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The new effort was made possible by the generosity of Virginia Tech alumni Bill and Carol Seeley, who donated $2 million to the project. Their generous support allowed Weiss and his team to develop a comprehensive plan to begin monitoring the ocean. “The work of the Coastal Zone Observatory is a critical step in helping us become better stewards of our most vital resource on Earth, the world’s oceans,” said Bill Seeley.
Following the data path
According to Weiss, our knowledge of the marine environment – apart from the presence of microplastics – is full of holes. This is partly because the ocean itself is a dynamic data source.
“We know the surface of Mars better than the surface of our oceans,” Weiss said. “But this terrain is on the sea floor. Now imagine how much we know about conditions when the water in the ocean is constantly moving. If a situation in a particular area is constantly changing, how can we describe it? Was it gone the moment you measured it?”
Researchers at the Coastal Zone Observatory collect ocean data such as temperature and turbidity — the ability of sunlight to travel deeper — to correlate with ocean transience. They use robots equipped with underwater sensors developed by a team of engineers led by Dan Stillwell, a professor of electrical engineering in the College of Engineering and director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Marine Autonomy and Robotics.
“It’s exciting to see the Seeley Coastal Zone Observatory taking shape so quickly,” said Kevin Pitts, dean of the College of Science. “The pollution of our oceans is getting worse, and I’m excited to see researchers from the Colleges of Science, Engineering, and Veterinary Medicine collaborate to learn more about these issues and find ways to help address this global problem.”
The approach “rethinks the way we take in ocean data,” Weiss said. The team believes it will help establish a data set that reflects the changing marine environment over time. Autonomous vehicles provide researchers with the ability to navigate the depths of the ocean and a more flexible way to measure environmental conditions through the ability to track data from currents. Eventually, the team will be able to use those vehicles to collect microplastics and learn how they are affected by the currents of the ocean around them.
“Let’s say we have a sensor that can detect the future on siteWeiss, who is director of the Academy of Integrated Sciences and part of the College of Sciences, said the focus is on microplastics. “We can follow the concentration values in the ocean, and with the movement of the vehicle we can see how these concentrations change over time. So it gives us more comprehensive and complete information to understand how microplastics move in the ocean. What conditions are they dependent on, such as temperature?”
When researchers collect data on the marine environment, other microplastics in the coastal zone observatory study the impact of microplastics on marine life, as this impact extends from individuals to species and moves up the food chain. Biologists from the Chesapeake Bay Area College of Science and veterinarians from the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine are studying the effects of microplastics on seafood. Others are collaborating with biologists from Radford University and the University of Connecticut Fairfield to study the use of microplastics by tilapia and Magellanic penguins and learn which types of microplastics have the greatest impact on coastal organisms.
The Coastal Research Center is part of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. Weiss launched the center in 2020 to coordinate research, teaching and outreach aimed at ensuring a sustainable coexistence of humans and nature in coastal communities.
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