Introducing Bedrock Ocean Exploration
By: Anthony Dimare
Tags: Robotics, Oceans, Startup, Exploration, Tech

Introducing Bedrock Ocean Exploration

A public benefit corporation developing technology to make sure humans get full-ocean exploration right. We’re vowing to explore and map the entirety of Earth’s oceans.t Anthony DiMare Follow Jan 13, 2020 · 8 min read

It is a scientific, environmental, and humanitarian imperative that we map, image, and classify our Oceans.

We often pontificate about humanity traveling to space and becoming a multi-planetary species. Humans do need another option if we are to survive beyond the existence of Earth.

Yet, when we talk about this concept, we often exclude the fact that the vast majority of humans will inevitably remain on Earth for the next several hundred years. That means we have a necessity as a species to understand how we are going to shift the environment we currently live within, how we will supply people with the materials and food to further sustain a growing population, and continue to uncover secrets we have yet to learn to further advance and give our Earth-originating species the best chance of multi-centennial survival.

This is — and always should be — something we maintain as a top human priority.

Why explore the ocean?

We have yet to map 85% of Earth’s oceans to modern high-resolution standards. That means we do not know what’s there. We do not understand how it works. We cannot change something we know nothing about.

If New York City was on the bottom of the ocean, we’d likely have no idea it was there. We seek to understand the vast space that Earth spins within foregoing a much more approachable and impactful frontier right here: our oceans. The only way we’re going to do this is by building a new company that develops the right technology to explore this frontier. When trying to predict the companies that will define the next decade, I find it difficult to see a world where multi-faceted ocean intelligence is not an ultra-critical and decade-defining asset.

Why will humans need this?

The ocean is our largest energy sink. It is the lungs of our planet. We will need to work with the ocean to address the surmounting environmental shifts. When we create an accurate energy model of the ocean (which relies on understanding the geometry of the seafloor), we’ll be able to better predict and understand the weather patterns that are worsening in severity. This is particularly true for hurricanes, tsunamis, and other disastrous weather anomalies we currently have little-to-no capability of accurately predicting.

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About 40% of the world’s population lives within 100km of coastline, and that percentage is going up. Our species population will reach 8.6 billion people by 2030, 9.8 billion by 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100. Currently, 3 billion people (38% of the current world population) rely on seafood as their primary source of protein.

How will we continue feeding these people?

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Young people ages 10–24 account for ~1.8 billion of the total 7.8 billion people on Earth now. 90% of them live in developing countries and we are quickly seeing them advance into the industrialized world. Africa, India, China, Latin America will require access to technology products at volumes we’ve never seen before. These products require specialized minerals. Yet, at this point in history, many of the obvious land-based mineral reserves have been exhausted. So, we can dig deeper, drastically increasing the human risk, pollution, and cost to extract these minerals. Or we can turn to the ocean bedrock that makes up 71% of the surface area of the planet. The need for more raw minerals is being driven by the consumers of the world. Not the knowledge that the reserves exist.

How will we find and monitor these mineral deposits responsibly?

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By 2100 — essentially our lifetime — we will need to remove 100 Gigatons of CO² out of the air. Where are we going to put it all? Where will we store all that liquid Carbon Dioxide? The leading best (worst case) option is the ocean. Ironically, the same companies that made trillions pulling carbon out of the Earth will be the ones making trillions trying to put it back in because we need them to.

How will we prevent more irrevocable damage to our ocean environments?

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All of these answers are reliant and contingent on Earth’s oceans and our understanding of them. And yet, humanity still dreams of space, ignoring the obvious unknown abyss where any large discovery has immediate financial and humanitarian benefit and reward.

The next decade for Bedrock.

Exploration, Discovery, & Surveying — We’re working to make the collection of high-quality, high-resolution subsea and seafloor data quicker and cheaper. This is critical for accelerating the rate we can explore the ocean.

Cloud Platform — Once we have collected comprehensive data on an area, we intend to make it accessible to the rest of the world for a fraction of the cost.

Monitoring— We intend to enable subsea monitoring which was never before possible to keep track of our highest-risk activities.

All this will require a new type of subsea survey system. One built from the ground up to scale across the oceans with minimal to no human intervention. This new infrastructure is necessary to enable the largest Earth exploration mission in human history.