LCSR Seminar: Brett Hobson

Description

Brett W. Hobson, a mechanical engineer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, will give a talk titled "The Development of Robots for Open Ocean Ecology" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics.

Abstract:

The open ocean is a massive 3D ecosystem responsible for absorbing much of Earth's excess heat and CO2 emissions produced by humans. A portion of the ocean's carbon pump sequesters atmospheric carbon into the sediments of the deep sea. Quantifying the amount of this carbon exported to the deep and identifying the variables driving that export is vital to understanding how we might better mitigate the deleterious effects of climate change. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Institutes MBARI has developed high endurance mobile robots to investigate ocean carbon transport. One of its vehicles, the Benthic Rover has been working continuously on the seafloor at 4000m for six years– measuring the spatial and temporal variability of carbon export from the surface. This long-term dataset has revealed that carbon enters the deep sea in large pulses of sinking detritus. MBARI is now focused on connecting these carbon pulses to processes in the upper layers of the ocean. Exploring, mapping and sampling the upper water column to uncover ocean productivity hotspots (HS) is a central/key initiative/goal requiring the collaboration of MBARI's Long Range Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (LRAUVs) as well as other complementary vehicles that are able to measure the full ecology of the hotspots from the microbes to the whales.

Learn more about the speaker online.