Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Dawn Wright discusses the scientific advances revealing the ocean floor, and why the work is increasingly urgent for climate resilience, coastal safety, and global commerce.
Less than one-third of the world's seafloor has been mapped in high-resolution detail. That means we have a clearer picture of the surface of Mars than we do of Earth’s ocean floor. Dawn Wright is working to change that. As chief scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) and a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University, she is pioneering the use of geospatial tools in a range of environmental initiatives. Among them is Seabed 2030, the U.N.-backed effort to map the entire ocean floor by the end of the decade. That work that is critical to climate resilience, coastal safety, and global commerce.
In 2022, it took her to the bottom of the world. Strapped into a submersible alongside explorer Victor Vescovo, Wright descended 10,919 meters to the southern end of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean — the deepest point on the planet. Her mission was to test a prototype sonar instrument, and the expedition as a whole gathered 4 terabytes of data. The data is part of information that is being used in everything from tsunami warning systems to climate models to the placement of undersea internet cables.
Wright visited the Yale School of the Environment Oct. 5-6 as this year's Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. Ahead of her visit, YSE News spoke with Wright about why she believes ocean mapping is one of the most urgent, and overlooked, challenges of our time.
Aside from our human tendency to look upward toward the stars, mapping in the ocean is a challenge because we need to use different technologies that are much slower at gathering the necessary data. Scientists often use electromagnetic energy, such as light, which travels easily through Earth’s atmosphere and through outer space, but not as well through water. Compared with mapping 70% of our own planet, mapping the surface of the moon or Mars is a piece of cake. For the ocean, we have an array of technologies, including acoustic multibeam sonar, sidescan sonar, undersea robots and drones, and geographic information systems, or GIS, to analyze and map out the data. With acoustic mapping, it’s a long, slow process, and it is much more labor intensive.
Mapping is vital for everything from ship navigation to climate modeling. We need accurate seafloor maps for siting and maintaining wind energy turbines, tidal energy structures, wave energy buoys, and more. Better maps can contribute to more accurate climate predictions, enhancing our understanding of glacier dynamics and sea-level-rise. Nearshore and coastal seafloor mapping provides coastal communities with the means to better understand flooding, erosion, and other climate-related hazards. As ocean traffic continues to increase, seafloor maps will play an increasingly important role in high-seas safety, helping to safeguard vessels, the global supply chain that depends on them, the crews that operate them, and the sensitive environments through which they sail.
I always love the descent of a submersible dive. It’s exhilarating, and it never gets old. You’re descending through the sunlit zone of the ocean, which is the most beautiful, gorgeous aqua blue, and then things slowly turn to gray and ultimately to an inky, pitch black.
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At around 900 meters deep, we saw a faint glow in the darkness appearing through pilot Victor Vescovo’s viewport. Believing the source to be some kind of bioluminescent life form, Victor flashed the sub’s lights. Much to our delight, the creatures responded in kind. This “conversation” of sorts between nature and machine is a lovely example, to me, of the magic of the ocean.
What we did not expect to see was a beer bottle as soon as we landed. It was a dispiriting reminder that human activity is affecting even the remotest spots on the globe. But within a few minutes, we started seeing amazing geology and biology: anemones, sea cucumbers, tiny amphipods, all creatures living in complete darkness and withstanding the16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure down there, living in complete darkness. Together, we are part of the miracle that is life, and the totality of life, on this planet.
We’re now collecting data from more than just ship-based multibeam sonar. Bathymetric lidar — which uses pulses of green light — can produce higher-resolution 3D maps of the seafloor, and next-generation lidar will be compact enough to deploy on submersibles and underwater vehicles. Uncrewed surface vehicles, or sea drones, are cheaper and more efficient than crewed survey ships, and cut fuel use, emissions, and ocean noise.
GIS technology processes and visualizes the data all of this generates. AI is speeding up analysis — helping identify marine life in massive imagery datasets, and powering GIS-enabled decision-support tools that let policymakers assess marine protected areas and conduct spatial planning.
GIS itself is shifting from flat, 2D mapping toward real-time global monitoring and cloud-based ocean data integration, where live streams from underwater vehicles, buoys, and floats feed directly into web-based systems. That’s opening the door to digital twins, virtual representations of an object, process, or system that bridges the gap between physical and digital worlds. This is game-changing technology. When combined with modern sensors and AI, digital twin technology can accelerate innovation by iteratively modeling changes in environmental plans and testing how proposed components or systems will function.
People need to know that the oceans are in terrible crisis— waters too hot, acidic, ecosystems greatly damaged, and more. But there is still time; there is still hope. We can turn the tide, just as we are doing with climate change writ large, and research has shown us what actions to take.
