A Moonshot for the World’s Oceans

Newswise — Ved Chirayath is on a singular mission. For the past decade, he has worked toward what he calls “the holy grail of oceanography: developing a technology that can image the seafloor just as astronomical telescopes image the cosmos.” 

His quest to unlock the secrets of the Earth’s last unexplored frontier—its oceans—has received a major boost from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has selected Chirayath as one of five 2024 Moore Inventor Fellows. 

The Moore Inventor Fellows program honors and embodies Gordon Moore’s enthusiasm for science and innovation. The fellowship, launched in 2016 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law, the groundbreaking prediction of exponential growth in computing power, champions scientist-inventors who design groundbreaking tools and technologies. Each honoree receives $825,000 over three years to drive their invention forward, including $50,000 per year from their home institution. 

Chirayath is the G. Unger Vetlesen Endowed Chair of Earth Sciences at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science; inaugural director of the Aircraft Center for Earth Studies at the Rosenstiel School; and a National Geographic Explorer. Previously, he directed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Laboratory for Advanced Sensing at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.   

Chirayath’s newest, and perhaps boldest, idea is active fluid lensing, a fusion of two of his previous inventions patented by NASA. Passive fluid lensing is a theoretical model and algorithm that enables scientists to photograph the ocean in remarkable clarity. MiDAR is a next-generation imaging device with broad applications to earth and planetary remote sensing. MiDAR was named NASA Invention of the Year in 2019. 

As Chirayath explained, active fluid lensing would allow for imaging through ocean waves to see marine wildlife, the seafloor, and marine plastics from aircraft—and future spacecraft—much like telescopes observe the distant universe through our turbulent atmosphere. Current passive fluid lensing technology allows for imaging to a depth of about 65 feet, using the sun as a light source. Active fluid lensing would push beyond the visible light spectrum using active sources of light like lasers, allowing scientists to peer further into the benthic zone, and reveal the seafloor. 

The Moore Fellowship will support Chirayath in advancing active fluid lensing from foundational principles and concepts to a working prototype. His ultimate ambition is to achieve parity in the oceans with what scientists have done on land and in space. 

 “We have mapped more of the surface of Mars, the Sun, and the Moon than we have our own ocean floor,” Chirayath said. “Yet the ocean is Earth’s largest ecosystem, comprising 99 percent of the habitable volume of our planet, pivotal to our survival, and the most rapidly changing due to climate change. 

“A probe the size of a golf cart crash-landed on Mars, and within 10 days, the crash site was found and the wreckage imaged from orbit. Yet, on Earth, 10 years ago, we lost a jumbo jet with hundreds of souls on board over the ocean, and we are still looking for the wreckage. The technological disparities between space exploration and earth science and oceanography remain startling—and there is an opportunity to fix that.” 

Chirayath cites the Sustainable Land Imaging Program, a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, as an example of the type of large-scale endeavor he wants to emulate. Over the past half-century, the program has mapped the entirety of Earth’s land—and, as Chirayath said, fundamentally changed how humans view our planet. The data inform decisions about agriculture, forestry, natural resources management, natural disaster management, and much more. 

“The ocean is three times the size, and we have nowhere near the quality or capability of land imaging,” Chirayath explained. “I want to change that for lakes and rivers, as well as the oceans, to conduct fine-scale seafloor mapping using underwater robots and airborne and spaceborne platforms. It’s a high-risk, high-reward investment, akin to the early days of radar, and I am very excited about the potential to conserve the planet.” 

Roni Avissar, dean of the Rosenstiel School, noted that federal agencies such as NASA generally only fund such cutting-edge technologies once they are advanced to the proof-of-concept stage. With the Moore Inventor Fellowship, “this is what professor Chirayath proposes to do with active fluid lensing—and has successfully done at least twice before,” Avissar said. 

As Avissar noted, Chirayath’s 2016 doctoral thesis first described passive fluid lensing, which Avissar called a seminal invention for oceanography. Passive fluid lensing has been employed to create centimeter-scale, three-dimensional imagery of the world’s coral reefs and to image whales underwater, a crucial advance for early warning prevention of whale strikes by cruise ships and other vessels. 

Active fluid lensing, in turn, “has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of our ocean and home planet, while giving marine conservationists an extraordinary tool for their work,” Avissar added.  

Chirayath said that the Moore Inventor Fellowship is “a dream fellowship. It’s particularly challenging even to be considered because the Moore Foundation looks at all fields across all academic institutions in the U.S. [Getting] this honor means you have outcompeted breakthroughs in medicine and other things, and it comes with a fair bit of pressure to develop something that is equally revolutionary. 

“I have spent most of my career figuring out why it is so difficult to map the seafloor,” Chirayath reflected. “If we don’t know what’s happening in our home world, it’s at our peril. It’s the main reason I moved from space science to oceanography, and it’s my life goal. Earth is a unique planet—there really is no place like home.”