Former Google CEO Will Fund Boat Drones to Explore Rough Antarctic Waters

A foundation created by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, will fund a project to send drone boats out into the rough ocean around Antarctica to collect data that could help solve a crucial climate puzzle. The project is part of a suite of funding announced today from Schmidt Sciences, which Schmidt and his wife Wendy created to focus on projects tackling research into the global carbon cycle. It will spend $45 million over the next five years to fund these projects, which includes the Antarctic research.

“The ocean provides this really critical climate regulation service to all of us, and yet we don’t understand it as well as we could,” says Galen McKinley, a professor of environmental sciences at Columbia University and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and one of the lead scientists on the project. “I’m just really excited to see how much this data can really pull together the community of people who are trying to understand and quantify the ocean carbon sink.”

The world’s oceans are its largest carbon sinks, absorbing about a third of the CO2 humans put into the atmosphere each year. One of the most important carbon sinks is the Southern Ocean, the body of water surrounding Antarctica. Despite being the second smallest of the world’s five oceans, the Southern Ocean is responsible for about 40 percent of all ocean-based carbon dioxide absorption.

Scientists, however, know surprisingly little about why, exactly, the Southern Ocean is such a successful carbon sink. What’s more, climate models that successfully predict ocean carbon absorption elsewhere in the world have diverged significantly when it comes to the Southern Ocean.

One of the biggest issues with understanding more about what’s going on in the Southern Ocean is simply a lack of data. This is thanks in part to the extreme conditions in the region. The Drake Passage, which runs between South America and Argentina, is one of the toughest stretches of ocean for ships, due to incredibly strong currents around Antarctica and dangerous winds; it’s even rougher in the winter months. The ocean also has a particularly pronounced cloud cover, Crisp says, which makes satellite observations difficult.

“The Southern Ocean is really far away, so we just haven’t done a lot of science there,” says McKinley. “It is a very big ocean, and it is this dramatic and scary place to go.”