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Since NASA's explorations of Mars and Saturn and with private spaceflight taking the media by storm, when most people think of exploration, they first think of space. However, amazing discoveries are occurring from deep ocean exploration, and the underwater frontier is every bit as strange and exciting as outer space.
At this talk from Pop!Tech 2005, Marcia McNutt of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute compares space exploration with ocean exploration and describes some of the recent discoveries. Ocean exploration, she says, faces many challenges not shared by space missions, including difficulties in getting power and the routine fouling of equipment. However equipment always sinks, so the cost of an ocean mission is much less than that of space exploration.
Recent projects have discovered new species and ecosystems and have shown that the pH of the oceans are changing to become more acid as a result of climate change. McNutt describes the vehicles and other tools used to explore the deep ocean and paints a vivid picture of the often harsh life found below the waves.
This talk was from the Explorer's Club session at Pop!Tech. The other speakers in this session were Peter Diamandis and Carolyn Porco. The question and answer period can be heard at the end of Carolyn Porco's talk.
Marcia McNutt is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California. MBARI is a research laboratory funded by the Packard Foundation to develop and exploit new technology for the exploration of the oceans. The institute's main focus is on designing and building new tethered and autonomous underwater vehicles and in situ sensor packages for increasing the spatial and temporal sampling of the ocean and its inhabitants.
Marcia was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she graduated class valedictorian from Northrop Collegiate School (now The Blake Schools) in 1970. In 1973, she received a BA degree in Physics, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Colorado College in Colorado Springs. With the help of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, she next studied geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, where she earned a PhD in Earth Sciences in 1978. After a brief appointment as a sabbatical replacement at the University of Minnesota, she spent the next three years working on the problem of earthquake prediction at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, before joining the faculty at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1982. Marcia spent the next 15 years at MIT, where she was appointed the Griswold Professor of Geophysics. While at MIT, she also served as Director of the Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, a cooperative graduate educational program between MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In 1988, she won the Macelwane Award from the American Geophysical Union, presented for outstanding research by a young scientist.
Marcia's principal research involves the use of marine geophysical data to study the physical properties of the Earth beneath the oceans. Recent projects include the history of volcanism in French Polynesia and how it relates to broad-scale convection in the Earth's mantle, continental break-up in the western U.S., and the uplift of the Tibet plateau. Her research is both theoretical and field-based, using data she has collected on nearly two dozen oceanographic expeditions.
Marcia lives in Salinas, California with her three daughters and her husband, Ian Young, a sea captain.
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This program is from our Pop!Tech 2005 series.
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