A vision for the ocean planet in 2020

In 1989, the underwater visionary Henry Stommel dared to dream of a future world with unprecedented research technology and oceanographic capabilities. In Stommel's version of the 21st century, a large fleet of small, cheap robots glide over the ocean floor. Stommel believed the right kind of technology would set oceanographers free to explore, discover, and even unlock the secrets of the deep. Technological advances in autonomous vehicles, electronic charts, Global Positioning Systems, the on-going success of autonomous gliders, the deployment of Argo floats, extensive research on our global oceans from fixed platforms, research vessels, and submersible exploratory tools allow us to scour the ocean floor at depths. The technological base for this evolution rests on the development of truly adaptive sampling, pervasive networked devices and globally abundant bandwidth for data transfer capabilities. In the future, commuters will rely on intelligent navigation systems which will incorporate weather conditions, current traffic patterns, historic trends, and preferred routes to deliver a driver to his destination in the safest, fastest, most economical route. Autonomous vehicles will roam the oceans truly sampling and studying the sea. Emerging tropical storms will be detected by networked systems that will be able to follow the storm and provide superior modeling and warning capabilities to coastal communities. Other systems will detect pollution in fragile ecosystems and be able to instantaneously follow the plume to the source and alert appropriate enforcement authorities and clean-up experts to limit the damage. By knowing the migration routes, size and fecundity, essential habitats, and actual biomass, resource managers will develop true sustainable-use plans and catch quotas, and limit by-catch. New energy and biopharmaceutical resources will be discovered and evaluated by autonomous underwater agents circling the world's oceans as they update and create new charts and gradually map the entire ocean. Just as today's Internet users can move from one WiFi hot spot to the next, the robots exploring and monitoring our oceans will be continuously and wirelessly connected to land-based servers. Immediate and constant connections between vehicles will allow new synthetic aperture techniques to yield improved data and facilitate adaptive behavior of individual units.