FEATURED CONTENT:
See how one UM professor and space explorer maps the “wild west” beyond the waves in our On Site video feature.
We’ve mapped Mars. We can see deep into the universe. But most of Earth’s ocean floor? It’s still uncharted territory.
“Underwater is just completely the Wild West,” says Ved Chirayath, Director of the Aircraft Center for Earth Studies at the University of Miami. “We don’t really have a baseline of what’s happening.”
Only about five percent of the seafloor has been mapped with the same precision as land. “If you think about how integral maps are for land,” Chirayath explains, “we navigate by them, we plan by them, we put crops in the ground. Depending on what satellites tell us is going on, we can stop forest fires and monitor them from space and aircraft.”
Underwater, that clarity doesn’t exist – yet.
Chirayath’s life mission is to match the mapping of the ocean floor to what science has done in land and space. See how he’s doing it in our latest Opportunity Miami On Site video feature.
Leaving Space to Map the Sea
Ved Chirayath grew up in Southern California, where he was captivated by the night sky as a child, spending hours building telescopes and dreaming of space exploration. He even detected a new extrasolar planet about 150 light-years away while in high school.
That early curiosity set him on a path to NASA, where he trained as a physicist and aerospace engineer and worked on technologies designed to study distant planets and galaxies. His career was, quite literally, aimed at the stars until he realized “that we barely understand life on Earth in its entirety.”
The most pressing mysteries and threats to our lives aren’t found in space, he explained, but instead hidden beneath the waves of our own planet.
Chirayath gave Opportunity Miami a tour of the Aircraft Center for Earth Studies at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Sciences, where he serves as the Director, Professor, and Endowed Chair. With the giddy enthusiasm of a kid, he proudly showed us the multitude of drones and state-of-the-art, unmanned aircraft and high-end sensors he and his team use to survey things over very large scales and distances.
His boyish sense of wonder hasn’t faded with time.
“I’m a curious kid who likes inventing tools to explore life,” he described himself with a laugh.
Chirayath is also a National Geographic Explorer and was named one of five Moore Inventor Fellows last year. (Fun fact: he was also a finalist for the NASA Astronaut Candidate Class of 2021). He developed fluid lensing, a theoretical model and algorithm that allows scientists to photograph the ocean floor using MiDAR (a NASA invention of the year in 2019). The technology allows drones to see through wave distortions, producing detailed 3D maps of reefs and coastlines that satellites can’t match. Imagine being able to “see” everything on the ocean floor, from a sea cucumber the size of a palm to a missing cell phone, and everything in between.
Mapping Our Oceans Matters
“Ninety-nine percent of the habitable volume of our planet is in the water, and we are barely scratching the surface of what’s there right now,” Chirayath said. “Half of the breaths we take in this conversation are generated in the sea.”
Without baseline data, humanity is flying blind as the ocean changes. “If one of those key parameters shifts, it may not favor humanity,” he warned. “Cockroaches will probably outlive us all because they have learned to evolve and adapt quickly. We need to evolve fast, but we are biologically not very capable of doing so.”
Mapping isn’t just academic. Coral reefs, for example, have already given us lifesaving medicines. “The drugs to treat Covid came out of a reef species… It is a drug that literally saved us,” he said. “So those are the things that I worry about. If we lose that species or we lose something or we don’t have any idea of what is there, the next pandemic that comes, and we’re looking for that drug, it may not be there, and so we lose it at our own peril.”
Miami Is the Front Line
Miami is a testbed.
“Miami, for better or for worse, is at ground zero. Literally,” Chirayath noted. “Sea levels are changing. It’s not great if your city is situated in an environment that is rapidly ceding territory to the sea.”
Our coral reef system is the fourth largest in the world, serving as a shield during storms. “But if we lose that, we lose out on tourism. We lose out on fishing. We lose out on potential cures for diseases. We lose out on protection for all of the homes that are on the coastlines,” he warned. “So it’s to me, it’s very important to study.”
A Call to the Next Explorers
Miami has the tools – and the historical knowledge – to plan for the future.
“Right now, the main life support system we have, something that has evolved for billions of years, is under threat,” Chirayath cautioned.
He sees the ocean as the next great frontier — and the place where humanity’s future will be decided.
“I want every young kid and space explorer out there to turn their eyes to the ocean and realize this is the final frontier,” he said. “This is where space is at. We need your skills and expertise to explore this world because we can’t do it alone.”
PITCH US
If you have a company or an entrepreneur to suggest or an idea to share that relates to building Miami’s future, email us at next@opportunity.miami. We invite you to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on our social media channels. If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can subscribe by clicking here. And if you are new to Opportunity Miami, you can learn about our mission and work here.
~ Opportunity Miami