Press Release
Global Oceans and the Center for Life in Extreme Environments (CLEE) Announce Launch of the Innerspace Deep Sea Initiative
New York, 15 April 2024 - Global Oceans, a US-based nonprofit 501(c)3 operating foundation, and The Center for Life in Extreme Environments (CLEE), a research “Center of Excellence” at Portland State University, announce the launch of the Innerspace Deep Sea Initiative - an on-going international collaboration to explore and understand life that thrives in the abyssal deep sea and within the unique and harsh realm of extreme ocean environments. Innerspace will collaborate with international research institutions, scientists, engineers, corporate partners, tech start-ups, and nonprofits to originate new approaches to deep sea exploration and discovery.
Innerspace will explore the morphology, behavior, and diversity of deep sea organisms in their natural environment with new high-resolution deep sea microscopes, micro-spatial environmental sensors, and precision biosamplers deployed by 6,000-meter deep sea vehicles specially designed and built for the program. Undersea vehicles will include the ROV Innerspace 6000 OEV (Ocean Exploration Vehicle) and the towed Innerspace 6000 TIA (Towed Instrument Array), together with deep sea landers and autonomous vehicles. The Innerspace 6000 OEV will feature a modular robotic instrument arm platform, modeled after the instrument arm and in situ laboratory on NASA’s Curiosity Rover.
The project will focus on exploring important scientific questions about biodiversity, mechanisms of biophysical adaptation, and survival in extreme ocean environments, and will catalyze fresh thinking about the integration of new technologies to enable high-resolution imaging, environmental sensing, and top-side omics-level analyses of organisms from the macro- to the nano-scale. The new baseline capacity of deep sea robotics, instruments, sensors, and sampling systems is designed to be integrative - a multi-functional, modular “system of systems”.
Innerspace will enable scientific investigations that span biological life across habitats from hydrothermal vents and hypersaline habitats to frozen methane seeps, and across organismal scale and life history stages from embryos to adults. It will expand our ability to understand deep ocean life by bringing together engineering expertise, new technologies, and scientists studying deep sea ecosystems, molecular systems, and biophysics – to collaboratively answer questions about ocean life on our planet, many of which we have yet to formulate.
Innerspace will link this new opportunity to deploy multi-technology, multi-user deep sea tools with leading areas of scientific investigation and emerging questions through four core Science Working Groups and workshops: Deep Sea Biodiversity & Conservation, Astrobiology and Origin of Life, Marine Genetic Resources, and Innerspace at the Micro-Spatial Scale - an exploration into how emerging technologies from outside the realm of ocean science can “open the aperture” of what we can question, observe, and discover in the deep sea.
Four Technology Working Groups will develop and bring new technologies to deep sea exploration, and through co-design of new imaging, sensing, sampling, and data processing/AI tools will support investigation of questions posed by the Science Working Groups. Innerspace Working Groups will provide the research framework for these investigations and will shape the technologies that are developed, adapted, and deployed to enable this work.
A detailed Innerspace program and research strategy prospectus has been completed by Global Oceans and CLEE. Major funding for the organizational launch and on-going operation of the program is currently being sought from philanthropic foundations, major individual donor support, and government funding agencies.
Program Contacts:
Jim Costopulos
CEO/Founder, Global Oceans
Amie Romney, PhD
Interim Director, Center for Life in Extreme Environments (CLEE)
Portland State University
