Research ship helps ocean scientists dive deep

When the state-of-the-art vessel Falkor first docked in Honolulu Harbor in 2013, its private backers looked to fill what they said was a growing void in badly needed ocean research.

Four years later, having logged nearly 128,000 additional miles exploring the world’s oceans, not much has changed, they report.

“The state of ocean research is the same as it was then,” Schmidt Ocean Institute co-founder Wendy Schmidt said Tuesday. “There are no greater resources being dedicated to it” — despite the rising temperatures, coral die-offs, runaway pollution and other challenges.

Schmidt and her husband, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, were in town this week with scientists and supporters to celebrate their vessel’s first five years of research across the world’s oceans. That includes a dozen expeditions involving the University of Hawaii, institute officials say. The Falkor, which embarked on its maiden journey in 2012, was docked once again in Honolulu Harbor to mark the occasion.

In 2014, UH researchers aboard the Falkor helped map some 23,000 square miles of seafloor at the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument’s northern end and discovered 18 additional undersea mountains, or seamounts.

Their extensive, detailed undersea mapping of Papahanaumokuakea helped “make the case” for its controversial expansion last year, according to Schmidt.

“There was greater biodiversity than anyone thought, the monument was deeper than anyone thought,” she said during an interview at the Waikiki Aquarium amid a reception that marked the Falkor’s first five years of research. “There were physical properties and information that were gathered by the scientists on board the ship that made the case.”

In the next five years, the institute hopes that research aboard the Falkor, a 272-foot-long mobile, globe-trotting ship, will lead to similar outcomes that better protect ocean resources.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based nonprofit organization shares publicly all the findings and data logged by scientists on the Falkor, an attempt to hasten understanding of how ocean systems work, its officials say. At Tuesday’s reception, several researchers summarized their research projects.

They reported studying El Nino weather patterns, phytoplankton, sea-level rise after the most recent ice age, and ocean-surface infrared imagery, among other topics.

In total they mapped some 550,000 square miles of ocean floor, according to Schmidt officials.

The Falkor was originally built in the early 1980s as a German coast guard ship. But after a $60 million retrofit by the institute — including a science control center and flat-screen monitors — its high-tech interior now resembles something out of a James Cameron movie.

The vessel has traveled 175,000 miles in its first five years and partnered with some 500 scientists and crew, institute officials said Tuesday. “We remain the only self-funded research vessel that’s doing basic science research that’s out there,” Schmidt said.

Even if the group often faces a difficult political climate to effect change for the ocean, “what we’re doing is a marathon, not a sprint. And the work will go on, and we will continue to fund it,” she added. “It is what it is.”

As she did in 2013, Schmidt emphasized Tuesday that those who live thousands of miles from any ocean need to understand how the seas’ health affects everyone. It’s similar to a remark Hokule‘a captain Nainoa Thompson often made during the Hawaiian canoe’s recent voyage around the world — that “you can’t protect what you don’t understand.”