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ocean

New Battery-Free, Wireless Underwater Camera From MIT Engineers Could Help Scientists Further Explore The Ocean 

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According to MIT News, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have potentially advanced the way that scientists can explore unknown regions of the ocean, track pollution, and/or monitor climate change. 

Scientists currently estimate that more than 95% of the oceans on Earth have never been explored. One of the biggest obstacles researchers face is the high cost of powering an underwater camera that can withstand the environmental changes that come from the extreme depths of the ocean. 

Typically, researchers need to have the underwater cameras that currently are in use to observe the ocean tethered to a vessel or need to send a ship out to recharge the batteries of the camera. 

Now, MIT researchers have developed a battery-free wireless underwater camera that is “100,000 times more energy efficient than other undersea cameras.” 

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The device is said to take color photos, even in dark underwater environments, and can transmit the data from the images wirelessly through the water.

The camera itself is powered by sound, and works by converting mechanical energy from sound waves traveling through the water into electrical energy that can then be used to power its imaging and communication systems. Once the camera captures an image, it uses the sound waves to transfer data to a receiver on land that will reconstruct this image taken.

The scientists behind the camera also think the device is so impressive because it doesn’t need a power source, meaning it can be underwater capturing images for weeks before it needs to be retrieved. This will allow researchers to explore new depths for longer periods of time. 

“One of the most exciting applications of this camera for me personally is in the context of climate monitoring. We are building climate models, but we are missing data from over 95 percent of the ocean. This technology could help us build more accurate climate models and better understand how climate change impacts the underwater world,” explained Fadel Adib,  senior author of a report on the device published in Nature Communications. 

Sayed Saad Afzal, Waleed Akbar, and Osvy Rodriguez are co-lead authors on the study as well, as well as Unsoo Ha, Mario Doumet, and Reza Ghaffarivardavagh. 

Adib explained how initially, the group was “trying to minimize the hardware as much as possible, to create new constraints on how to build the system, send information, and perform image reconstruction. It took a fair amount of creativity to figure out how to do that.” 

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The camera uses red, green, and blue LED lights to reflect on the white parts of the image, which can then “reconstruct the color image taken,” according to Akbar. 

“When we were kids in art class, we were taught that we could make all colors using three basic colors. The same rules follow for color images we see on our computers. We just need red, green, and blue — these three channels — to construct color images,” he explained. 

According to the report, the researchers tested the camera in several different underwater environments. Through those trials they were able to take high-quality photos of fish and plants in dark environments that are typically very difficult to capture. 

Now that they have a working prototype, the next step will be for the researchers to enhance the device to be used in more real-world settings. Overall, they want to increase the camera’s memory, extend its range, and ability to stream images and potentially videos in real time. 

“This will open up great opportunities for research both in low-power IoT devices as well as underwater monitoring and research,” says Haitham Al-Hassanieh, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Great Barrier Reef

How Scientists are Using Sound Waves to Repopulate the Great Barrier Reef

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Climate change is transforming the Great Barrier Reef, turning a once lively and colorful underwater ecosystem into a massive coral graveyard. Already, about 89% of the reef is dead or dying, putting the future of countless species of underwater life in jeopardy. Once teeming with life, large sections of the reef are now eerily quiet, which scientists believe led fish to abandon this habitat. In an attempt to revitalize this dying ecosystem, scientists have installed loudspeakers in various areas of the reef to make them sound as though they are healthy. Scientists have observed that reefs that sound lively attract fish to return to these habitats, paving the way for a potential future project to restore, at least in part, the once-lively and diverse ecosystem of the Great Barrier Reef.

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Using a process they call “acoustic enrichment,” which they described in a report published by Nature, scientists played noises including “the crackle of snapping shrimp and the whoops and grunts of fish” via a network of underwater loudspeakers. The scientists observed that twice as many fish arrived, and stayed, in areas of the reef that sounded lively compared to equivalent areas where no sounds were played. As the presence of fish is necessary for sustaining the ecosystems of coral reefs, scientists hope that attracting fish back to the Great Barrier Reef will help to kickstart other life in the region, potentially undoing some of the disastrous effects of rising ocean temperature levels. In other words, scientists hope that making coral reefs seem to be teeming with life will attract fish, beginning a natural recovery process.

As the field experiment lasted only six weeks, scientists have not yet had the opportunity to determine to what extent the repopulation of coral reefs impacts the larger surrounding ecosystem. However, the success of the experiment thus far has provided hope that interventions using science and technology can mitigate the damage of ecological collapse caused by climate change and other effects of human activity. That being said, while acoustic enrichment has proven to be an effective strategy for attracting fish, a number of threats to the Great Barrier Reef as well as the larger underwater ecosystem remain and will have to be accounted for to ensure the ongoing health of the ocean. These threats include climate change, overfishing, and water pollution.

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The span of time during which scientists observed the reef was too short for the fish to start breeding, and as of yet it’s unclear whether the fish will stay in this habitat long enough to spawn multiple generations of animals and to revitalize the surrounding coral. Coral depends upon the natural byproducts created by fish in order to survive, as they work as vitamin filters that allow the reefs to absorb nutrients. And as up to 85% of the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from the ocean, the health of underwater reefs also directly impacts life above land.

While large swaths of the Great Barrier Reef are entirely dead, a small percentage of the reef remains alive, albeit less populated with life than they used to be. Other projects to revitalize sections of the reef have also been conducted, with varying degrees of success. For example, scientists working for the Mote Marine Laboratory grew small pieces of reef in the laboratory and implanted these pieces alongside compromised sections of reef, which helped to regrow coral in just a few years, as the implanted sections of reef reproduced naturally. Additionally, the University of Hawaii is undergoing a project to selectively breed species of coral that are resistant to bleaching by using specimens that have shown to be particularly resilient. There is a long, uphill battle ahead to preserve the Great Barrier Reef, but scientific interventions provide hope that such an enormous task is possible.

Earth

New Research Hints at Origin of Life on Earth

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While the theory of evolution is broadly accepted as fact among scientists, more controversy exists over explanations for the ultimate origin of life on Earth. However, new research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution sheds light on a potential theory for the origin of living things by attempting to recreate the conditions of the early earth and exploring how they could lead to the development of “protocells,” which are thought to be fundamental “building blocks” of all life. In an experiment, researchers successfully created conditions that led to the development of protocells by replicating the environment of underwater hydrothermal vents, whose combination of heat, alkalinity, and minerals are instrumental in the creation of protocells.

Though multiple competing theories explaining the origin of life exist, including Darwin’s assertion that life probably first evolved in shallow pools of warm water, the theory that life originally began within underwater thermal vents is supported by evidence, including the discovery of some of the world’s oldest fossils nearby these vents. Now, this explanation for the creation of life seems even more likely, as demonstrating the creation of protocells under these conditions is a key argument supporting the theory. Although the results of this research do not definitively prove that life on earth began in underwater hydrothermal vents, the researchers assert that the possibility of this explanation cannot be ruled out.

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Hydrothermal vents are located deep under the Earth’s seas, where minerals from the planet’s crust react with seawater, creating a warm, alkaline, and hydrogen-rich environment. This process leads to the creation of so-called chimneys, which are rich with alkaline and acidic fluids, enabling the formation of complex organic compounds, including, as this new research shows, protocells. These vents emerge spontaneously along fault lines as a result of geological processes, and have existed on Earth for millions, if not billions of years. Hydrothermal vents are known for being areas of the deep sea where life is relatively abundant, as they tend to be populated by shrimp, worms, and clams, who feed off of the energy and materials present around the vents.

This research has strong implications not only for the beginning of life on Earth, but for the potential for life to form elsewhere in space.

Protocells are, in essence, the most basic form of a cell, consisting of a bilayer membrane around an aqueous solution. Previous experiments succeeded in creating these cells in cool, fresh water, but only under tightly controlled conditions. Also, previous experiments attempting to replicate hydrothermal vents have failed to generate protocells which don’t fall apart. In this most recent experiment, however, the scientists identified a flaw with previous research on creating protocells in hydrothermal vents; namely, these experiments used a limited number of types of molecules, whereas in natural environments, you would expect to see a wide range of different types of molecules.

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Whereas it was previously thought that heat, alkalinity, and salt posed obstacles in the creation of protocells, this new research shows that these factors were actually beneficial in the process. This is because head allowed long carbon chains to form into a protocell structure, an alkaline solution helped protocells keep their electric charge, and saltwater helps fat molecules band together, forming more stable structures. What’s notable about this experiment is that while protocells have been created artificially in laboratory environments before, they had never been before created under conditions that match the chemistry of the early Earth.

This research has strong implications not only for the beginning of life on Earth, but for the potential for life to form elsewhere in space. This is because space missions have revealed the presence of similar hydrothermal vents on extraterrestrial bodies, including the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Life on other planets or moons has not yet been discovered, of course, but research into the origins of life on Earth could give scientists a better idea of where in space to look for extraterrestrial life.