Northern California’s most-celebrated deep sea explorers are about to get a new ride.
Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute on Tuesday announced plans to build a new $50 million state-of-the-art flagship vessel, named the David Packard, in honor of the Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded Hewlett-Packard and in later life used much of his fortune to explore and preserve the world’s oceans.
The 164-foot long ship, to be constructed in Spain starting this fall, will hold 12 crew members and 18 scientists, focusing on deep sea research in Monterey Bay and other parts of the world. Issues from overfishing to ocean pollution to climate change are expected to play a central role when it takes its maiden voyage in 2023.
“We’re excited,” said Chris Scholin, president and chief executive officer for the research institute. “Building a ship from the keel up is a rarity. It’s only happened with us once before and we are approaching our 35th birthday. This ship will carry on for decades. It’s going to serve generations of scientists. There are kids in school who don’t know it now, but who are going to be on board one day doing science and engineering.”
MBARI, as the Moss Landing-based organization is known, is a separate non-profit organization from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, located 20 miles to the south on Cannery Row in Monterey.
Packard built the aquarium in 1984 with a $55 million gift. It receives about 2 million visitors a year who marvel at its sea otters, jellyfish, sea birds and sharks. Although he was proud of the educational opportunities the aquarium affords to thousands of children and the public every year, Packard, an engineer to the core who founded Hewlett Packard in a Palo Alto garage in 1939 with his friend Bill Hewlett, was most fascinated by deep sea research.
Packard came to believe that America spent too much money on space exploration and not nearly enough on exploring the world’s oceans. Not only do the oceans cover 71% of the world’s surface, they provide food and impact the weather. Their plankton, kelp and other plants create 50% of the world’s oxygen.
With a $13 million donation, he founded MBARI in 1987 in an effort to shift the balance toward ocean research.
“I have become addicted to the vision that within the next few years the Monterey Bay will become one of the major world class centers for ocean science,” Packard said in a 1989 speech. “I base this vision on my realization that the oceans are one of the major remaining frontiers of opportunity.”
After Packard died in 1996 at age 83, he left the bulk of his estate to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in Los Altos. The foundation has provided $1.1 billion to MBARI over the past 34 years, making the Packard family the world’s leading private benefactors of ocean research.
With a $58 million annual budget and staff of 215 people, MBARI is now widely viewed with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego in the triumvirate of elite ocean exploration centers in America.
“MBARI is tremendously well respected for its innovation and the way it merges engineering with science to solve problems,” said Greg Rouse, a professor of marine biology at Scripps. “Many other institutions don’t have that vision. They have had so many firsts over their history.”
In recent decades, MBARI’s engineers and scientists have worked together to design unmanned submersibles, once mostly used in oil exploration. They fitted them with fiber optics, high-end cameras and other gear, probing the dark world more than 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, and often beaming the video to crowds at the aquarium.
Probing the mysterious depths of the Monterey submarine canyon, which plunges two miles deep — twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in Arizona — the organization has discovered more than 200 new species of marine creatures never seen before. Among them are a type of giant red pulsating jellyfish three feet wide, sponges shaped like umbrellas, pulsating rope-like creatures with tentacles that glow in the dark called siphonophores that can grow to be 100 feet long, and mysterious worms with red feathery plumes that live on the bottom of the ocean and eat dead whale bones, drawing out nutrients through their plant-like roots.
MBARI scientists also discovered the wreckage of the USS Macon, a 785-foot dirigible that crashed into the ocean off Big Sur in 1935. They explored Davidson Seamount, a dormant undersea volcano 80 miles southwest of Monterey with huge forests of undersea coral. Afterward, federal officials expanded the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary to better protect them.
Packard himself helped design MBARI’s previous flagship, the 117-foot Western Flyer, which will be retired. The new ship will not only be able to hold more researchers and travel farther, it also will become the main launch point for the Doc Ricketts, MBARI’s remotely operated vehicle that can dive to the ocean floor. And it will be able to launch multiple “AUVs” — torpedo-like robot probes that can take underwater video, map the sea floor and collect water samples on days-long journeys.
“Whether it is studying hazards like earthquakes, or pollution like microplastics in the ocean, or the chemicals in the ocean, or the impacts of global warming on the food chain — the ocean impacts us on a daily basis,” said Mike Kelly, MBARI’s Director of Marine Operations. “It’s important for us to know more about it.”
