#08 Democratizing access to the deep sea

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WELCOME BACK TO THE OCEAN EMBASSY

It has been rather quiet on my podcast for two months, a lot going on, but we are back with some amazing episodes in the pipeline and some exciting news.

Christine de Silva is a marine biologist at the University of Rhode Island and co-founder of the company Juice Robotics (Opens in a new window). I met her during a virtual meeting and was totally hooked on her idea, her passion and rigor and knew she had to come on here. With Juice Robotics, Christine aims to revolutionize and democratize deep sea technology that allows exploration of our ocean. As you heard in the intro, more than 93% of our oceans are considered deep sea. If you wonder why we need to explore these places, do keep listening because that is exactly what we’ll talk about – besides all the technical gist and general functioning of their work. I think Christine is super impressive and I love the work for several reasons, mostly because us engineers sometimes tend to overcomplicate technology, making it prohibitively expensive, and that definitely holds true for deep sea technology.

Thanks to completely rethinking their approach to building Baited Remote Underwater Video System (BRUV), Juice Robotics is able to offer deep sea technology at a much lower price than conventional systems. This is incredibly important for democratizing access to these technologies and empowering communities to explore ocean spaces in their home countries, especially in the Global South.

Christine and I talked about the necessity for deep sea exploration, why it is meaningful for the protection rather than exploitation of the deep sea, and also how their technology is built. One of the most pressing questions I had was how they prevent the predators they mean to observe from destroying the technology. We had a good laugh and Christine was actually able to share an amazing video of one of their systems, which you can check out on our Instagram.

I hope you enjoy this episode and please let me know if you have any questions, comments or ideas for more topcis!