"Oceans are the lungs of the planet, and we’ve been collectively smoking one giant cigarette," Steve Etchemendy, director of marine operations, told a small group of press gathered in a conference room of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, or MBARI, early Saturday morning. "Half of the oxygen on Earth is provided by the phytoplankton," he explained, and ocean acidification by carbon dioxide and other byproducts of human industrialization are killing those microscopic drifting plants.

On Saturday morning, MBARI, a research institute financially and geographically separate from the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium prepared for its once-a-year open house. This year was special, though, as the Institute had a public christening event for the Rachel Carson, a former Gulf field oil supply boat that MBARI was in the process of refitting to serve as a research vessel.

Ars got a tour of MBARI’s Rachel Carson, the Western Flyer (a bigger research vessel currently under the care of MBARI), and an exclusive look at the giant remote operated vehicles (ROVs) that Institute scientists use to study the seas not just in Monterey Bay but around the globe, and the autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that have made studying the fragility of our vast oceans possible.

Remote operated vehicles come ashore

ROV pilot and technician D.J. Osborne showed us the intricacies of the Ventana, which will be placed on the Rachel Carson. Built on a frame of structural aluminum, the keepers of the Ventana have to fight the corrosiveness of seawater by regularly applying different types of zincs to the frame, and occasionally bead blasting it.

The front of the ROV is equipped with a main HD camera for the pilot, who can pitch it up or down and pan it around. Osborne says the scientist, who is usually trying to get samples or images of sea life, typically just controls the zoom and focus of the camera. The tubes you see in and around the vehicle and behind the HD camera are filled with either hydraulic oil or cables packed with copper and water block—care is taken not to create any air voids that would break the equipment under pressure.

The top two-thirds of the Ventana were developed by the oil and gas industry, which regularly uses this type of equipment for deep-sea drilling. MBARI modified this ROV’s design by creating a bifurcated structure: the bottom third is called a tool sled and is detachable, and alternate tool sleds can be prepared for the next day’s dive while one team is out at sea. "It just takes four bolts, a couple of electrical connections, and a couple of hydraulic quick disconnects and we can lift the whole core vehicle off the tool sled, so we can reconfigure the sleds for different missions," Osborne said. One of the Ventana’s tool sleds contained large, sealable cylinders for collecting specimens, another contained 15 smaller cylinders for collecting mud samples off the sea floor.

The arms of the vehicle are critical to ROV operation. The Ventana has two arms, one of which cost $250,000 and is made from titanium. The arms have 5 degrees of motion that the pilots can control: shoulder swing, elbow, pitch, yaw, and open and close. A third device in the middle serves as a cutter, which Osborne says can be used as an additional arm in a pinch.

The Ventana, which can dive up to 1850 meters deep (MBARI’s other ROV can go twice as deep) is also equipped with 400 watt lights. "Once you get to 1000m, the photons from the sun are counted individually. Even with these lights we may have only a few meters of visibility," Osbourne says.

Osborne estimates the Ventana has seen some 3750 dives, and it’s always controlled in real time with a pilot in the ship’s control room, linked by a sort of umbilical cord—a 2,400m tether called "the noodle" which contains copper and fiber optic wiring and is cased in Kevlar. The breaking strength in the Kevlar is about 30,000lbs.

All hands on deck

The noodle that provides the lifeline for the ROVs is connected to a research vessel like MBARI’s Western Flyer or the still-under-construction Rachel Carson. A giant winch responds to the pitch and roll of the boat in real (reel) time and lets in and out lengths of the cord so that the ROV can remain stable and take reliable photographs.

ROV pilots and scientists direct the research from the ship’s control room, which is packed with monitors. Ships like the Western Flyer can hold a team of 26 people and usually do 100 day-trips (stopping every 11 days or so for refueling and switching out science teams). The Rachel Carson will be equipped with modular labs in small bungalows that massive cranes at MBARI can switch on and off the deck, depending on what kind of research is scheduled.

The drones of the sea

Researchers at MBARI noted frequently that the Institute, founded in 1987 by David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, receives 80 percent of its funding from the Packard foundation (that’s a little short of $40 million a year), so it’s granted a lot of autonomy when it decides what directions to go in research.

"MBARI has its own funding, so we decide what’s important to us. Sometimes it's not what’s important to the federal government. And it turns out that sometimes we’re the only ones with the capabilities to do very neat things," Etchemendy told Ars. MBARI was one of the first research institutions that NOAA called after the Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. NOAA wanted to deploy one of MBARI’s autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs, to try to survey the site of the spill and the area around it.

The torpedo-shaped AUVs are outfitted with advanced SONAR readers, cameras, and sensors to detect anything from the conductivity, temperature, and salinity of the water; its oxygen content; or even "acoustic backscatter."

The sea drones are convenient because they can collect massive amounts of data with minimal investment (after the first few million dollars spent to outfit the drone, of course). And an underwater AUV dock, the Monterey Accelerated Research System or MARS, runs a gigabit Ethernet cable and a 10kW power cable 32 miles undersea to provide MBARI’s AUVs a place to recharge and dump data before another mission.

James Bellingham, chief technologist at MBARI, said this type of long-term data collection could go further than either satellites or ROVs could ever manage in understanding climate change, especially at MBARI where many of the sensors are developed in-house. "Historically the Navy did most of the ocean sciences, but the Navy really cared about the instruments they built more than the marine science... [and] climate change isn’t really relevant to Navy problems right now," Bellingham said. But this weekend, the politics of funding was played down, and the wonder of sea research took front and center.