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This is Sea Orbiter--its not a concept from the latest JJ Abrams Star Trek movie - even
though it looks like an underwater version of the starship enterprise fused with a sailboat...It
is a real-life, coming soon to an ocean-near-you research ship. It will be completely powered
by the three sustainable energy sources available to it in abundance: the sun, the wind and
the waves, allowing it to go a lot further, for a lot longer than any ocean exploration
vessel before, as it won’t have to return to land to refuel. Sea Orbiter is the brainchild
of French architect Jacques Rougerie and will exist mostly underwater with housing for 22
researchers and crew. It will actually launch divers and submarines from under the surface
of the water so that missions won’t be contingent on the weather. Prototypes have already been
extensively modeled and tested, and funding has been gathered, so the project is a go.
It is exactly this type of an out-of-the-box approach to sea exploration that will be crucial
in our quest to learn a lot more about the still largely unexplored, little-understood
ocean ecosystem, which is the most abundant on earth, containing 80 percent of all life.
We are just beginning to appreciate how powerful all that water is in influencing our biosphere--how
slight changes in the oceans can create extensive, life-altering ramifications for life on land.
So we’re kind of in a hurry, which makes it very hopeful indeed that construction on
the $50 million floating laboratory is set to begin in the Spring of 2014. Thanks for
watching. For the daily conversation, I’m Bryce Plank.