Ved Chirayath, Ph.D. is a National Geographic Explorer and Professor of Earth Sciences and Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Miami. He is also a 2024 Moore Inventor Fellow, and the foundation supports his work on active fluid lensing – technology to allow for imaging through ocean waves to see marine wildlife, the seafloor, and marine plastics from aircraft.
In this installment of Beyond the Lab, Ved discusses his love for the oceans and the problems he is looking to address with his research.
You can find Ved on LinkedIn.
What are some of your sources of inspiration as a researcher?
For me, the ocean is like being in space – I’ve had so many experiences floating above it, looking down, and it’s the same feeling I get looking through a telescope. There is a sense of infinity in front of you. There are a lot of parallels between space and the ocean– they’re both harsh environments to work in, the ocean will try to eat and nibble at you. It’s very humanizing. Our blood has similar properties to seawater. We came from the sea.
One of the most exciting things about the ocean is that it’s an environment where we have animals, like whales, that communicate over vast distances and can perceive time and space similar to the way humans do, but without technology.
In my search for life elsewhere in the Universe, that’s what has made the ocean so special and unique. It’s the harbor for the majority of life on Earth, and we barely understand it. If we’re going to try to explore other worlds and find intelligent life there, how do we anticipate communicating with them if we can’t even communicate with our relatives in the ocean?
I’m working on a whale project, which I’d never thought I’d say as someone that comes from an astrophysics and aeronautics background, and I’m completely captivated by these creatures. Whales have a complex culture. They are their own spaceships, they have names for each other, they have cultural practices, and they mourn their dead. Whales are so much more like us than we realize.
This is inspiring me right now to study oceans– just trying to understand what’s in our own backyard.
What are some of the challenges that you face in your research?
The ocean is very challenging compared to space if you think about being a human in that environment. In space, the difference between being inside the space station and outside is one atmosphere of pressure. At the bottom of the ocean, you’re dealing with a difference of thousands of atmospheres of pressure. It’s a very humbling place to be because it tries to test your boundaries. It tries to tell you, “You evolved from this environment, but you are no longer very good at inhabiting it.” The environment imposes rules on what can and cannot work. Things that work in space don’t always work in the ocean.
The second challenge is navigating the physics. Water is a bizarre substance, and I didn’t appreciate this until I did multiple degrees in physics. Thinking about how water freezes, if it froze from the bottom up, there would be no life on Earth. But it freezes from the top down, which means that during its phase transition, water gets lighter as it gets colder, floats to the top and freezes. That means that fish can survive in the winter. It also means that when Earth has gone through periods of glaciation, there has been life underneath the ice. Very few fluids do that in the Universe.
That same water molecule is very difficult to see through, and it has other strange properties. Radio waves do not transmit through it, so GPS doesn’t work underwater – good luck trying to find something under the surface! Water is an incredibly challenging fluid, despite being life-giving. In water, light does transmit, but only in certain colors. Life has evolved to use those colors. Living beings have given up on electromagnetic radiation and use sound instead, using acoustic waves to "see" the farthest.
The physics of seeing through water is challenging, and it’s also fun because you’re given so many restrictions, which means you have to find the little bit of light you can get through the fluid and see what you can do.
If you’ve ever dropped something in a pool or the ocean, you’ll be familiar with my problem – it’s hard to see underwater. If you’re above the water and trying to find something, it’s hard to locate where the object is. It’s very dark, there’s a lot in the way with waves moving and things splashing. That’s what active fluid lensing is trying to solve. It’s trying to see the bottom of the sea, a river or a lake the way fish see the same environment.
CREDIT: VED CHIRAYATH
It's surprisingly difficult, especially coming from a field like astronomy where we see to the edges of the known Universe and gather every single photon. It is almost easier to see galaxies than it is to see something that’s in our backyard, underwater. That’s one of the biggest challenges of the present day, and I hope the next generation picks up the mantle after me!
Tell us more about your invention, active fluid lensing.
Fluid lensing, a technique for imaging through the ocean’s surface, has come a long way from the beginning where no one thought it would work, me included, and now it’s mapping places around the world.
Active fluid lensing takes that technique to a new level. We are trying to achieve parity with what we do in astronomy and space science to look at the edges of the cosmos, but in the ocean.
The technology is still in the inception stage – I’m still sorting out some of the maths, but the groundwork is there, and the proof-of-concept has been demonstrated. I’m glad that the Moore Foundation saw promise in this, because it takes a lot of guts to build, to fail, and to learn, and someone needs to take on that risk. My hope is that active fluid lensing can help us see full ocean depth at some point. If we can do that, we can image everything on our home planet and on other planets that have oceans – and we know our solar system has multiple ocean worlds.
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Thank you for sharing.