The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is the world’s largest private oceanographic research institution, dedicated to advancing both basic and applied understanding of fundamental ocean problems. WHOI uses this knowledge to address increasingly urgent challenges and is currently at the forefront of research on such topics as the ocean carbon cycle and marine carbon-dioxide removal (mCDR).

The long and storied history of Japan's leadership in ocean science really couples very well with our long story at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). What is distinctive about WHOI is that it is the world’s largest private institution dedicated solely to understanding ocean science and technology and advancing the next generation in an education program with MIT, with whom we’ve had a joint program for 55 years. Our main aim is to advance our basic and applied understanding of fundamental ocean problems or questions and try to use that knowledge to explore deeper and more pressing questions that are becoming increasingly urgent. Sometimes, in a role as head of an institution, someone will ask you one or two years into the job what is the thing that surprised you the most? What surprised me the most about WHOI is that despite its size it's a very nimble place. We can go after very big problems quickly that are actually at a very high price point because our scientists are able to take on risks and apply new technologies to go after problems that are difficult for some other organizations to pursue. Also, it's a very egalitarian and teamwork-oriented place. Another defining characteristic of WHOI is our unparalleled access to the sea, not so much because of our global class research vessels but how we extend our understanding of the ocean with both sensing networks and autonomous vehicles, coupled to developing technologies that give us new ways of looking at the ocean. Our submersible, Alvin, that can dive to 6,500 meters, was recently refit, and in the process of exploring we discovered hydrothermal vents, which are believed to be one of two sources of the origin of life on this planet. This kind of fundamental discovery comes from people who are willing to take risks. 

Today, many of our scientists are looking at the role of the ocean and climate, the ocean climate nexus with implications for sea level rise and coastal assets; future energies such as offshore wind; the future of food, particularly fisheries and the impact on climate and other factors on overfishing, for example, marine mammals, coral health, oceans and human health, harmful algal blooms, technology, and future ocean sensing. We're now leading a big new initiative on marine microplastics and have developed a plastic that degrades with exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun. On coral conservation, there's a whole group of scientists across all of our five departments that are committed to both coral conservation and meeting the fate of the increasingly vanishing coral world on the planet.
Where people get very excited when they come to visit us, is when they come to see our robot labs. We have a program called the Ocean Observatories Initiative that we run, that’s actually a federally funded program at about $50 million a year, to observe the ocean at scale. This involves networks of sensors that are designed to understand how the ocean environment is changing in key hotspot regions around the world, and explores, for example, the impact of ocean warming on offshore fishing. You're probably all familiar with the Argo program. This is a series of about 4,000 floats around the world's oceans, of which a quarter were developed and launched by our team. It's the single largest, most successful joint ocean science venture to date. Most of these floats are only measuring temperature and salinity, what we call state variables, but this collection of sensors tells us that the ocean has absorbed about 93% of the excess heat from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, when we ask the question of how the ocean is faring as a living, breathing fluid, a sort of multimedia soup that is our ocean planet, we're basically flying blind because we don't have nearly this many sensors to tell us anything about the carbon system in the ocean. The ocean has a carbon reservoir that's 50 times that of the atmosphere, and the carbon storage potential of the ocean is something that's well known to oceanographers. However, there are a number of organizations and institutions around the world that are exploring the question of whether the ocean can take up additional carbon from the atmosphere to reverse the impacts of global warming. Indeed, that's already happening. The ocean takes up about a quarter of our emissions every year, so a number of organizations, many of them private, not open to public scrutiny, are looking into exploiting this way in which the ocean could take up carbon. We therefore took a position on this at WHOI. We said that basic science has to lead the knowledge frontier on this problem, because if we don't, we lose the opportunity to inform about the unintended consequences of doing any intervention at scale. This idea of amplifying the ocean's carbon potential to use photosynthesis to sink more marine carbon down to the deep ocean is something we know the ocean has done in the geologic past. And the ocean has taken up 100 PPM equivalent of carbon dioxide between ice ages and warm periods. What we don't know is that if we tried to do that at any kind of scale, is this something that we would like, that works, without negative consequences. We also are looking into abiotic solutions.

What I want to share with you next is a vision that we're actually working on right now. The suite of Argo floats inform us about temperature and salinity and pressure for the most part, for the upper two kilometers of the ocean. But with respect to the carbon system in the ocean, particularly at a global scale, we're still operating in the dark. We therefore envision an undersea network, an internet of the ocean that consists of sensors for carbon and carbon nutrients in the ocean system that are clustered in regions that are either hotspots or places that are changing rapidly, or places that can be used to explore these marine carbon dioxide removal approaches to understand their effectiveness, the durability of carbon storage, the safety of the approach, and whether it's really a viable solution. This involves not just WHOI, but a number of institutions around the U.S. and the world. But how do you scale? This work began with a $25 million gift from our board chair, who was so compelled by this problem that he said we need to get to work on it immediately. And he's right. Together with federal funding, we've raised about $50 million toward this ambition. But this is easily a billion-dollar problem that's going to take cooperation from all of us. So how do you get to scale? Well, the United Nations has the U.N. carbon trading mechanism, for which the ocean has a very nascent policy. And then there's also the Global Greenhouse Watch Program, which actually has
funding available for scalable solutions, but mainly terrestrial. To take advantage of the known scaling that's available in the ocean, we're exploring the United Nations Center on Ocean Climate Solutions with the idea of creating a global hub for stakeholders to accelerate this kind of work. What I think is the hardest part however, is how do you get the people? How do you address the bigger question, the social license for scalable solutions? How do you bring international partners together in developing ocean policy, involving stakeholders? I will close with these questions and with my thanks for your hospitality. It’s been a real delight to be back in Japan.