| On March 12th, 2021, 1-2 PM UTC, we will have Jim Costopulos, CEO and Founder of Global Oceans, who will talk about The Future of Ocean Science: Building Scale and International Collaboration. The Moderator will be Charles J. Vörösmarty, Founding Director of the Environmental Sciences Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).
The intensity of scientific research required for understanding global-scale mechanisms of climate change, ocean biodiversity, and human impact on our ocean; and for modeling, mapping, and monitoring Earth system states in the deep sea, atmosphere, and polar regions, will require an expanded array of scientific infrastructure and global collaboration. Autonomous and remote observation technologies are helping to achieve this, but there are crucial observations and research that can only be achieved by scientists working at sea on scientific vessels.
Global Class research vessels, however, are a resource that is contracting rather than expanding. In an era of continuing resource and funding constraints, can a sufficient 21st century agenda for ocean science, international collaboration, and regional capacity building be enabled without being tethered to the high capital expense, fixed costs, and silo’d administration typical of institution-owned dedicated research vessels?
Global Oceans is an operationally-focused nonprofit corporation that has developed the Modular Adaptive Research Vessel (MARV) model to integrate time-chartered offshore service vessels, modular lab and workspace systems, and remote logistics support, for mobilizing fully-functional scientific platforms. This approach is regionally deployable, dynamically scalable, non-capital intensive, and responsive to capacity building needs and opportunities. It is designed to foster international research collaboration and make resource cost-sharing more accessible and efficient.
The presentation will outline the operational basis of the MARV model, and will illustrate the rationale and developing applications where this flexible, adaptive infrastructure capacity can uniquely “open the aperture” of what is both possible and crucially needed for a global-scale ocean science enterprise that can effectively address the challenges we face.
More details about this session here. |
