TheEconomistMarch 14th 2020 631T
here is twiceas much water on Earth
as land. Oceanographers are neverthe-
less fond of saying that science knows less
about the high seas than it does about the
moon. If John Waterston gets his way,
though, that could soon change.
Mr Waterston is the head of the “Ocean
of Things” project at the Defence Advanced
Research Projects Agency (darpa), an
American military think-tank that has
helped develop everything from the inter-
net to stealthy fighter planes. The project’s
name is a play on the “Internet of Things”,
the awkward phrase which describes the
trend for stuffing sensors and an internet
connection into all manner of ordinary ob-
jects, from cars and toothbrushes to factory
robots and doorbells. The Ocean of Things
aims to likewise wire up the high seas with
swarms of floating, connected sensors.
Such devices are not in themselves new.
There are around 6,000 floating sensors
deployed around the world’s oceans, run by
navies and research institutes. What is un-
precedented is the scale of Mr Waterston’s
ambition. Over the next few years he hopes
to deploy 50,000 sensors across 1m square
kilometres of sea, an area considerably
larger than Texas. The eventual goal—
much more distant—is to enable the con-
tinuous monitoring and analysis of a sig-
nificant fraction of the world’s oceans.Peering into Neptune’s kingdom
The project’s main aim, mindful of the “d”
in darpa’s name, is tracking ships. But
rather than building something that can do
just one job, Mr Waterston wants the Ocean
of Things to supply a wealth of other infor-
mation, from water temperature to wave
heights, weather conditions, nearby wild-
life and more. All this would then be madefreely available to scientific and commer-
cial users.
Existing “floating instrument pack-
ages”, known as floats or drifters, are often
custom-built, and usually contain the
highest-quality instruments available.
They therefore tend to be expensive, and
are bought only in small numbers. A typi-
cal existing float, designed for scientific re-
search, is the Argo. It costs around
$20,000, and can measure water tempera-
ture and salinity.
The Ocean of Things takes the opposite
approach. The aim is to cram as many
cheap, off-the-shelf components as possi-
ble into a single low-cost package. Current
float prototypes cost around $750, and Mr
Waterston hopes that economies of scale
could drive the cost down further. That
would allow tens of thousands to be de-
ployed without breaking the bank. Large
numbers are crucial for coverage. They also
help compensate for inaccuracies in indi-
vidual instruments. “Can a $5 sensor do the
same things as a $1,000 temperature
gauge?” Mr Waterston asks rhetorically.
“The answer is ‘yes’ if you have a lot of
them, because you can cross-correlate.
Maths solves the problem for you.”
The project’s researchers are evaluating
three designs from different manufactur-
ers, ranging in size from about six to 18 li-
tres. One, proposed by Xerox’s Palo Alto Re-
search Centre, is made of glass, like a
traditional Japanese fishing float. A sec-Big wet data
An ocean of things
Compared with the land, the seas are poorly monitored. That is about to change
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