    [House Hearing, 116 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                               OCEAN EXPLORATION:
                      DIVING TO NEW DEPTHS AND DISCOVERIES

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   BEFORE THE

                          SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT

                  COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
                            HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                         ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                   __________

                                  JUNE 5, 2019

                                   __________

                               Serial No. 116-25

                                   __________

     Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology

     [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

           Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov

                                  __________

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                  COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY

                 HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman
    ZOE LOFGREN, California              FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma,
    DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois                Ranking Member
    SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon             MO BROOKS, Alabama
    AMI BERA, California,                BILL POSEY, Florida
        Vice Chair                       RANDY WEBER, Texas
    CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania             BRIAN BABIN, Texas
    LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas               ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
    HALEY STEVENS, Michigan              ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
    KENDRA HORN, Oklahoma                RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
    MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey           MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
    BRAD SHERMAN, California             TROY BALDERSON, Ohio
    STEVE COHEN, Tennessee               PETE OLSON, Texas
    JERRY McNERNEY, California           ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
    ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado              MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
    PAUL TONKO, New York                 JIM BAIRD, Indiana
    BILL FOSTER, Illinois                JAIME HERRERA BEUTLER, Washington
    DON BEYER, Virginia                  JENNIFFER GONZALEZ-COLON, Puerto
    CHARLIE CRIST, Florida                   Rico
    SEAN CASTEN, Illinois                VACANCY
    KATIE HILL, California
    BEN McADAMS, Utah
    JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia
                                     ------

                          Subcommittee on Environment

                    HON. LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas, Chairwoman
    SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon             ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas, Ranking
    CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania                 Member
    PAUL TONKO, New York                 BRIAN BABIN, Texas
    CHARLIE CRIST, Florida               ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
    SEAN CASTEN, Illinois                JIM BAIRD, Indiana
    BEN McADAMS, Utah                    JENNIFFER GONZALEZ-COLON, Puerto
    DON BEYER, Virginia                      Rico

                            C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

                                  June 5, 2019

                                                                       Page
    Hearing Charter..................................................     2

                               Opening Statements

    Statement by Representative Lizzie Fletcher, Chairwoman,
      Subcommittee on Environment, Committee on Science, Space, and
      Technology, U.S. House of Representatives......................     9
        Written Statement............................................     9

    Statement by Representative Roger Marshall, Ranking Member,
      Subcommittee on Environment, Committee on Science, Space, and
      Technology, U.S. House of Representatives......................    10
        Written Statement............................................    11

    Written statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson,
      Chairwoman, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S.
      House of Representatives.......................................    12

                                   Witnesses:

    Dr. Katy Croff Bell, Founding Director, Open Ocean Initiative,
      MIT Media Lab
        Oral Statement...............................................    13
        Written Statement............................................    16

    Dr. Carlie Wiener, Director of Marine Communications, Schmidt
      Ocean Institute
        Oral Statement...............................................    30
        Written Statement............................................    32

    Mr. Steve Barrett, Senior Vice President Business Development,
      Oceaneering International
        Oral Statement...............................................    51
        Written Statement............................................    53

    Mr. David Lang, Co-founder, Sofar Ocean Technologies
        Oral Statement...............................................    57
        Written Statement............................................    59

    Discussion.......................................................    63

                 Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions

    Dr. Katy Croff Bell, Founding Director, Open Ocean Initiative,
      MIT Media Lab..................................................    82

    Dr. Carlie Wiener, Director of Marine Communications, Schmidt
      Ocean Institute................................................    89

    Mr. Steve Barrett, Senior Vice President Business Development,
      Oceaneering International......................................    94

    Mr. David Lang, Co-founder, Sofar Ocean Technologies.............    95

                Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record

    Letters submitted by Representative Lizzie Fletcher, Chairwoman,
      Subcommittee on Environment, Committee on Science, Space, and
      Technology, U.S. House of Representatives......................    98

                               OCEAN EXPLORATION:.
                      DIVING TO NEW DEPTHS AND DISCOVERIES

                                  ----------

                             WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5 2019

                      House of Representatives,
                           Subcommittee on Environment,
                   Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
                                                       Washington, D.C.

        The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:15 a.m., in
    room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Lizzie
    Fletcher [Chairwoman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Chairwoman Fletcher. The hearing will come to order.
    Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare recess at
    any time. Good morning, and welcome to today's hearing
    entitled, ``Ocean Exploration: Diving to New Depths and
    Discoveries.'' The Committee is holding this hearing at the
    beginning of World Oceans Month and Capitol Hill Ocean Week to
    celebrate the oceans, and the wonders that they hold. I would
    like to welcome and thank all of our witnesses for being here
    today to discuss the state of our oceans and the importance of
    ocean exploration to the United States. I want to let the
    witnesses know that my colleagues and I are going to have to
    leave for votes around 10 a.m., actually on four bills that
    address ocean acidification that passed out of this Committee
    last month, so in order to get to witness testimony and
    questions as quickly as possible, Ranking Member Marshall and I
    are going to keep our opening statements short. I request to
    submit my full statement for the record.
        As we've discussed in the Subcommittee this Congress, the
    oceans are incredibly important for sustaining life on Earth,
    regulating the Earth's climate, supplying over half the oxygen
    we breathe, providing a major source of protein for billions of
    people around the planet, and more. Human health is intricately
    connected to ocean health. We live on a blue planet. The oceans
    cover 71 percent of our planet, and yet we've mapped about 15
    percent of the sea floor. Human eyes have seen less than 5
    percent of it. While we have sent 12 people to the moon, only
    four have gone to the deepest part of the ocean. The ocean is
    the Earth's final frontier.
        Yesterday we held a hearing on biodiversity laws, and heard
    about the rapid rate at which the oceans are changing through
    climate change, ocean acidification, pollution, over-fishing,
    and more. The clock is ticking. At today's hearing I look
    forward to a discussion with our distinguished panel of
    experts, innovators, and explorers on how we can advance the
    pace of ocean exploration, and dive to deeper depths and
    discovery for a better future.
        I also note that the Science Committee is hosting its first
    ever Ocean Exploration Expo tomorrow morning at 9:30, which
    some of our panelists, and many other groups from the ocean
    exploration community will showcase their cutting edge
    technology, work, and discoveries. This will be an amazing and
    fun educational opportunity, and I encourage those who can to
    attend.
        [The prepared statement of Chairwoman Fletcher follows:]

        Good morning, and welcome to the Subcommittee on
    Environment's hearing entitled, ``Ocean Exploration: Diving to
    New Depths and Discoveries.'' The Committee is holding this
    hearing at the beginning of World Oceans Month and Capitol Hill
    Ocean Week, to celebrate the oceans and the wonders that they
    hold. I would like to welcome and thank all of our witnesses
    for being here today to discuss the state and importance of
    ocean exploration to the United States.
        As we've discussed in this Subcommittee this Congress, the
    oceans are incredibly important for sustaining life on earth,
    regulating the earth's climate, supplying over half of the
    oxygen we breathe, providing a major source of protein for
    billions of people around the planet, and more. Human health is
    intricately connected to ocean health.
        We live on a blue planet. The oceans cover 71% of our
    planet, and yet we have mapped only about 15% of the seafloor.
    Human eyes have seen less than 5% of it. While we have sent 12
    people to the Moon, only four have gone to the deepest part of
    the ocean. The ocean is earth's final frontier.
        Yesterday, we held a hearing on biodiversity loss and heard
    about the rapid rate at which the oceans are changing--through
    climate change, ocean acidification, pollution, overfishing,
    and more. The clock is ticking.
        At today's hearing, I look forward to a discussion with our
    distinguished panel of experts, innovators, and explorers, on
    how we can advance the pace of ocean exploration and dive to
    deeper depths and discovery for a better future.
        I also note that the Science Committee is hosting its
    first-ever Ocean Exploration Expo tomorrow morning at 9:30, at
    which some of our panelists and many other groups from the
    ocean exploration community will showcase their cutting-edge
    technology, work, and discoveries. This will be an amazing and
    fun educational opportunity and encourage those who can to
    attend.
        We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about
    the seafloor. Like space exploration, ocean exploration has
    traditionally been a difficult, time-consuming, and expensive
    endeavor. As Dr. Bell points out in her testimony, at the
    current rate of ocean exploration - using the gold-standard of
    oceangoing research vessels equipped with special equipment for
    mapping and exploration - it would take over 1,000 years and
    millions of dollars to explore the remaining 85% of the oceans.
        As new technologies emerge for exploring the oceans, from
    underwater drones and smaller and cheaper remotely operated
    vehicles (ROVs), sensors to measure conditions in harsh ocean
    environments, to machine learning applications, ocean
    exploration is experiencing a renaissance. But the U.S. is
    falling behind in marine innovation, as federal investment in
    ocean exploration remains relatively small and stagnant, while
    international investment and innovation in ocean exploration
    grows. I am glad we are having this hearing to explore ways
    this Committee can look to legislative solutions to support and
    enhance U.S. leadership in ocean exploration.
        The United States has jurisdiction over more ocean than any
    other nation, so we have a real leadership role to play in
    ocean exploration. Our exclusive economic zone covers over 4.3
    million square miles, an area larger than the 3.8 million
    square miles of terrestrial land that make up the U.S. Having
    information on what's in the U.S.'s waters and seafloor is
    important for national security, natural resource management,
    economic health, and cultural identity. We must know what's out
    there in order to better manage and conserve our resources for
    generations to come.
        Ocean exploration would not be possible without a diverse
    enterprise of federal, commercial, academic, and non-profit
    investors and stakeholders. The National Oceanic and
    Atmospheric Administration is home to the nation's only
    dedicated federal ocean exploration program. This Committee is
    interested in learning about how the members of the ocean
    exploration community work together and how these roles can be
    better defined and partnerships leveraged to increase the pace,
    scope, and efficiency of ocean exploration.
        We are a nation of explorers, and we must keep exploring
    and learning about the oceans because our future depends on it.

        Chairwoman Fletcher. I will now recognize Ranking Member
    Marshall for an opening statement.
        Mr. Marshall. Thank you for holding this hearing,
    Chairwoman Fletcher. I want to thank our witnesses for
    appearing before this Subcommittee and sharing their
    perspectives. Though we are known more for wheat, cattle, and
    ethanol production, Kansans are affected every day by our
    oceans. Weather and climate patterns are one direct impact, but
    other indirect impacts, such as energy production,
    international trade routes, shipping our exports, as well as
    recreation and tourism opportunities affect Kansans daily. All
    Americans benefit from a better understanding of our oceans,
    whether we live on a farm in western Kansas, or a coastal
    community along the ocean.
        June is National Ocean Month, and it's fitting we hold this
    hearing recognizing the importance of researching this part of
    our planet, which has gone largely unexplored. Over 70 percent
    of our planet is covered by water, and more than 96 percent of
    that water is in our oceans. There are more than 13,000 miles
    of United States coastline, and 3.4 million nautical square
    miles within our Nation's territorial jurisdiction. However,
    NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
    estimates that only 35 percent of the ocean water adjacent to
    the U.S. has been explored with modern technology.
        A recent proclamation from the White House notes that our
    oceans, along with the Great Lakes, generate more than $320
    billion in economic activity annually. As part of NOAA's Fiscal
    Year 1920 budget submission, Acting Administrator Dr. Neil
    Jacobs named the development of the blue economy one of his top
    priorities. Having a better understanding of our oceans is an
    important component of promoting economic development, whether
    it's ensuring a strong fisheries economy, international trade,
    recreation and tourism, or energy exploration, we all benefit
    from ocean exploration.
        Scientific research is an important aspect of ocean
    exploration. We will hear from our witnesses today how
    discoveries from research conducted related to our oceans can
    positively impact medical research, cleaner energy production,
    and even the development of spacesuits. I look forward to
    hearing from our witnesses how this Committee can help promote
    research for our oceans.
        In January 2018, President Trump signed an executive order
    to advance ocean-related scientific research, and promote
    greater coordination between Federal agencies and ocean
    partnerships. This committee should ensure that universities,
    private companies, and non-profit groups can continue the
    mission of increasing our knowledge of our oceans for the
    benefit of our country. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I yield
    back.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Marshall follows:]

        Thank you for holding this hearing, Chairwoman Fletcher. I
    want to thank our witnesses for appearing before the
    Subcommittee and sharing their perspectives.
        Though we are known more for wheat and cattle production,
    Kansans are affected everyday by our oceans. Weather and
    climate patterns are one direct impact, but other indirect
    impacts, such as energy production, international trade routes
    shipping our exports, as well as recreation and tourism
    opportunities affect Kansans daily. All Americans benefit from
    a better understanding of our oceans, whether we live on a farm
    in western Kansas or a coastal community along the Atlantic
    Ocean.
        June is National Ocean Month and it is fitting we hold this
    hearing recognizing the importance of researching this part of
    our planet which has gone largely unexplored. Over 70% of our
    planet is covered by water and more than 96% of that water is
    in our oceans. There are more than 13,000 miles of U.S.
    coastline and 3.4 million nautical square miles within our
    nation's territorial jurisdiction, however NOAA estimates that
    only 35% of the ocean water adjacent to the U.S. has been
    explored with modern technology.
        A recent proclamation from the White House notes that our
    oceans, along with the Great Lakes, generate more than $320
    billion in economic activity annually. As part of NOAA's FY 20
    budget submission, Acting Administrator Dr. Neil Jacobs named
    the development of the blue economy one of his top priorities.
    Having a better understanding of our oceans is an important
    component of promoting economic development. Whether it is
    ensuring a strong fisheries economy, international trade,
    recreation and tourism, or energy exploration, we all benefit
    from ocean exploration.
        Scientific research is an important aspect of ocean
    exploration. We will hear from our witnesses today how
    discoveries from research conducted related to our oceans can
    positively impact medical research, cleaner energy production,
    and even the development of spacesuits.
        I look forward to hearing from our witnesses how this
    committee can help promote research of our oceans. In January
    2018, President Trump signed an executive order to advance
    ocean-related scientific research and promote greater
    coordination between federal agencies and ocean partnerships.
    This committee should ensure that universities, private
    companies, and non-profit groups can continue the mission of
    increasing our knowledge of our oceans for the benefit of our
    country.
        Thank you, Madam Chair. I yield back.

        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Marshall. If there are
    Members who wish to submit additional opening statements, your
    statements will be added to the record at this point.
        [The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:]

        Thank you Chair Fletcher for holding this hearing, and I
    would also like to welcome our witnesses today.
        I am glad to see our Committee so engaged in World Oceans
    Month and Capitol Hill Ocean Week from our film screening of
    Chasing Coral yesterday, to today's hearing, to our Ocean
    Exploration Expo tomorrow morning. We are also moving four
    bipartisan ocean acidification bills, which passed out of this
    Committee last month, on the House Floor this morning. The
    oceans are such a vital part of our national economy and
    livelihoods, with forty percent of the U.S. population residing
    in coastal counties that it is only fitting that we celebrate
    them.
        The oceans make up over seventy percent of the surface of
    our planet, but over eighty percent of the world's oceans
    remained unmapped. It is commonly said that we know more about
    the surface of the moon than we do about the sea floor. Ocean
    exploration is more than just finding ship wrecks and
    identifying new marine species. It has the potential to answer
    questions about the origins of life on Earth and beyond. We
    have barely scratched the surface when it comes to marine
    discoveries.
        I have always considered the Science, Space, and Technology
    Committee to be the Committee of the future. We have seen our
    federal investments in research and development lead to great
    advances in science and technology that have helped the United
    States to lead in many fields. This Committee should be
    committed to continuing to promote and enable American
    excellence in science, technology, and innovation. Ocean
    exploration is a field that has untold opportunity. But,
    despite the emergence of new cutting-edge and cost-effective
    ocean exploration technologies, we are ceding ground to other
    countries. Congress must be engaged in the next phase of ocean
    exploration so we can regain American leadership in this field.
        In order to be global leaders, we must first understand the
    state and importance of ocean exploration, which is why today's
    hearing is so important. The witness panel brings together
    diverse perspectives of organizations that are at the leading
    edge of ocean exploration. It is a field that is built upon a
    foundation of partnerships between public, private, academic,
    and non-profit sectors. We need to ensure that we are fully
    leveraging these partnerships to maximize the resources and
    tools available to us. I am looking forward to our witnesses
    providing feedback on how these partnerships are working, and
    how we can address knowledge gaps so that we can continue to
    make advances in this important.

        Chairwoman Fletcher. And at this time, I would like to
    introduce our witnesses.
        Our first witness, Dr. Katy Croff Bell, is the founding
    Director of the Open Ocean Initiative, and a research scientist
    at the MIT Media Lab. Her background is in deep-sea
    exploration, and since 1999 she has led or participated in more
    than 25 oceanographic and archaeological projects. In 2001, she
    was a John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellow in the NOAA Office of
    Ocean Exploration. At the Ocean Exploration Trust, she was
    chief scientist of the Nautilus Exploration Program. Dr. Bell
    received her B.S. in ocean engineering from MIT, her Master's
    in maritime archaeology from the University of Southampton, and
    her Ph.D. in geological oceanography from the University of
    Rhode Island.
        Our second witness, Dr. Carlie Wiener, is the Director of
    Marine Communications at the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
    Previously she held the position of communications manager for
    Centers for Ocean Science, Education Excellence, Island Earth,
    and prior to that she worked as the research and outreach
    specialist for the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology,
    Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Research Partnership, at the
    University of Hawaii. She also hosted the monthly marine
    science radio show, All Things Marine, for 6 years. Dr. Wiener
    received her bachelor's degree in communications, and her
    master's and doctorate degrees in environmental studies from
    York University in Toronto, Canada.
        Our third witness, Mr. Steve Barrett, is the Senior Vice
    President of Business Development at Oceaneering International,
    Inc. Previously he served as senior vice president of Sub-sea
    Product Lines at Oceaneering International. Mr. Barrett has
    more than 30 years of experience working in the oil and gas
    industry, starting in 1980. In 1982, he joined FMCA
    Technologies, Inc., where he progressed from design engineer to
    his most recent role as global director of Sub-sea Services.
    Mr. Barrett holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Texas
    A&M University, and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from
    Rice University.
        Our final witness is Mr. David Lang, the co-Founder and
    Vice President of Business Development and Outreach for Sofar
    Ocean Technologies. In 2011, Mr. Lang co-founded Open Rove,
    which pioneered low-cost, underwater drone designs. Open Rove
    merged with another company in 2019 to form Sofar. Now the
    mission of the company is to create pervasive sensor networks
    to understand and monitor ocean environments, and provide
    critical data for ocean enthusiasts, industry, and
    conservation. Mr. Lang received his bachelor's of business
    administration from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
        Each witness will have 5 minutes for their spoken
    testimony. Your written testimony will be included in the
    record for the hearing. When you've completed your spoken
    testimony, we will begin with questions. Each Member will have
    5 minutes to question the panel. And we will begin with Dr.
    Bell.

                    TESTIMONY OF DR. KATY CROFF BELL,

                FOUNDING DIRECTOR, OPEN OCEAN INITIATIVE,

                              MIT MEDIA LAB

        Dr. Bell. Chairwoman Fletcher, Ranking Member Marshall,
    Members of the Environment Subcommittee, and Members of the
    House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, thank you
    for this opportunity to testify on the importance and future of
    ocean exploration.
        The deep ocean, below 200 meters, is the largest ecosystem
    on our planet, supporting life for every human on Earth. The
    ocean provides most of the oxygen we breathe, supplies food for
    billions of people, supports a trillion dollar global ocean
    economy, nourishes our souls, and astonishes us with its
    wonders. In turn, we are impacting the deep sea at an
    unprecedented rate, increasing greenhouse gas emissions,
    pollution, extraction industries, and more, and yet we only
    have a rudimentary understanding of the ocean's role in our
    survival. We are at a critical point where we may be
    irreparably impacting the deep sea without truly understanding
    what those impacts may be.
        In 2000, an expert panel, led by Dr. Marsha McNutt,
    published the report of the President's Panel on Ocean
    Exploration. The distinguished group of academic, industry, and
    government leaders called for the establishment of a Federal
    ocean exploration program to map the physical, geological,
    biological, chemical, and archaeological aspects of the ocean,
    funded at $75 million a year. Within months the NOAA Office of
    Ocean Exploration was created, funded at $4 million, and has
    seen a maximum of $42 million just this year in FY 2019. If
    high risk research like exploration is underfunded or unstable,
    agencies will tend to invest in safe bets that result in
    incremental progress, rather than riskier, but potentially
    transformative, endeavors that can truly change the future,
    enhance our understanding of the ocean, and ensure U.S.
    leadership. Today, deep-sea exploration sits at a crossroads.
    We could continue making incremental progress, or we could
    invest in new technologies, research methods, and social
    systems to transform and accelerate discovery for the 21st
    century. I believe that America is better served with the
    latter.
        To do so, we must first maximize the efficiency of
    discovery. Current practices focus on large, ship-based
    equipment, which affords spectacularly detailed observations,
    like the ones you see here, but only on hyper-focused spatial
    and temporal scales, and at a very expensive rate. To try
    maximize our investment, we should leverage economies of scale
    to dramatically decrease the cost of sensors and systems by
    orders of magnitude to significantly increase the amount of
    area and volume of the ocean that we can explore, develop data
    systems, standards, archiving, access, and advanced analysis to
    fully understand data and new scales in an integrated way, and
    innovate across the spectrum of exploration by applying
    advances from other industries to ocean challenges, and
    creating a responsive environment in which to deploy and
    operationalize new tools to re-establish the United States as a
    global leader.
        Second, we must use these new tools to explore the world's
    undiscovered places. To be sure, the mandate to explore the
    entirety of the U.S. exclusive economic zone is a significant
    challenge, but it is not enough. The ocean does not know
    boundaries, and it is an incredibly interconnected system, from
    coastal communities to the high seas, the atmosphere, to the
    deep-sea trenches. We therefore must view ocean exploration as
    a global imperative, not a national one, to achieve something
    greater than we could ever do alone.
        And, finally, we must lead a global community of explorers.
    Traditionally exploration is conducted by those with advanced
    degrees, and access to costly equipment, limiting the number
    and diversity of people involved in the enterprise. To fully
    explore and understand our vast oceans, however, we need to
    work outside the traditional structures. One strategy for
    thinking beyond our current model is to build new bridges with
    communities who have not yet been invited into oceanographic
    exploration, including underrepresented communities within the
    U.S., as well as developing countries around the world. Instead
    of only an elite cadre of academics participating in ocean
    exploration, limiting the types and amount of work that we can
    do, we need to nurture new communities, build greater global
    capacity for exploration, and look for ideas and expertise in
    unexpected places.
        Creating a global program of ocean exploration is
    ambitious, but imperative, and will yield a significant return
    on investment, with innumerable benefits to the United States,
    and the world. To do so, we need to invest in high risk
    research and development to maximize discovery, explore the
    world's undiscovered places, and lead a global community of
    explorers. By undertaking a long-term global strategy of ocean
    exploration, we will leverage all that we know, and all that we
    will discover. Thank you very much.
        [The prepared statement of Dr. Bell follows:]
        [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Dr. Bell. Dr. Wiener?

                     TESTIMONY OF DR. CARLIE WIENER,

                   DIRECTOR OF MARINE COMMUNICATIONS,

                         SCHMIDT OCEAN INSTITUTE

        Dr. Wiener. Thank you Chair Fletcher, Ranking Member
    Marshall, and the other distinguished Members of the Committee,
    for holding this valuable hearing today, and for giving me the
    esteemed privilege for providing testimony. It is an honor to
    be here to speak about the deep-sea environment that is not
    often at the forefront of everyday citizens' thoughts about the
    ocean. Such vital systems, like deep seamounts, coral reefs,
    seeps, and other deep systems provide scientific understanding,
    sharing, and consideration. I thank this Committee for its
    efforts to facilitate discussion on a national level to address
    the significance of ocean exploration, and continued need for a
    collaboration, technology-based research. If you could start
    the slide, that would be great.
        It is my great pleasure to appear before you today in my
    current capacity as directing communications and outreach for
    Schmidt Ocean Institute, a 501(c)(3) operating foundation
    established by Eric and Wendy Schmidt in 2009. Schmidt Ocean
    Institute is the only philanthropically funded international
    seagoing facility dedicated to year-round open ocean research,
    and aims to foster a deep understanding of our ocean by
    combining advanced science with state-of-the-art technology. In
    my role I share the exciting discoveries and important research
    that takes place on the institute's research vessel, Falkor.
        A statistic we often hear is that we know more about the
    far side of the moon than about the ocean, but I personally
    think that the more important question to highlight here is,
    why do we know more about the moon than we do about the deep
    sea? How do we create excitement and passion for the systems
    that we cannot view from the beach, and bring understanding to
    the ocean health--about ocean health to America's heartland?
    Many observe the vastness of the ocean, but few comprehend the
    scale of the deep sea. However, technology is beginning to
    change this, not only giving access to these environments for
    research, but to share this exploration through livestreaming
    video around the world, technology that continues to advance
    the state of the ocean science in an area where more focus
    needs to be allocated, allowing for broader and faster data
    collection, management, analysis, and open sharing.
        As our global ocean changes, we need to be able to capture
    baseline data for hard-to-reach places, and understand how they
    will influence shallow environments. Unfortunately, available
    deep-sea observations are discontinuous, and it is not known
    how these ecosystems connect to each other, or to the broader
    ocean food chain. One of the best ways to close this lack of
    understanding is through multi-disciplinary, multinational
    partnerships. Schmidt Ocean Institute has endeavored to achieve
    this through unique collaborations that have had scientific and
    conservation implications. An example of this is in 2014, high-
    resolution maps created off of research vessel Falkor for the
    Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. These maps helped
    to eliminate sea mounts that contributed to justification for
    expansion of the protected areas. Or of the newly discovered
    geological formations found in the Pescadero Basin last year
    that feature upside-down, mirror-like lakes that pool hot
    fluids. The work at this site will further allow investigation
    of the geological controls on habitat suitability for different
    animal communities.
        Better data monitoring and capacity will play a central
    role in improving exploration outcomes. This means not only
    implementing robust technologies in our own waters of North
    America, but expanding them globally to remote and developing
    countries. Robotics systems, coupled with artificial
    intelligence, can complement existing vessels and platforms.
    When deployed in groups, autonomous vehicles will improve
    coverage and cost-efficiency for ocean observations.
        Schmidt Ocean Institute has focused on scalable ocean
    research, offering time at sea for developing and testing of
    robots, and smart software for autonomous marine surveys. These
    types of projects allow scientists to make quick and well-
    informed decisions on how to directly sample and conduct fine-
    scale surveys. While we still have much to discover here on
    Earth, scientists are also looking to other oceans in our solar
    system. In preparation for such endeavors, deep ocean systems
    can serve as a laboratory to develop and test new technology
    for use in extraterrestrial exploration.
        Ocean exploration lends itself to interactive storytelling
    and engagement. Outreach programs should not only continue to
    be supported on a national level, but successful programs must
    be identified, expanded, and replicated across disciplines and
    locations. It is important to not just make data and imagery
    available, but to synthesize these materials for engaging
    widespread audiences. One example is Schmidt Ocean Institute's
    Artists at Sea program, that has had many artists participate
    in science expeditions, and share their art. It is a way to
    make data approachable, and bring in new audiences to
    understand the ocean.
        The public faces daily messages and negativity surrounding
    our ocean. During this time of environmental decline, ocean
    exploration can provide a new narrative, bringing a message of
    hope by showcasing beautiful and mysterious parts of our ocean
    that are rarely observed to millions of people. The ocean is
    changing, but new data, science, and dedicated people can bring
    a fresh understanding and engagement to the deep sea. Thank you
    very much for inviting me to testify here today.
        [The prepared statement of Dr. Wiener follows:]
        [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Dr. Wiener. Mr. Barrett?

                       TESTIMONY OF STEVE BARRETT,

              SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT,

                        OCEANEERING INTERNATIONAL

        Mr. Barrett. Chairwoman Fletcher, Ranking Member Marshall,
    Members of the Committee, thank you for holding this very
    timely and important hearing, and for the opportunity to
    provide one perspective on the future of ocean exploration. I'm
    very excited to be here today, and to represent Oceaneering
    International, and to share a seat at this table with some
    truly incredible co-panelists. Dr. Wiener's tremendous work as
    Communications Director at Schmidt Ocean Institute, where
    Schmidt continues to set the bar for getting ocean exploration
    at the forefront of the public; Dr. Bell's aggressive work to
    promote ocean exploration as a cornerstone in the field and the
    academic world, and continues to set the example for others to
    join and emulate; and David Lang's innovative approach with
    Open ROV (remotely operated vehicles), and now Sofar Ocean
    Technologies, and his engagement in ocean exploration and new
    ideas are bringing a new generation of ocean explorers to our
    world. Together they are bringing us to new depths and
    discoveries.
        My written submitted remarks focus on how Oceaneering's
    history of innovation and technology development is helping
    shape the future of ocean exploration, particularly in the
    commercial ocean energy services and defense undersea sectors.
    Oceaneering continues to leverage technology, innovation, and
    expertise from its maritime, space, and robotics industry
    portfolios across both the commercial and defense domains to
    better support current and future of ocean exploration.
        Oceaneering has developed state-of-the-art, world-class ROV
    technologies, and currently is taking those to the next level
    of all electric, resonant, with remote piloting for extended
    missions, and building on those breakthrough technologies with
    our new Freedom vehicle, combining extended electric
    deployment, work, and hovering capability with remote or
    autonomy in extended sub-sea survey inspection and maintenance
    missions.
        As Dr. Bell, I think, mentioned deploying assets, working
    offshore in marine environments is inherently very costly, as
    is developing new and improved technologies for ocean
    exploration. Obviously, no sector working alone can achieve all
    that is needed, and therefore a better collaboration between
    government agencies, academics, non-profits, and industry
    should be a priority. Better collaboration could potentially
    lower the inherent high cost of ocean data acquisition, and
    expand the footprint of coverage. As Dr. Bell touched on, there
    must be better ways to leverage the utilization of existing
    vessels within industry activity, such as transportation,
    offshore energy services, and fishing, and, with that, we might
    be able to improve our collective ability to cost-effectively
    acquire more ocean data.
        Finally, to attract our best and brightest young minds who
    can tackle the technical, cost, data acquisition, and data
    analytics challenges for ocean exploration, we need to make
    sure that industry, academia, and government are providing
    attractive and exciting new opportunities in the areas of ocean
    exploration. Many current and future technical and
    collaborative developments across the spectrum of ocean
    exploration are a key foundation to our collective challenge of
    reaching new depths and discoveries. Having a robust commercial
    sector, partnerships, industry, and participants, such as
    Oceaneering, I believe, can provide a force multiplier that
    complements the tremendous work of Doctors Wiener and Bell, and
    of innovative new players in this area, like David Lang of
    Sofar Ocean Technologies. We all have critical roles to play,
    and, with your Committee's support, we look forward to our
    future in supporting ocean exploration. Chairwoman Fletcher, I
    look forward to engaging in discussion with you and the
    Committee, and answering any questions that you or your
    Committee may have.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Barrett follows:]
        [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Barrett. Mr. Lang?

                        TESTIMONY OF DAVID LANG,

                  CO-FOUNDER, SOFAR OCEAN TECHNOLOGIES

        Mr. Lang. Chairwoman Fletcher, Ranking Member Marshall, and
    Members of the Committee, thank you for this opportunity. I
    need to start with a disclaimer, I am not a formally trained
    scientist or engineer. My path to this hearing is unusual, and
    worth explaining. It begins in an unexpected place, not a
    graduate school lab in Woods Hole or Monterey, not on a
    research vessel exploring the high seas, and not on a Navy
    battleship. It starts in 2011, my friend Eric Stackpole's
    garage in Cupertino, California. We were both in our mid-20s
    and underemployed. We were attempting to build an underwater
    remotely operated vehicle, an ROV, for as cheap as we possible
    could, using only off-the-shelf parts we could buy on the
    Internet. Our goal was to use the robot to explore an
    underwater cave in the Trinity Alps in Northern California,
    supposedly filled with gold from an abandoned heist during the
    gold rush. The story was an excuse for us to tinker with new
    technologies and, honestly, to have a little fun.
        After our unsuccessful, but commendable, expedition to find
    the gold, the project took on a life of its own. The effort was
    reported on by the New York Times, and we were overwhelmed with
    interest by others who wanted a similar, affordable device. We
    launched a project on Kickstarter to sell our design as a DIY,
    build-it-yourself kit, and quickly sold more than we projected.
    Over the years, we grew out of the garage to become one of the
    largest volume ROV manufacturers in the world, pioneering new
    designs, and most recently merging with another company to form
    Sofar Ocean Technologies. Our community, using our tools, have
    made important contributions to the understanding of species
    and ecosystems around the world, and contributed to the
    education and engagement of thousands of students and young
    explorers.
        We only learned later, during a NOAA-organized meeting with
    leading ocean scientists and engineers, just how unique our
    effort had been. The scientists were less impressed with what
    we built, after all, they already had all of these tools, but
    in how we went about it, by openly sharing our designs online,
    crowdfunding our initial startup costs, and, most importantly,
    engaging a global community of citizen scientists. The experts
    were bound by constraints, both economic and institutional,
    that we were not. Our innovation was not a result of genius. It
    was mostly luck, born of necessity and amateur persistence. Our
    inexperience, mixed with a rapidly shifting technological
    landscape, created an opportunity to move the needle on small,
    low-cost ROVs.
        I tell you this long story for context, but also because I
    think we learned really important lessons, which I submit this
    Committee could find useful. The first is to remember that the
    mission of ocean exploration, to illuminate the unknown,
    carries multiple meanings. It's widely reported, as everyone
    here has said, what little percentage of the ocean we've
    explored and characterized. Whether mapping the ocean floor, or
    studying the varying depths of the water column, there are
    still vast areas of Earth left to explore, and we should. But
    there is another responsibility of the ocean exploration
    enterprise that doesn't get as much attention, how we explore.
    Part of the process of discovery is the constant search for a
    better way and a new perspective. This is the technological
    frontier, and it's as dynamic and full of opportunity as the
    unexplored places. The emerging fields of robotics and machine
    learning, the advancements of eDNA and genetic sequencing, and
    the steady march of Moore's law and increasing connectivity
    continue to make this fertile ground for experimentation.
        We're still at the beginning of applying these technologies
    to the mission of understanding and monitoring the ocean. Over
    10 years ago NOAA made a leap by operationalizing Dr. Bob
    Ballard and the Ocean Exploration Trust's vision for
    telepresence, and its potential to scale the effectiveness of a
    single ship at sea, and that telepresence has completely
    changed the way we conduct science, engage the public, and
    inspire the next generation. We need more leaps. Exploration is
    where we go and how we get there.
        The second lesson is that entrepreneurs and startups are an
    increasingly important part of navigating this technological
    frontier. Congress would be wise to look at the evolution of
    NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) over the
    past decade and hope for a similar ocean renaissance. As a
    generation of space entrepreneurs took to the cosmos, NASA was
    able to find commercially competitive contractors to take over
    launch and other duties, which allowed them to focus their
    resources on what they do best, going further. As NOAA faces
    the challenge of managing aging ships and infrastructure, the
    agency would do well to focus enough of their limited resources
    on stimulating a vibrant private sector, rather than trying to
    rebuild everything themselves.
        The last lesson is--we learned is that ocean exploration is
    for everyone. We all have a stake. This is not just a coastal
    issue. We were surprised by all of the enthusiasm we received
    for our project, the citizen scientists who wanted to get
    involved all over the world. I can do no better than John
    Steinbeck's call to the sea, published in 1966 in Popular
    Science, which is still as relevant as ever. There is something
    for everyone in the sea. Incredible beauty for the artist, the
    excitement and danger of exploration for the brave and
    restless, an open door for the ingenuity and inventiveness of
    the clever, a new world for the bored, food for the hungry, and
    incalculable material wealth for the acquisitive, and all of
    these in addition to the pure clean wonder of increasing
    knowledge. Ocean exploration is a cause worth championing, and
    I hope that you do.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Lang follows:]
        [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Lang. At this point
    we'll begin our first round of questions, and I'm going to
    recognize myself for 5 minutes.
        I really enjoyed hearing from all of you, and there are
    some themes that emerged that all of you have talked about.
    One, stimulating excitement, and innovation, and interest in
    this exploration, and two, the partnerships, and so I want to
    try to touch on both of those, and I have general questions for
    the panel. As I mentioned in my opening statement, and Dr.
    Wiener referenced, more people have walked on the moon than the
    deepest parts of the ocean, and, of course, being from Houston,
    we are very proud of our history of space exploration and
    putting man on the moon, but certainly there's a lot of work to
    do here.
        So I loved seeing the pictures of the artists that you had,
    Dr. Wiener, and I'm wondering of you all can suggest some
    specific ways that we can excite the public about ocean
    exploration. To your point, Mr. Lang, about invigorating a
    whole new group of folks to get out and engage in this process,
    how can we excite the public about ocean exploration with the
    same vigor that we've seen, for example, in space? And that's
    for anyone on the panel who wants to take it. Want to go first,
    Mr. Lang?
        Mr. Lang. I would, yes. I think--when you think about
    what's happened with space, and why it's received such a
    renewed excitement, the people who are leading at are
    entrepreneurs. It's Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Those are the
    first things that come to mind, and I think all of the
    entrepreneurs who are following their lead. And so I think it's
    wise to look at that example, at charismatic entrepreneurs, as
    folks who can help reinvigorate. And I think NASA has done a
    great job of working with that momentum, and helping to support
    it.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you. Anybody else want to weigh
    in? Dr. Wiener?
        Dr. Wiener. I'd like to weigh in as well, thank you.
    Another point I'd like to make too, in terms of the space/ocean
    comparison, space has done a really good job of branding
    itself, and the oceans have--are getting there, but it's a lot
    more diverse. We've got coral reefs, and shallow waters, and
    deep sea, and many different ecosystems, and making those
    connections, I think, is something that needs to be emphasized
    more, and also reaching those that haven't traditionally been
    involved in the ocean, so reaching some of our underserved or
    underrepresented groups that don't have direct access to the
    ocean, and starting with inspiration at a young age, and
    following through from K to gray, making sure that we are able
    to engage all of our public communities in the ocean.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Dr. Wiener. Dr. Bell?
        Dr. Bell. Yes, I'd like to go in a slightly different
    direction and look at media and entertainment. I have no idea
    what percentage, but I would be willing to bet that a large
    percentage of people who are in the space industry loved
    watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and there are many people,
    Mae Jamison, for example, who cites her experience at NASA
    because of Nichelle Nichols in Star Trek. And I think that it
    would be a huge opportunity loss to not look at media and
    entertainment because of the stories that can be imagined and
    told about--potentially utopian ocean futures, rather than the
    dystopian ones that we see every day in the media, to bring it
    to a much, much larger audience than today we're able to
    through--and we are reaching tens of millions with
    telepresence. We are reaching lots and lots of people through
    citizen science initiatives, but if we actually want to reach
    billions of people, I think we need to do it with different
    types of partnerships than we have before.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you. Well, that touches on sort
    of the second area that I wanted to go to, and, knowing that I
    have limited time, maybe I can just segue over to talk a little
    bit about the existing partnerships, and how we can strengthen
    the existing partnerships amongst government, academia,
    industry that you all have referenced. How can we strengthen
    those to leverage the available ocean exploration tools? I
    think, Mr. Barrett, you talked a little bit about that, and
    resources in the future, and then how can we kind of broaden
    that to reach your objective, Dr. Bell, of widening interest?
    Maybe, Mr. Barrett, could you talk about that a little bit
    more?
        Mr. Barrett. I think one of the challenges for industry and
    commercial enterprises like oceaneering is investment, and
    investment in new technology comes with inherent risks. And
    often we invest in new technologies because we have a clear
    line of sight to our customer's needs, and how we would
    commercialize toward those needs. I think a better line of
    sight to a broader spectrum of technological needs that apply
    to ocean exploration, in the academic sense, and in the
    scientific sense, and the vision going forward could be very
    useful to commercial enterprise to shape better how they view
    and justify technical investments, technology investments.
        I think the other piece that--it seems to me that the
    collaboration around the vast numbers of oceangoing vessels,
    and how they could be utilized to capture more data on a
    regular basis is something that should be explored more fully.
    It'll take a platform, and forums, and better opportunities to
    engage with those enterprises to do it, but it seems like an
    opportunity to me.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Barrett, and I see that
    I have gone over my allotted time, so I will now recognize
    Ranking Member Marshall for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Marshall. OK. Thank you, Chairwoman. I want to talk a
    little bit about globally, some of the global challenges that
    we have. In particular, I'm always interested to know if our
    scientists are talking to scientists from other countries,
    specifically China, India, Russia, Japan, Brazil. Is there any
    interaction between what we're doing and some folks from there?
    Have any of the four of you had interaction with scientists
    from other groups working on solving this problem that we have
    together? This is a world challenge, obviously. Dr. Bell does.
        Dr. Bell. Definitely. Yes, working with Nautilus for many
    years, we've worked in--all over the Mediterranean region, and
    so therefore working with scientists from all of those
    countries. And one really exciting opportunity coming up is the
    U.N. Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, which
    is sort of being--ideas are coming together right now to launch
    for 2021 to 2030, and I think that's a huge opportunity to work
    with like-minded scientists from all over the world.
        Mr. Marshall. Will China and Russia participate in that?
        Dr. Bell. I believe that there were--there were scientists
    from China at the first global planning meeting that was just
    held 2 weeks ago in Denmark. I don't know if Russia was
    represented there. But the--that was just the first planning
    meeting, and regional meetings are being planned for the next
    year or so----
        Mr. Marshall. India, Brazil, would they most likely be
    there?
        Dr. Bell. I would have to check.
        Mr. Marshall. Is there anything that we can do to promote
    those relationships and work on this challenge together?
        Dr. Bell. Absolutely. There are several members of the
    executive planning group for the U.N. Decade that are from the
    U.S., Craig McLean, most notably, who's the acting chief
    scientist of NOAA, so I would definitely talk to him first
    about who from those countries have been represented so far,
    and who might be in the future. There will be several regional
    planning meetings coming up in the next year, and I believe
    that Brazil might be one of the hosts of those. But I'd be
    happy to get back to you.
        Mr. Marshall. Anybody else with interaction with other
    scientists? Mr. Barrett?
        Mr. Barrett. No. Ours really is through--we're a global
    company, but our interaction is always through our customers,
    traditionally, in the global stage.
        Mr. Marshall. OK. All right.
        Dr. Wiener. I just wanted to add to the remarks from Dr.
    Bell that there's also the Seabed 2030 Project, which is an
    initiative from the Nippon Foundation in Japan, and it's a
    global initiative to try and map the entire ocean sea floor by
    2030, and so that's another opportunity to engage and
    collaborate with the nations that you've mentioned. Schmidt
    Ocean Institute also looks to international collaborations, and
    we have hosted many scientists from multiple countries
    collaboratively on our research vessel for different projects,
    including some of the countries that you had mentioned.
        Mr. Marshall. OK. So certainly my learning curve on
    oceanography right now is like this, and I'm back here, so
    forgive me if this is an ignorant question, but as I think
    about the function of the ocean, removing carbon gases, and
    then restoring oxygen from all the plankton that we have around
    the world, is that all done in the top 10 or 20 meters of
    water? Are there plants down lower that are doing that as well,
    in your research?
        Dr. Bell. So the actual photosynthesis that's happening is
    being done in the top layers, where sunlight can penetrate
    through the water, but the ocean circulates, on a global level,
    from sea surface down to deep water, so it's a very
    interconnected system. I am not an expert in that particular
    field, but the carbon dioxide that's being used by plants is
    happening in the top layers.
        Mr. Marshall. So are there any innovation opportunities
    down deeper to help promote that photosynthesis that's going on
    above? And I think you were staring to go in that direction a
    little bit.
        Dr. Bell. Do you want--I have one interesting fact about
    whales, that whale defecation actually is a huge input of
    carbon to those systems to support plankton, which then are the
    basis of, for example, fisheries, and other--it's a very----
        Mr. Marshall. I hope they're not releasing----
        Dr. Bell. It's a killer system.
        Mr. Marshall [continuing]. Any methane gas. OK. Dr. Wiener,
    go ahead.
        Dr. Wiener. I just wanted to add to that, that we still
    don't fully understand those relationships, and that is why
    exploration and research is so important, is to better
    characterize these very specific--not--sorry, to better
    characterize how these interactions take place, and looking at
    these small ecosystem relationships, and how they are
    interconnected.
        Mr. Marshall. OK--anyone else?
        Mr. Lang. I would add its--the perspective of someone who's
    also relatively new to the ocean exploration enterprise, and
    ocean science, and the thing that was most surprising to me
    over the past decade has been realizing just how little we
    know, and how much we're actually at the beginning of starting
    to understand these kind of systems, and how much progress----
        Mr. Marshall. I need to yield back, but I think we keep the
    goal in mind, if our goal is to innovate, as opposed to just
    researching for researching, so I yield back.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Marshall. And, before
    we move on, I would also like to mention that we received two
    letters of support for this hearing, and ocean exploration,
    from OceanX and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that I
    will submit for the record. And, with that, I'd like to
    recognize Mr. Lamb for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Lamb. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Lang, I was very
    interested in what you said about--as NOAA makes decisions
    going forward about the use of its resources, sort of where we
    direct those investments, and how they can take advantage of
    the energy of young entrepreneurs, and folks in the private
    sector, while also kind of doing the core mission that you
    benefit from. Because you highlighted telepresence in your
    testimony, and that was sort of a NOAA-led innovation, as I
    understand it. So could you may just go into a little more
    detail about, in your experience, what you saw as the strengths
    of NOAA, like, the things that only NOAA could've done, and the
    things that you think could be sort of more efficiently built
    upon by people in your situation?
        Mr. Lang. Yes, absolutely. So I think the biggest thing
    that--the biggest opportunity is in terms of autonomy and
    distributed systems. I think the costs of sensors and compute
    is going down, connectivity is continuing to increase. I know
    SpaceX just launched their Starlink system. Connectivity is
    going to change dramatically in the next few years, and the way
    that we do--the way that we actually collect that data could be
    done in a much more distributed manner. And you--there's a
    number of startups working in this area, and it's a really
    tricky interface right now to work with NOAA. It's a--it's--
    there's a lot of hurdles, and a lot of--it's unclear what the
    interface actually is, and I think that's the big opportunity,
    is to create----
        Mr. Lamb. Are those technical hurdles, like they don't have
    the systems to make the data interact with each other, or is it
    more regulatory, or cultural, or could----
        Mr. Lang. I would say it's cultural. I think the way that--
    how fast a startup moves--you think about the way that we're
    able to raise capital, and the timelines that we're working on,
    in, like, months and years, rather than the way that kind of
    the NOAA grant process works, is more on an academic schedule,
    which is actually really a tough way to work for smaller
    companies like ours. It's easier for bigger companies, who have
    those kinds of cycles, but it's trickier for a group like ours.
    I think the, you know, the Department of Defense, with their
    DIU (Defense Innovation Unit), has kind of--has started to make
    headway into trying to figure out a way to interface with these
    companies, but it's still a problem worth solving.
        Mr. Lamb. OK. And the advancements in your space, can you
    just kind of describe what you expect to see in the next few
    years, as far as these, you know, just these underwater drones,
    for lack of a better term? I mean, are we talking sort of pure
    data gathering, are we talking, like, actual expiration of, you
    know, species, and testing to determine if we could get, you
    know, anti-inflammatory drugs or anything out of them? Tell me
    just kind of where we are.
        Mr. Lang. Yes. So these are our ROVs right here. I mean,
    this is orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper than what's
    existed before. I think we're going to continue to see the
    miniaturization and the autonomous potential. I think there's a
    ton happening with positioning sensors that's going to open up
    a lot. The way that eDNA is--become a way to actually sense
    what's in the environment. I think you look at how cheap
    genetic sequencing is getting, that we're going to have an
    opportunity characterize these environments in a completely
    revolutionary way.
        Mr. Lamb. So you think we're not that far away from the
    ability, for example, for one of your sensors to actually
    sequence a genome underwater, and send that data back to the
    surface?
        Mr. Lang. I don't know if one of--the in situ genetic
    sequencing is not something--I don't know how close we are to
    that exactly, because you've got to understand, everything--as
    fast as that's moving on land, doing that in situ underwater is
    really hard.
        Mr. Lamb. Right.
        Mr. Lang. But I would say, when you look at, like, from a
    systems perspective, and the way that we've been able to engage
    this global community of citizen scientists, there's a huge
    opportunity to engage people in a different way. And there was
    just--the--in 2016 the Citizen Science Act, I forget the
    precise name of it, but--allowed that data to be used for
    scientific research purposes, and for government research
    purposes. So there is kind of some precedent to start thinking
    about these systems in new ways, these data collection systems.
        Mr. Lamb. Thank you. I yield back.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you very much, Mr. Lamb. I will
    now recognize Mr. Babin for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Babin. Thank you very much, Madam Chair, appreciate it.
    And thank you, witnesses, for being here. We really appreciate
    your testimony. In addition to serving on this Subcommittee, I
    also serve as the Ranking Member on the Space and Aeronautics
    Subcommittee, and I have the privilege of representing Johnson
    Space Center back home in Houston. And, with that in mind, I'd
    like to ask a couple of questions about ocean exploration, and
    how this field is often closely tied with technologies that are
    used in space exploration as well. And so, Mr. Barrett, I'll
    start with you.
        Oceaneering has engaged in extensive research and
    development as part of its core business of energy exploration.
    And, for many years, Oceaneering has been involved in the space
    industry, and is currently working with NASA on the next
    generation spacesuit. How did your work in ocean exploration
    contribute to the spacesuit development, and what lessons
    learned from ocean exploration have helped you in spacesuit
    development as well?
        Mr. Barrett. Congressman Babin, that's a great question.
    It's a--such a natural adjacency to take technology and methods
    that were developed in a harsh environment underwater, and then
    use those in a harsh environment that includes the vacuum of
    space. And so the way that man interacts with that environment,
    though--whether it's a spacesuit, or through a diving suit,
    there are tremendous learnings and applications that were
    deployed.
        We mostly do work underwater in our diving and in our ROV
    business, and the way you do work through automation, through
    tool position, through the use and design of the tools, as well
    as the visibility and the inherent challenges of mobility and
    dexterity, it's a natural adjacency for us. And it even carries
    into the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, which we operate the divers for
    the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, so--to simulate working in space,
    it's a natural to do that underwater, and make the astronaut
    neutrally buoyant so he can practice his--I think they call it
    EVAs, his extra vehicle activity, over and over until it's very
    routine and very precise, so----
        Mr. Babin. Which is more hostile, underwater or space?
        Mr. Barrett. Well, in some ways underwater. When I first--
    --
        Mr. Babin [continuing]. I thought.
        Mr. Barrett [continuing]. Joined the sub-sea business, and
    we were completing--helping our customers complete wells in
    10,000 feet of water, the difference is, you know, a vacuum has
    a pressure differential of one atmosphere. In 10,000 feet of
    water, you've got pressures of 5,000 psi, so in some ways the
    ocean depths can be--I will say as hostile, or more hostile.
        Mr. Babin. Right. That does not surprise me. Thank you very
    much. And, Dr. Wiener, I wanted to ask you, I serve as the
    Ranking Member of Space and Aeronautics. As I see it, I was
    fascinated to read how the Schmidt Institute had worked with
    NASA on the development and testing of hardware in preparation
    of future deep space missions by utilizing the depths of the
    ocean, that's similar to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. How is this
    partnership between NASA and the institution initiated? And,
    following up on that, what have been the benefits for each side
    in this partnership?
        Dr. Wiener. Thank you for your question. We've been working
    with scientists in the research community who work with NASA on
    development of technologies. There are similar goals there
    between ocean exploration and space exploration. An example is
    the Abyss Lander. This was recently used on research vessel
    Falkor in 2018, with Dr. Peter Girguis from Harvard, and some
    of the technologies that they were using on this lander are to
    test and see how things work on this lander that could also be
    used in space.
        Additionally, other technologies have been looked at with
    other scientists on Falkor, in terms of remote capabilities,
    and being able to talk to the technologies, or the robotics,
    that you're using, and using AI to make decisions when they're
    away from--let's say the mothership, whether that's a vessel or
    a spaceship. Thank you.
        Mr. Babin. Fascinating. Thank you very much, and I yield
    back, Madam Chair.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Babin. And, as you all
    can hear from the bells, votes have just been called, as I
    mentioned at the beginning of our hearing, so we're going to
    stand in recess for probably about 15 minutes. I believe we
    just have one vote on the floor. But we're going to recess, and
    then we'll come back. Thank you.
        [Whereupon, at 10:04 a.m., the Subcommittee recessed, to
    reconvene at 10:39 a.m. the same day.]
        Chairwoman Fletcher. The hearing will come to order. We are
    now reconvening our hearing. Thank you to the witnesses for
    your patience, and we were in the process of taking questions
    from Committee Members, so I believe at this time I will now
    recognize Mr. Tonko for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and thank you for
    holding this hearing in honor of World Oceans Week. Our oceans
    hold so much promise, from understanding the origins of life,
    to offering new medicines, to the enhancing of opportunities to
    learn and excite new students, and, of course, providing for
    the thrill of exploration and innovation. The evidence
    undeniably shows that climate change is hurting our oceans, and
    the trend will only get worse with inaction. As a Committee,
    the promise of our oceans should motivate us to push forward in
    addressing the challenges of climate change.
        In 1962, President Kennedy gave his famous moon shot speech
    in support of the Apollo program. In less than 10 years NASA
    landed a person on the moon, proving that incredible
    achievements in science and technology can come about in a
    relatively short amount of time. So for each and every one of
    our witnesses, is there a need for an ocean exploration moon
    shot, and if so, what should it aim to achieve? Maybe we'll
    start with you, Dr. Bell?
        Dr. Bell. That's an excellent question. I think that
    absolutely yes there should be an ocean moon shot. What exactly
    it should be I think should be a broader discussion. But
    looking at exploring some percentage of the ocean by 2030,
    2040, would be ambitious, but yet feasible. What that
    percentage is, maybe 30 percent, I don't know, but I think that
    it's definitely something that would galvanize the United
    States behind a common goal, the scientific community, the
    private community, Federal philanthropic, and would provide
    some sort of end goal that we can accomplish together.
        Mr. Tonko. Thank you. Dr. Wiener?
        Dr. Wiener. Yes. I echo Katy's comment that I do think an
    ocean shot or moon shot would be a very helpful and important
    initiative. Having a common goal, whether it's mapping the sea
    floor, or working together to really focus in efforts on
    working on technology advancement to be able to characterize
    the ocean in a more persistent and low cost way I think would
    be another way that we could really help make dramatic
    improvements.
        Mr. Tonko. Thank you. Mr. Barrett?
        Mr. Barrett. Yes. Just building a little bit--we talked a
    little earlier about inspiring the best, brightest minds, the
    entrepreneurs, the students, to enter the field, and I think a
    moon shot, quote/unquote, a very tangible, exciting goal that
    could spur more collaboration, get people really excited. I do
    believe that it's no one sector of government alone, or
    industry, or--I think it has to be the kind of goal that people
    could really wrap around across all the sectors. I think it'd
    be fantastic.
        Mr. Tonko. Thank you. And Mr. Lang?
        Mr. Lang. I think the moon shot works really well in space,
    and I think--I like Elon's goal of going to Mars as being an
    invigorating motivator for space. When I think about oceans, I
    think of Jacques Cousteau, and the example that he set. And, to
    me, the biggest challenge facing our oceans is not plastic
    pollution or ocean acidification, it's getting more people to
    care. And I think the biggest challenge is that, and, in order
    to do that, I look to Cousteau, really, as the model we should
    try and emulate.
        And he's known for, obviously, his media, as Katy said, as
    an important part of this, but he also co-invented the
    aqualung. He invented SCUBA diving. And I think we need to
    think about these kind of new technologies that give everyone
    that ability to actually participate in this whole process. And
    I think NOAA in particular has an incredible opportunity to
    lead that engagement process.
        Mr. Tonko. Quite a point. And with that field of ocean
    exploration, how is it evolving with the development of new
    technologies? Anyone?
        Mr. Barrett. I highlighted a few, but I think with the work
    that Mr. Lang is doing, I think it's going to evolve around how
    do we get more, you know, more devices collecting data,
    mapping. It's going to be about power management. There's going
    to be new technologies needed for communications and autonomy.
    To deploy these assets, sensors, sub-sea for an extended period
    of time, it's going to take some new technology to be able to
    deliver the power, probably from the surface, or recharging
    these types of things. And I think there's a lot of
    opportunity--and I think the connectivity is a big enabler for
    everybody as we get more communication power distributed across
    the oceans.
        Mr. Tonko. And Dr. Bell?
        Dr. Bell. Yes, and another thing that we need to consider
    is also the scale on which we do it. So this--everybody has a
    supercomputer in their pocket now because millions of these
    devices are made. There's more computing power in this than all
    the computers combined that put men on the moon. So if we
    actually want to explore the entire ocean, or some significant
    part of it, we need to dramatically bring down the costs of
    systems, sensors, and the data analysis. People can't sit there
    after an expedition and review every second of every bit of
    video that has been collected. We need to be using advanced
    algorithms, machine learning, computer vision, to be able to
    deal with the amount of information that will be coming in.
        Mr. Tonko. Thank you. My time has expired, but I just want
    to share with Mr. Lang that--earlier you mentioned the Citizen
    Scientist Act. I'm very proud to have sponsored that
    legislation, and even more proud that it's been recently signed
    into law, so thank you, and let's go forward with science.
    Thank you. I yield back.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Tonko. I'll now
    recognize Mr. Gonzalez for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the
    witnesses for your patience and attention today. Turning first
    to Dr. Bell, in your written testimony you mentioned ocean
    science compared to other fields of science, has been largely
    left behind by the digital era. Help me understand that a
    little bit. How much of that is sort of the scope of the
    problem, or the scope of the research that we're trying to do
    itself, versus workforce, versus just general interest? Kind of
    just flesh that out for me a little bit.
        Dr. Bell. So one of the challenges, again, is just the fact
    that the tools that we're using today are so large and custom-
    built. Everybody redesigns a pressure housing for every
    different vehicle that is being created. And so if we're able
    to take advantage of, for example, you know, cellphone
    revolution, the fact that everybody has a computer, bringing
    down the costs of chips, and all of the over devices that are
    required to do that, then we can bring down the costs, and
    significantly increase the amount of area, or volume, that we
    can explore for the same amount of money eventually.
        Mr. Gonzalez. So why are they custom-built? Because, I
    mean, that's the, like--right, the custom-built, on premise
    software versus cloud-based solution question applied to this
    problem----
        Dr. Bell. Sure. I might defer to Mr. Barrett on that one,
    for Oceaneering.
        Mr. Barrett. The, you know, the marine environment is an
    extra harsh environment. Things that come in and out of the
    water are subjected to every aspect of corrosion, and--so you
    end up with inherent costs associated with equipment, and
    deployment of that equipment in the offshore environment. And
    truly the scale--back to the scale, you know, problem, or
    opportunity, depending on how we do it--the only way to get the
    cost down is really through scale, through having a volume of
    equipment, or sensors, or even a volume of--ability to deploy
    them is going to be the only way, I think, to get the costs
    down associated with massive ocean exploration.
        Mr. Gonzalez. OK. And then, turning a little bit to
    workforce, so, Mr. Barrett, you represent a company who has
    benefited from ocean exploration and research. What can this
    Committee do to help you continue technology development
    efforts, and how challenging is it to find a well trained
    workforce in this field?
        Mr. Barrett. I think our company is pretty well positioned
    to find the workforce, but I do believe that this Committee
    could, you know, further support STEM (science, technology,
    engineering, and mathematics) education, particularly as it
    relates to ocean and ocean sciences. We, I think, previously
    highlighted the need to get more people engaged, more
    entrepreneurs engaged, more public awareness so that it is an
    exciting field to go into.
        I think we have to create an infrastructure that provides
    opportunities, more opportunities, and that comes through
    companies like ours, that provides opportunities because we're
    commercially successful. It comes from academia. It comes from
    non-profits having the funding to be able to provide exciting
    opportunities, and it comes from the success of entrepreneurs,
    so I think anything you can do to support those endeavors. And,
    finally, I would say the collaboration piece again. A
    platform's more, you know, an easier path to collaborate is
    another area that I think could help us as a company see the
    vision and future better so that de-risks our technological
    investments a little bit.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Great. And then, Dr. Bell, you cite research
    that suggests the number of students pursuing Ph.D.'s in ocean
    engineering have remained steady, while other fields, such as
    aerospace engineering, have increased. To what do you attribute
    that trend, and what are you doing to address this challenge?
        Dr. Bell. That's an excellent question. I don't know why
    that's happening. What am I doing to address it? Well, being
    involved in STEM education, and sort of broad public engagement
    in general is definitely one thing I'm doing. Last year, about
    6 months ago, I chaired the 2018 Ocean Exploration--National
    Ocean Exploration Forum at MIT, which was on broadening
    engagement and participation.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Great. And I didn't mean it to be a personal
    question, sorry.
        Dr. Bell. No.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Maybe let me ask it differently. What, in
    addition, should we be doing? What should--societal, maybe take
    that lens on it.
        Dr. Bell. Sure. Well, I think that----
        Mr. Gonzalez. Didn't mean to call you out there.
        Dr. Bell [continuing]. Looking at different partners in
    different industries in a different and creative way than we've
    done it in the past, rolling out yet another ocean curriculum
    for middle school is not nearly as exciting and engaging as
    maybe a television show, or a movie, that highlights factual
    things, but also may have, you know, exciting storytelling
    behind it. Aquaman, for example, was the highest-grossing DC
    Comics movie of all time, over a billion dollars brought in at
    the box office. So, like, there's an appetite for ocean themes,
    I think.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Great. Well, with the Aquaman reference, I
    yield back. Thank you.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you. I will now recognize Mr.
    Casten for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Casten. Thank you, Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you to
    the panel. I must apologize, I have not seen Aquaman yet. I was
    really hoping it was a nice pivot there. I want to talk a
    little bit about climate change. We had a--at our full
    Committee hearing yesterday, one of the witnesses described how
    90 percent of all of the heat that we have generated because of
    man-made CO2 emissions has been absorbed by the
    oceans. Good news it's a lot cooler up here on the land than it
    would otherwise be. The bad news is that we have that heat
    absorbed in the part of the Earth that we seem to least
    understand.
        And I want to start with Dr. Bell. How much do we
    understand about how that heat stratifies at deeper depths, and
    where are there gaps in our knowledge that you think we should
    focus on really pushing to understand that stratification of
    temperature in the ocean?
        Dr. Bell. So I'm not an expert, admittedly, in climate
    change and heat distribution, but my understanding, and I'd
    like to echo Dr. Wiener's comments earlier, is that we really,
    truly, don't have a good understanding of ocean systems. We
    have a pretty high-level understanding, but looking at specific
    locations--for example, during the break I was speaking with
    Mr. Barrett about oxygen concentrations, and how they affect
    their sub-sea equipment, but they didn't know that, while
    deploying different types of equipment. So we have good--
    generally good global models, but verifying them with in situ
    measurements all over the world is something that we really
    don't have, and don't have a really fine-grained understanding
    of how that works yet.
        Mr. Casten. Would any of you care to comment on where the
    gaps in our knowledge, and where we should be thinking about,
    from a Science Committee, to fill in those gaps right now?
        Dr. Wiener. I also am not an expert on the subject, but,
    just from working with many of scientists who have come on
    Falkor to look at this very question, I would say it's not just
    a matter of looking at heat distribution, but also pH, and
    oxygen levels, and how those are impacted by temperature
    changes. The other piece of it that has captured a lot of
    interest from scientists coming onto Falkor is other gases,
    like methane, that is stored in the sea floor, and how that
    methane is transformed in the water, and eventually makes its
    way to the atmosphere. And that's something else that's been
    looked at, and would have an impact on climate change.
        Mr. Casten. So you read my mind on my next question. Mr.
    Barrett, I think you talked about doing some work with some of
    your clients on offshore gas development. I'm assuming that was
    methane hydrates you were referring to?
        Mr. Barrett. Well, no, we haven't been directly involved in
    mining methane hydrates. I was talking about the more
    traditional aspects of oil and gas production.
        Mr. Casten. OK.
        Mr. Barrett. We have--I think we've done some survey work
    around methane hydrates, but that's not part of our direct
    business.
        Mr. Casten. OK. Well, I guess I'd follow up with Dr.
    Wiener. As we raise these temperatures, there's a ton of these
    clathrates that are down at depth that we are, I think, all
    crossing our fingers that are going to stay at depth, given the
    impact on climate. And it comes back to my question, as we warm
    up at these deeper levels--and I should understand the
    thermodynamics better. Is it pressure that keeps them down
    there, is it temperature that keeps them down there, or is it
    both? Because the pressure will presumably stay, but, as the
    temperature goes up, how concerned should we be?
        Dr. Wiener. You know, I don't feel like I have the
    expertise to really answer the depth of concern that we should
    have. I certainly do think, though, that making sure we have a
    fundamental understanding of that through baseline studies is
    critical to--before we progress with anything further.
        Mr. Casten. OK.
        Mr. Barrett. I can comment a little bit on it. There's a,
    you know, methane hydrate formation curve that has to do with
    both temperature and pressure, so at points on that pressure/
    temperature combination is where hydrates form, so it's a
    combination of the two. Our company's involved in hydrates that
    actually form in pipelines sub-sea, and the remediation of
    those, but not--again, not with those naturally occurring
    hydrates that are, you know, found on the ocean bottom.
        Mr. Casten. So with your familiarity on that pressure
    temperature curve, as I said, the, you know, the pressure at
    10, 12 atmospheres is going to stay 10, 12 atmospheres of
    pressure, but the temperature's going to change. Are there
    ranges of possible warming that get up to a concerning point
    where it's just into the gas phase?
        Mr. Barrett. Yes. I mean, there are two ways to bust a
    hydrate. There's one to increase the temperature, or to reduce
    the pressure. That's the extent of my knowledge.
        Mr. Casten. OK. Well, thank you all for letting me geek out
    for a second, and I yield back the balance of my time.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Casten. I'll now
    recognize Mr. Beyer for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you all very
    much for being here. The ocean-space dichotomy is fascinating,
    because this is a panel that loves space, so we thank you for
    giving us a chance to learn so much more about the deep ocean.
    Mr. Lang, in some of the printed testimony we had--it'll take
    10,000 ship years to completely view the sea floor. And even if
    we have a full-time exploration of 10 ships, it'll take 1,000
    years. That's longer than we probably want it to take. You
    suggested that maybe NOAA should scale back on its direct
    investment in ships and infrastructure, and let the private
    sector take up the slack, and we've certainly watched for years
    as NOAA has been pushing for ever more congressional investment
    in its fleet. Can you comment on how likely it is that the
    private sector will pick up what is now a 10,000-year project?
        Mr. Lang. Yes, absolutely. And I, you know, in my
    involvement on the NOAA Ocean Exploration Advisory Board, I've
    been involved in some of those conversations, and heard, you
    know, everyone's aware of the challenge. I think the reality is
    that if we want to map the ocean floor to the extent we want
    to, it's going to take distributed autonomous systems. And the
    good news is these things are getting cheaper, and they're
    getting smaller, and they're getting more affordable. I think
    the question is, can we get enough brainpower, and enough
    people working on innovating in this field, and in that space?
    And I think the--there has to be more of an economic incentive,
    a clear economic incentive, to drive the investment, to drive
    the enthusiasm, of entrepreneurs and technologists.
        Mr. Beyer. Which means to say, if you map it all, what
    economic value is it to entrepreneurs? Or the public?
        Mr. Lang. Yes, both, right? There has to be kind of
    economic mechanisms to underwrite that development, whether
    that's mapping--but also there does have to be a driver that
    spurs it. And I, you know, whether that's deep-sea mining, I'm
    not sure.
        Mr. Beyer. OK, great. Thank you. Dr. Bell, you talked about
    how the six leading autonomous underwater vehicle companies,
    only half are the U.S. But obviously the U.S. has been the
    leader in all this ocean research. Where's China? Which also
    comes up in this Committee a lot.
        Dr. Bell. Yes, as this morning. That I don't know. Most of
    the autonomous vehicle companies that I know of are more in
    western countries than in China. I do know that there has been
    a sudden explosion of small ROVs by Chinese companies just,
    like, in the last 6 months to a year. They----
        Mr. Beyer. Is there any reason we need to be threatened by
    Chinese research, as we are, for example, with Chinese research
    in AI?
        Dr. Bell. I don't know enough to answer that question.
        Mr. Beyer.OK. Cool. Well--yes, Mr. Lang?
        Mr. Lang. I think what--we can look at what happened with
    aerial drones. These got smaller, and cheaper. And what we keep
    talking about are making--getting to economies of scale, and
    making sure the sensors, and the production, can build these at
    the scales that we need. And that's something they're very good
    at, and something that we're not as good at. And it's--we are
    the--on the front lines of that competition, and I think if you
    look at aerial drones, you can see how we kind of lost out on
    that industry because of our inability to engage with smaller
    entrepreneurs who were just getting going at the same time.
        Mr. Beyer. Great. Thank you. I don't know who to address
    this question to, but the whole discovery of the chemosynthetic
    bacteria in the deep vents, I guess something that clearly
    didn't need light to have life, and I don't know how much
    oxygen is involved in it. What will this help us to understand,
    in terms of the origins of life? There's a recent book that I
    just read a review of this morning that talked about how we
    probably are the only intelligent life in the universe because
    it's so difficult for life to evolve, and yet here we've had
    life evolve twice, once in the photosynthetic way and once in
    the chemosynthetic way. No molecular biologists or geneticists
    on our panel, are there? All right, let me----
        Dr. Bell. Well, I don't know if they evolved separately or
    not, but there are many ocean scientists who are interested in
    the origins of life, and are also looking to other ocean
    worlds. So they're studying the microbiome here on Earth so
    that they can start to identify what types of things we might
    find, for example, on Europa, once we're able to drill through
    the ice and get down through the water. So using the
    information that we're able to study and understand here on
    Earth is definitely being used for understanding the sort of
    broader question of life in the universe.
        Mr. Beyer. OK, great. Thank you. And then, an easy
    question, the Ocean Exploration Act of 2009 required NOAA to
    establish a national strategy and program for ocean
    exploration. Is there such an actual national strategy now
    that's formalized, that's one paragraph, one sentence, one
    book? Well, I was looking for it all through the testimony, and
    I saw a lot of amazing ideas, but no national strategy, per the
    Act. OK.
        Dr. Bell. I don't know if there is one. There was a
    review--a 10-year review of the office, and a report as a
    result of that. Has the OAEB (Ocean Exploration Advisory Board)
    been a part of a national strategy?
        Mr. Lang. That's absolutely a discussion that happens at
    the OEAB level, is trying to set that priority. And there's an
    annual or semi-annual conference that happens where they bring
    people from all sorts of sectors, that we do discuss that. The
    question that you asked is a good one, is there a paragraph
    that describes it? And I think that's something that, because
    none of us can recall it, is--if it exists, it's not well known
    enough.
        Mr. Beyer. Well, I know the Chair of the Subcommittee, so
    I'm going to talk to her about it, so we'll see. Thank you,
    Madam Chair. I yield back.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Beyer. I'd now like to
    recognize Ms. Bonamici for 5 minutes.
        Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, Chair Fletcher. Thank you all for
    being here. I just want to start with a follow up to
    Representative Gonzalez's question about workforce, especially
    because, Dr. Bell, I saw that you do work at the MIT Media Lab,
    and more than 5 years ago, John Maeda, who spent 12 years at
    the MIT Media Lab, who was at the time the president of the
    Rhode Island School of Design, came here to Capitol Hill to
    help me launch the bipartisan STEAM Caucus, which integrates
    arts and design into traditional STEM learning to help, number
    one, engage more people, especially diversify the workforce at
    the K-12 level and college level, but also to make sure that
    people who are entering the STEM fields are getting both halves
    of their brain educated so we have creativity and innovation in
    the STEM workforce. So I just wanted to mention that there is a
    bipartisan congressional STEAM Caucus. I also serve on the
    Education Committee, and it comes up as well, when we're
    looking at expanding that workforce, the schools that have
    taken the STEAM approach are seeing more engagement, and more
    creativity, and innovation.
        So, now starting with, you know, looking at our planet, and
    Representative Beyer mentioned, you know, the focus on space in
    this Committee. If you look down from space at the planet, you
    see blue, fundamentally blue, because the oceans cover more
    than 70 percent of our planet's surface. And you look at--I
    mean, this is Oceans Month, and Oceans Week here on Capitol
    Hill. When you look at the blue economy, and the importance of
    the oceans for feeding people, and the power of the ocean
    waves, and the potential for generating clean energy, and so
    much is dependent on ocean--Representative Casten mentioned
    the--absorbing the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
    There's so much happening. It's fascinating that we still know
    very little about what's deep in the ocean, compared with what
    we know about the surface.
        So, as we're preparing for the United Nations Decade of
    Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, and the top priority
    to map the ocean floor, I'm working with my fellow co-chair of
    the House Oceans Caucus, Representative Don Young from Alaska,
    to highlight the importance of improving our ocean data and
    monitoring efforts. So later this month I'm going to be
    introducing the House companion to Senator Whitehouse's
    Bolstering Long Term Understanding and Exploration of the Great
    Lakes, Oceans, Bays, and Estuaries, it's easier to remember
    BLUE GLOBE Act, and that would rapidly accelerate the
    collection, management, and dissemination of data on the Great
    Lakes, oceans, bays, estuaries, and coasts. It also tasks the
    National Academy of Sciences with assessing the potential for
    an Advanced Research Projects Agency on oceans, or basically an
    ARPA-O, because we need to overcome the long-term and high-risk
    barriers in the development of ocean technology.
        So, Dr. Bell, in your testimony, you talk about a data
    analysis bottleneck. So what are the greatest challenges today
    in the collection, management, and dissemination of ocean data?
        Dr. Bell. Sure. Well, one of the biggest challenges is just
    the fact that it's so distributed. Everybody has--NOAA has its
    data, Schmidt has its data, the Ocean Exploration Trust has its
    data. Everybody has it in distributed ways. And even if they
    say it's publicly accessible and available, in some cases it
    can be extremely difficult to get, so just even finding--and
    that's for somebody who knows where to look, and knows people
    in those organizations, right? So if anybody doesn't know that,
    or would just be curious, probably couldn't get the data.
        Another one is that we're sort of on the verge right now of
    truly big ocean data, in comparison to organizations like
    Google, or other tech companies, which are dealing with very,
    very large amounts of data. Ocean data really isn't quite big
    yet, but if we're talking about deploying thousands or millions
    of different types of sensors all over the world, we're really
    going to have to figure out how do we actually deal with that
    data. We're not going to be able to have somebody physically
    sitting there looking at every second of video, right? So we
    need to----
        Ms. Bonamici. Right.
        Dr. Bell [continuing]. Develop the kinds of algorithms to
    create automated analysis so that we can pull out that
    information and understanding so that we can really understand
    what we're collecting. Because if we start collecting
    terabytes, petabytes, whatever the correct prefix is----
        Ms. Bonamici. Right.
        Dr. Bell [continuing]. We're not going to be able to do it.
        Ms. Bonamici. Want it to be useful.
        Dr. Bell. Um-hum.
        Ms. Bonamici. And I want to move on--last Congress, I
    helped secure funding for the construction of a National
    Science Foundation regional class vessel. It's going to be
    operated by Oregon State University. It's called the Taani. It
    comes from the Siletz term meaning offshore, scheduled for
    delivery in 2021, and it's going to be equipped to conduct some
    detailed sea floor mapping. The Taani is going to help identify
    geologic structures important in the Cascadia subduction zone
    earthquakes that could likely trigger a significant tsunami on
    the Pacific coast.
        So, Dr. Wiener, what and why are the scientific benefits of
    mapping the ocean floor important, and what breakthroughs do
    you believe will emerge as we expand to sea floor mapping?
        Dr. Wiener. Well, it is critically important that we are
    able to map our sea floor, not only to just understand what's
    down there, but to better characterize the different
    environments, and how they connect to each other. There are
    many--multiple initiatives, as we mentioned earlier today, that
    are looking to collaborate and bring together all of this
    mapping data.
        There are different scales of mapping data. Whether it's
    centimeter, sub-resolution scale, which you get from a robotic
    vehicle, versus multiview mapping, which is a larger--still
    high resolution, but not in the same focus, and I think both
    are important to have for our ecosystems. I'd also like to
    mention that it's wonderful to hear about the STEAM initiative
    that you're doing, and our Artists at Sea program works with
    some of the data that's collected to transform it in an
    artistic way for the public. We actually have an exhibit
    opening this weekend in Detroit.
        Ms. Bonamici. Terrific. Well, thank you so much. I see my
    time--Dr. Bell? Could we let Dr. Bell respond?
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Yes.
        Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, Madam Chair.
        Dr. Bell. Just a specific example for importance of sea
    floor mapping, especially for tsunamis, is that you need to
    know the shape of the sea floor for tsunami models to be
    accurate, to know how much and--of--the sort of magnitude of
    run-up will be on coasts, so that is particularly important for
    tsunami modeling and warning.
        Ms. Bonamici. Right. Which is critical, because we're----
        Dr. Bell. Um-hum.
        Ms. Bonamici [continuing]. Overdue for a massive
    earthquake--thank you. I yield back.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Ms. Bonamici. And, before
    we bring the hearing to a close, I thought I would just see if
    I could give each witness about 30 seconds to share with us, if
    you would like to, what you think Congress could do to support
    ocean exploration. And maybe we'll start with Dr. Bell, and
    just run down the line.
        Dr. Bell. Sure. I have three things that Congress could do
    to support ocean exploration. The first is to re-authorize the
    NOAA Office of Exploration Research, because the Public Law
    111-11 expired in 2015. The second would be to create a
    national or international program to include private, public,
    academic, and philanthropic partnerships, and not it being
    solely a Federal agency, but rather a more inclusive one. And
    also to support sufficient funding for said programs, because,
    in the last 20 years, it's been pretty unstable, and
    insufficient to really make true headway on accelerating and
    transforming the future of exploration.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Dr. Bell. Dr. Wiener, do
    you have anything to add?
        Dr. Wiener. I also have three recommendations that somewhat
    echo Katy's response, but leveraging economies of scale to
    decrease the cost of sensors and systems to make them available
    to more people, to cover more ocean, and to build capacity in
    technology poor regions, protecting sea resources where they
    are vulnerable. We should also look to the advances of other
    industries making exciting innovations across technology
    sectors, such as the medical, oil and gas, defense, et cetera,
    industries that could be applied to ocean research. And to
    position ocean exploration for high-risk, high-reward
    conservation-minded ocean science.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Dr. Wiener. Mr. Barrett?
        Mr. Barrett. I think they covered it really well. I do
    believe cost is going to be the area that we really need to
    focus on, and figuring out ways to leverage what either already
    exists, or how we build scale into the whole effort, because
    individual missions are just extremely costly, and, you know,
    you can't cover 70 percent of the Earth very well that way.
        I think I already highlighted the other two, which is
    certainly the educational aspect. Getting the best and
    brightest engaged and excited about this field I think is
    critical. And, finally, I think the way we could collaborate
    better, and I think a good place for Congress would be to
    create a vision, and to create some goals, and to create some
    consensus around where we want to be as a country, and for the
    world, in terms of understanding the ocean better. I think
    those types of visionary, you know, from the top, those
    visionary statements and leadership is really what it takes to,
    I think, muster the whole effort.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you, Mr. Barrett. And Mr. Lang?
        Mr. Lang. Yes, I agree with all the recommendations listed,
    including the reauthorization. I--the only thing I would add is
    that--to remember that ocean exploration is not just where we
    go, but how we get there, and this endeavor, this national
    ocean exploration initiative has a real opportunity to pioneer
    some new strategies in how we go about getting there. And I
    think, you know, given what space has done, it seems to me that
    engaging with private companies, and with entrepreneurs, and
    supporting those visions, is a really good way to do it. So,
    thank you.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Thank you very much.
        Mr. Beyer. Madam Chair?
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Yes?
        Mr. Beyer. May I throw out a 15-second challenge----
        Chairwoman Fletcher. You sure----
        Mr. Beyer [continuing]. Please?
        Chairwoman Fletcher [continuing]. Can.
        Mr. Beyer. I would like--thinking about our space parallel
    here, we're getting ready to go to the moon by 2024 and Mars by
    2033, I have the bumper sticker on my car. If you can think of
    the parallel in the deep ocean to going to the moon by 2024 and
    Mars by 2033, it would help us.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. Yes. That'd be great. Well, I want
    to----
        Dr. Bell [continuing]. Make you a bumper sticker.
        Chairwoman Fletcher. I do want to thank you all for coming
    this morning, for your testimony, and for your patience while
    we took a break to vote. I would also like to recognize Ms.
    Bonamici because, of course, we left our hearing to vote on,
    and Congress has now passed, in the House, H.R. 1921, the Ocean
    Acidification Innovation Act of 2019, and that was largely due
    to her great work, and it is the first bill coming out of our
    Subcommittee through the Science Committee. So I'm very
    pleased, and we passed several others this morning as well on
    the floor. So thank you very much for being here with us.
        The record from this hearing will remain open for 2 weeks
    for additional statements from Members, and for any additional
    questions for the witnesses, but you all are now excused, and
    the hearing is adjourned. Thank you.
        [Whereupon, at 11:14 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

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