Ocean Exploration via Biomimicry

 

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In a previous post, we examined the benefits of design inspired by the principles of biomimicry. As a reminder, biomimicry is the practice of observing and then mimicking nature as a way of finding innovative solutions to human problems. Nature has often optimized solutions through many millennia of natural selection at work. Our task, then, is to take these solutions that are readily available and find ways to tweak and apply them to human problems. One such example that I want to explore is that of deep sea exploration.

The deep sea and the sea floor are the last (macroscopic) frontiers on earth. By some accounts, more than 80% of the oceans and sea beds remain unexplored and unmapped. To gain an idea of the complexity of the issue, we should start with a little history of ocean exploration. 

In the United States, the first coastal survey was performed beginning in 1807 after the authorization of the Coast Survey by President Thomas Jefferson. It wasn't until 1840 that Sir James Clark Ross of England took the first deep sea sounding in the south Atlantic. The Gulf Stream, a key factor in the moderate temperatures of western Europe, was finally mapped in 1860 following a 15 year mapping project by the US Coast Survey. Ocean exploration and our understanding of climate goes hand in hand, as the oceans act as a great moderator of the climate that we experience due to the high heat capacity of water.

From 1872-1878, the first modern bathymetric map was created following soundings taken by the Coast Survey in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately for us in the modern world, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) now produces an online and interactive bathymetric data viewer. It allows a user to delineate and download a digital elevation model (DEM) of the ocean floor as measured by sonar and lidar (pulsed laser measurements).

Following the early creations of bathymetric maps from high-density soundings, ocean research in the following several decades continued primarily through depth soundings, dredging of the sea floor, and temperature measurements. It wasn't until the 1920s that radio acoustic ranging came on the scene and more modern methods were developed in subsequent decades, such as sonar and, in the past two decades, lidar. To underscore the difficulty of comprehensive ocean exploration, then, it has only been in the past century that we have been able to take electronic measurements and only for the past several decades that we have been able to do so at scale. This setup helps to explain the current paucity of knowledge regarding the oceans, particularly the vast space been the surface and the floor. 

The above methods all represent remote ways of measuring the ocean. Sending a craft, especially a manned craft, is far more difficult due to the immense pressures reached under even a couple thousand meters of water. From the 1930s, we have been sending humans to increasing depths in increasingly rigid and thick-bodied diving craft. In 1960, the manned Trieste bathyscaphe reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, a depth of over 10,900 meters (over 35,800 feet). In keeping with design principles of the time, the Trieste had a 5-inch steel wall around the pressure sphere, a small plexiglass observation window, and a thinner exterior steel wall to contain the float liquid used for buoyancy. 

Our design principles for deep sea diving may be changing, however, as a team of researchers from Zhejiang University in China demonstrated in a 2021 paper in the journal Nature. The team designed an un-manned diving craft using principles inspired by the soft-bodied hadal snailfish. This translates to a diving craft design with a silicone body and dispersed electronics, thus allowing the electronic components of the craft to be spread out in the silicone body and not require the pressure resistance that a centralized system would necessitate. 

This approach allows the robot to operate as a deep sea organism does, with its body flexing and responding to changes in pressure, but remaining pliant enough to not be crushed by the immense pressures. The robot is propelled by electrical signals that convert into mechanical energy and induce a flapping motion in the "fins" of the craft. Think along the lines of how the electrical current makes Batman's cloth cape rigid in Batman Begins.

The robot was subsequently tested in the South China Sea to a stated depth of 3,200 meters and was later tested in the Mariana Trench, though the final achieved depth was not stated. And while it is noted that the propulsion system needs some fine-tuning (ocean currents can pose a problem for the device's limited mobility), this is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, one inspired by simply observing and mimicking organisms in their natural environment. 

The potential advances we may discover lurking in the depths of the oceans provide more than enough motivation to continue this biomimicry-inspired research, whether we ultimately make breakthroughs of a medical, energy, or as yet unknown origin. This is research that allows us as humans to Seek what can be, something that we here at Deliberately Aimless certainly support (more on this in a future post).

For full details of the research, read the press release from Nature here.