I think that at the time that the Artemis journey around the moon was making all the news headlines I was busy on my last little rant about trying to understand climate change, so I didn’t spin a blog topic out of the Artemis mission….But don’t worry, I made a note. So here it comes.

You might recall, (if you’re a faithful reader with a good memory), that in February 2024 I wrote the article entitled “To Infinity and Beyond” in which I shat all over the notion that space travel was a viable option for humanity. I tabled arguments that said; 

– there is no inhabitable planet in this solar system other than this one.

– there is no way to make any of the planets habitable by “terraforming”.

– There is no way, being realistic, to travel to any other solar system, nor is there any serious hope of doing so in the foreseeable future.

– space travel is seriously injurious to your health.

At the end of that article I postulated that “I’d much rather spend our research dollars on how we continue to thrive on Earth….Maybe if we accept that there’s no better planet out there for us, we can get serious about doing a better job with the one that have.” And it is that thinking, that we’re wasting money and resources on a space travel dream and ignoring research opportunities on how we live successfully on planet Earth, that drives this article.

My sister Dorothy, is a talented singer who taught herself guitar and cut her musical teeth on the songs of John Denver. One of the John Denver songs she sang for her siblings was “Calypso”, which celebrates the life and times of Jacques Cousteau. The lyrics include this bit:

“For though we are strangers in your silent world

To live on the land we must learn from the sea”. 

I think John Denver was right on target. Our oceans are a phenomenally important part of our living environment. So how well are we doing at living on the land by learning from the sea?

Jacques Cousteau explored oceans to depths of 500 meters in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Red Sea, logging thousands of hours underwater. He was a pioneer who invented or perfected the aqua-lung and a deep sea submersible called the Diving Saucer. ( A translation of course – Cousteau was French). His research efforts told us about massive, vertically migrating layers of marine organisms (plankton, small fish, squids) moving up at night to feed and down by day. He was one of the first marine researchers to document the degradation of major coral reefs. He was not formally trained as a scientist, but his name is still the one that comes to mind when we think about oceanic exploration. The man died in 1997! What does it say about our cultural priorities when when nothing in the marine world has captured public interest in the same way for the last thirty years?

I suppose I do other researchers a disservice. Researchers like Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh have done much deeper dives into the ultra-deep marine trenches. But Cousteau was a real pioneer and we should be following up his work much more assiduously than we are.

To be fair we are doing some research and condition monitoring. The most important program is probably the Argo float program which deploys almost  4,000 robotic, battery-powered drifting floats that measure temperature, salinity, and bio-geochemical profiles from the surface down to 2,000 meters, with more recent models going down as far as 6000 meters. About 50% of the cost of maintaining this program has been borne in the past by the USA, but post-Covid budget cuts and subsequent attacks on climate science by the Orange Idiot have reduced the array by about 10%. The Argo float batteries have a life of about five years, and so an annual deployment of about 800 floats is needed to keep the program at its peak level. The Argo program is the greatest source of data on ocean temperature profile and trends, and has shown that the oceans are absorbing 90% of the heat associated with global warming.

There is an international collaboration called Seabed 2030 aimed at mapping the underwater earth surface by the year 2030.When the program was begun in 2017, about 6% of the ocean had been mapped. After 9 years, that number has reached 25%.  One might conclude that the probability of getting the remaining 75% in the next 4 years is vanishingly small.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US runs the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). This is a series of permanently tethered, very large, very complex data collection systems moored at locations off the US coasts, but also in the far north Atlantic between Greenland and Iceland. Similar observatories off Argentina and Chile were abandoned because they were too remote and too expensive to maintain. It is one portion of this equipment, the Greenland/Iceland observatories specifically, that monitors the temperature (and flow reduction) of the water in the Gulf Stream extension that I mentioned in my last article. In May of 2026, Trump ordered much of the OOI equipment to be decommissioned and some 200 scientific instrument sets were removed from the waters off the Pacific Northwest coast. In a rare exhibition of backbone, the US senate unanimously passed a bill to restore the program, and the equipment is being re-installed.

Another important element of deep-sea exploration is the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), which since 1968 has been extracting punch core samples from deep into the ocean floor to study Earth’s tectonic history and ancient climates.

By some estimates, we are spending $15B to $25B annually on ocean management, information sharing and analysis, and furthering scientific research. If you strip out the fisheries management, coastal weather stations, and in-shore military mapping of coastal bays and shallows, and you focus strictly on pure deep-sea exploration, marine biology, and mapping the abyssal plains, the funding drops down to about $2 billion annually. Two or three billion dollars is chump change. It would be a rounding error in the military budgets of many NATO countries. Canada’s military budget this year is close to $63B so we’re going to spend 30 times as much on defence as the entire world is spending on marine research.

The skeptic might ask for an understanding of why two or three billion dollars isn’t enough. What is left to be discovered and why should we care about ocean floor topography or about classifying and naming thousands of previously unclassified marine species?

The fundamental thing about discovery is that it implies that there is something you don’t already know – unknowns exist. And Unknowns are broken down into two kinds – known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Unknown unknowns are easy to describe. They are the things that you will never know about until you take a look with an open mind and a curious attitude. That alone should drive us to work harder to find out more about the world in which we live.

Known unknowns would include the ocean floor topography in any of the undersea areas that haven’t already been mapped. We know that we don’t know what the ocean floor looks in 75% of the world. The point is made repeatedly that we may already know more about the surfaces of the moon, Mars and Venus than we do about the surface of the Earth

That kind of mapping can tell us about vulnerability to tsunamis, about the stability of the ocean floor for underwater cable positioning, and about the activity of ocean floor rifts that may be vent points for geothermal energy.

Better mapping of ocean current and temperatures in both the horizontal and vertical planes can help us predict weather patterns on land and can help us understand and protect fisheries resources in the seas. 

Ocean floor topography and core sampling are keys to finding porous deep-sea basalt formations which may become extremely important in the battle for control of our climate. Scientists have discovered (from initiatives like Solid Carbon (led by Ocean Networks Canada) ) that if you dissolve captured atmospheric carbon in seawater and inject it deep into sub-seafloor basalt aquifers, a chemical reaction occurs. Within a few short years, the carbon chemically bonds with the rock, permanently turning into solid carbonate minerals (stone). This carbon sequestration prevents the carbon from bleeding back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Finally, there is a rapidly developing interest in “bioprospecting”. Deep sea organisms survive under extreme conditions of temperature, pressure, oxygen limitations etc. A deep sea organism is quite literally, a different kind of beast. Research into “marine natural products”(MNPs) is leading to new concepts in enzyme-based antibiotics, new cancer treatment drugs, biodegradable plastics, synthesizing cold-water laundry enzymes, and developing bio-catalysts that can clean up toxic industrial waste streams. We’re not hearing much about these initiatives, but they’ve become important enough to spawn a UN sponsored Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement to protect and regulate the use of marine resources.

Ocean research can also help us in identifying and controlling some of the threats to the oceans. Think about the need for rare earth minerals for electrification of vehicles and what happens if someone discovers a motherlode under the ocean off Newfoundland or BC, or in the Arctic Circle in Canada’s north. Say we find a way to mine that resource and we rip up the seabed like a pit mine beneath the surface of the ocean. What would that do to the massive blankets of plankton, small fish and squid that Jacques Cousteau discovered? Experience from oil exploration drilling platforms has shown that muddy silt carrying hydrocarbons, high salt content and heavy metals chokes out seabed organisms. The great fear is that mineral exploration will be far worse – streams of silt from mining operations may travel hundreds of kilometres and eliminate sea life as they go. Perhaps we really will need those minerals, and perhaps undersea mining is just around the corner. But we cannot leave unfettered control of those resources in the hands of the Orange Idiot and his billionaire cronies. Research is the key to developing a resource management system that allows us to harvest minerals we need without killing the biodiversity which we need even more.

Research is necessary to provide a controlling jurisdiction with a reasonable basis for regulatory guidelines. And the first problem with that statement is the issue of “controlling jurisdiction”. Who has jurisdiction? There are 12 mile national territorial limits. (Get out of here or we shoot). There are 200 mile economic exclusion zones (you can’t fish here – these fish are ours). Beyond that is wide open sea, subject to a UN agreement called the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Jurisdiction is exercised through the International Seabed Authority. There are several problems with that. The first is that the UN is a weak and powerless organization. The second is that the ISA has already issued over 30 exploration permits, many to China. The third is that they are close to issuing the first “exploitation” contracts which would authorize undersea mining. And the fourth problem is that the USA, (with the orange idiot in charge remember), has never ratified the UNCLOS agreement. Predictably, that has led to pressure from Trump’s billionaire cronies to have the US unilaterally issue mining licences under their own licensing rules and tell the rest of the world to go to Hell. Besides the potential for toxic mining operations springing up, that also raises the potential for international conflict over disputed mining territories.

So, there’s a lot to learn about our oceans. We’re beginning to understand that there might be some significant benefits from trying to understand how the oceans work and what they might do for us. And we can see some threats on the horizon that a better knowledge base might help us deal with. and so what are we doing instead? We’re spending money on outer space research.

There are two, perhaps three, reasons for trying to be good at rocketry and the control of near-Earth space. The first is communications. Satellite communications and  geo-positioning are so much a part of life now that I can’t imagine not having a Nav system in my car for a long trip. And it was, honestly, disconcerting to go for long stretches without satellite contact on my recent long drive through the Rockies.

The second reason is somewhat linked to the first. Satellite communications are so important now that they are a feature of modern warfare. We spy on each other constantly using satellite cameras. We evaluate the progression of the war in Ukraine and Russia by monitoring heat signatures of missile attacks. If WW3 breaks out, we can expect the belligerents to try to knock out the other party’s satellite communications systems. So, much as we might sigh at the folly of militarizing space, until we have a truly lasting global kumbya, there’s a legitimate need to spend on satellite defences.

The third reason is pure scientific astronomy research as typified by the Hubble telescope, (although I confess that I am a little puzzled about how seeing another galaxy a few million light years away is really expected to help us in the here and now).

Don’t talk to me about the usefulness of asteroid deflection defences. The notion that we’re going to spot that monster asteroid coming to destroy Earth and deflect it away is a comic-book pipe dream. If we hit it with every nuclear tipped missile that we own, we might convert it from a single several-billion-ton rock heading our way into several hundred million-ton rocks headed our way. If you ever see that asteroid coming, it’s time to get out the Wile E Coyote umbrella and say “th- th- th- that’s all folks.”

Over and above that “useful spending” is the spending on the International space station and voyages like Artemis that are linked to the dream that we are somehow going to escape this solar system. And if we strip out all of the “useful” spending on the first three types, we will find that while the world is spending about $2B annually on Oceanic research, we are spending  about $10B annually on the escapist dream. 

I think it’s important for Canadians to get passionate about marine research. We enjoy access to three oceans. Marine research has, until recently, focused on management of fisheries and on defence of our ocean borders. We now need to recognize that things are changing. Oceanic research may inform us about climate control and it may help us actually manage some aspects of climate control. And the geo-political situation, especially vis a vis the threat of expanded oil drilling and/or deep sea mining means that we need to be hungry for knowledge of our seas, not deep space. We should bury that Artemis program and ride the Calypso instead.