Page 16: of Marine Technology Magazine (March 2023)

OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTRUMENTATION & SENSORS

All Images Courtesy Sofar Ocean

MARINE

TECHNOLOGY

TV

Watch the video @ https://youtu.be/ rJJq-UwjjHA

M D GIND THE ATA AP

Sofar Ocean is on a quest to extract and put to use data from the world’s waterways. Co-Founder and

CEO Tim Janssen recently discussed with MTR the rapid growth of his company, and the burgeoning use cases for information from our oceans.

By Greg Trauthwein s we wrote back in the November 2021 edition said Janssen. He estimates that humanity collects about a tril- of Marine Technology Reporter, Tim Janssen lion gigabytes a year of data. Using his best estimate of 11 and his Sofar Ocean team were on an ‘Epic orders of magnitude difference between total data collected

Ocean Data Quest.’ Fast track to February compared to data collected from the ocean, he said it would 2023, and we could easily call it ‘Epic Ocean look something like this. “If you think about the distance from

A

Data Quest – Part II’, as Janssen and his growing team remain here to the sun and you equate that to the total amount of data laser focused on doing its part to help extract and put to use we collect every year, (the total amount of data collected from increasing quantities of information from the world’s oceans. the ocean) gets us about one to 10 meters on the way! That’s

The mantra ‘unlocking data from the ocean’ is a common re- the difference, and it is a compounding problem,” as every frain in subsea circles, and while extracting information from year the gap widens.

more than 2/3 of the planet earth is a sizeable task, the ? rst step is to accurately quantify the job itself.

Enter Sofar Ocean “The ocean is so far behind in terms of data acquisition; I Janssen and his team, while young and still relatively small, typically refer to it as an 11 orders of magnitude difference,” think big. “Our mission is to connect the world’s oceans to 16 March/April 2023

MTR #3 (1-17).indd 16 3/20/2023 2:31:26 PM