Jules Jaffe of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography is developing an army of underwater explorers that researchers hope will produce a fine-grained, real-time map of the movements of the sea.
If you’re a scientist who wants to study animals in their natural habitats, the process is simple enough: get a pair of binoculars, find a shady spot to sit, and watch the critters.
Artistic impression of Robots
But what if your quarry lives deep in the ocean — and is so tiny it’s barely visible?
Jules Jaffe, a research oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thinks he’s got a solution. With the help of a few million dollars in National Science Foundation funding, Jaffe is developing an army of small, networked, underwater robots that will drift passively along with the ocean’s currents and unobtrusively keep tabs on other things doing likewise, from algae to fish larvae to globules of spilled oil. The ’bots will relay data on what’s happening around them to human beings on the surface, providing unprecedented insight into how tiny organisms and objects travel in the complex welter of sub-surface ocean currents.
“In the ocean, there are these very fragile interactions, and when we bring stuff up to the surface, we disturb those interactions. So what’s really happening down there could be very different from what we think,” says Jaffe, a merry 60-year-old with a thatch of thick silver hair that looks like it was carefully combed a day or two ago. We’re having a lunch of salmon and spinach at a restaurant near his lab on UC San Diego’s coastal campus. “In the ocean, there’s no shortage of things to learn. It’s very complicated, and the diversity of animal life is poorly understood,” Jaffe continues. “But we can now build instruments to actually go down there, look at things in situ, and really figure things out.”
Developing the robots — officially dubbed “autonomous underwater explorers” — poses formidable technical challenges. But Jaffe is used to that; he’s been devising new technologies to gather images from underwater for nearly two decades.
He stumbled into this rarified niche almost accidentally. The son of Eastern European immigrants, neither of whom made it past high school, Jaffe grew up in Queens, New York, taking full advantage of the pleasures available to a teenager in the 1960s. “There was plenty of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll in high school,” he says. He may be the only Hendrix fan in the world, though, to have walked out of Woodstock. “A friend and I snuck in,” he says. “Everyone was covered with mud, and there wasn’t enough food or bathrooms. I thought it was going to be a disaster. So we left without seeing anyone play,” he says. “I’m really sorry about that.”
As a graduate student in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, Jaffe started working extensively with computers. He was hired by a biomedical company that processed digital images of angiograms. But Jaffe found he didn’t like having a boss. He did like sailing, though—a hobby he’d picked up in Berkeley. So when he saw an ad with a picture of a sailboat in an engineering journal calling for someone to do image processing at theWoods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, he thought it would be a great way to get back to academia and have fun.
At Woods Hole, Jaffe worked on a range of systems to gather pictures of life beneath the waves, from adapting then-new digital cameras to work underwater to developing a three-dimensional sonar system he dubbed “Fish TV.” Over the years, Jaffe has applied his techniques to track zooplankton in the Red Sea, protect manatees off the coast of Florida, and to help find the sunken wreck of the Titanic. “There’s so much cool stuff out there, and people just don’t think about putting it in the ocean,” says Jaffe. “And the oceanographers typically aren’t trained in technological innovation.”
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