ocean. These are certainly terrible environmental events and make for disturbing imagery.
But they are actually less of a source of oil in our oceans than normal shipping operations.
There are a number of ways in which vessels accumulate oil-contaminated waste. Cheap fuel is filtered before being fed into engines, resulting in the remaining sludge, or oil leaking from an engine can build up in the hull. Oil tankers may also wash cargo tanks between loads, or fill empty ones for ballast, producing oily water that needs disposal.
+Climate graphic of the week: World’s worst hotspot for oil pollution by ships - FT
There are rules about things like this at a macro, industrial level, but identifying offenders has been next to impossible for most of history—until now.
This graphic in the FT provided by data monitoring company SkyTruth shows that, while oil slicks are a pervasive problem, one place stands out from the crowd.
In this case, Indonesia had more incidents than the following four countries combined.
Additionally, by tracking the vessel's activities, it can be determined whether dumping was likely intentional.
Where the Plastic Really Comes From
In 2021, The Ocean Cleanup published a report detailing its findings on where ocean plastic comes from. The non-profit, at that time more well known for its videos scooping up massive amounts of plastic from the Great Garbage Patch, had evolved from cleaning up oceans to stopping them from being polluted in the first place.
They needed to understand where the plastic was coming from to do that. The prevailing wisdom was that ten rivers contributed to the majority of ocean plastic, but the new, peer-reviewed study found that the number was way off.
They found that 1,000 rivers contributed about 80% of the plastic destined for our oceans.
Without taking the time to examine the wound completely, The Ocean Cleanup would not have had all the information it needed to deploy its new Interceptors properly.
This culture of research is taking plastic detection at the group to the next step. They are now developing the technology to detect ocean plastic from space, a crucial step in finding pollution not close to shores or visible to the naked eye.
Tracking the Untracked
I've talked about Global Fishing Watch quite a bit here. It is just so obvious from the first time you see their tracking data, including fishing activities without any transponders operating that it is a game-changer in monitoring offshore fishing activities.
Their tools have been evolving quickly over the last few years and the implications of the data are astounding. In January of this year, they published a study finding that 75% of industrial fishing vessels are not tracked.
Their tools are moving beyond fishing and are being used to map all sorts of activity at sea. Visualizing their data in this way is critical in telling the story of activity of our oceans when the numbers themselves are just too large to comprehend.
Mapping the Seafloor
It is often said that we know more about space than our oceans. While this is debatable, the reality is that while oceans cover 70% of our planet, most of these areas are unexplored.
But that is changing rapidly.
Saildrone has developed wind and solar-powered drone boats that can drift across our oceans, collecting and transmitting data for months and years at a time. As the video below highlights, they are even being used to map the bottom of our oceans.
The dramatic reduction in the cost of this mapping technology is rapidly accelerating our ability to collect previously unknown data about our oceans and the seabed.
And a side affect of all of this technology?
+It's a Golden Age for Shipwreck Discoveries. - NYTimes
Sometimes, hard truths are difficult to swallow. There’s a part of us that doesn’t want to know what’s really going on. After all, 1,000 polluting rivers instead of 100 seems like a step back towards solving any problem.
But when it comes to improving our understanding of how commercial and other human activities are affecting our oceans, we can't rely on the "ignorance is bliss" model anymore.
Luckily, there are some amazing teams and companies working to shed light on the problems.