Expediting Ocean Exploration & Mapping
2021 has made the world acutely aware that the ways of our energy and climate past cannot be the way of our future. Because of this, countries are now attempting to rapidly shift to renewable power. The best shot we have at doing this quickly is the development of enormous offshore wind power plants where the wind blows strong and reliably, allowing a utility-scale clean energy transition.
In order to build this new ocean-based infrastructure, we need to create many seafloor maps. Quickly.
We believe this requires a new, vertically integrated seafloor data platform that is designed to solve many of the time-consuming, big data problems associated with seafloor surveys, mapping, & ocean exploration in general. Everything - from the way we operationally acquire raw marine survey data to the way it’s stored, distributed, and worked with - needs a new, faster technology solution. And we're excited to share that with the world today:
We are extremely proud to announce 2 major advancements at Bedrock. These two solutions work better together, and provide a completely different survey experience for anyone that touches seafloor data:
1. We’re now reserving survey services.
Contact us to get your slot today, or reserve future survey capacity.
2. You can sign up for Mosaic™ beta.
It’s the first cloud-native data platform specifically designed for the workflows surrounding seafloor data. Simple, clear pricing is now out, and we’re giving anyone, anywhere, 50GB of seafloor data storage for free. We’ll be slowly adding in new individuals and organizations over the next few months. Sign up today.
The ocean is humanity’s ticket to a quick, reliable, renewable energy future.
The United States currently has 8 offshore wind turbines. The U.S.’s clean energy goals require 2000 of them by 2030. This is happening because offshore wind is the cheapest solution available within the time frame we have to reduce emissions.
However, getting to turbine installation and construction requires numerous marine surveys. After construction, surveys are needed annually and after major weather, geologic, or ocean events that could have shifted the seafloor. The main bottleneck is speed. Currently, marine surveys can take 6-12 months to get to actionable data needed to move onto the next “step.” Our ability to map the seafloor quickly is a single inhibiting factor to meeting our emission reduction goals.
Why surveys don’t happen quickly now.
The current infrastructure, technology, and systems used to map - and therefore explore - the ocean is in need of a makeover. Most of today’s survey data acquisition largely relies on ships and surface-based infrastructure - where weather, crews, and ship infrastructure impose operational, economic, and scalability hurdles. It is a mess of piecemealed technology systems requiring complex operational processes. This poses inherent challenges to speeding this work up.
Post-acquisition, the data still lives on physical hard drives and flows through desktop computers running on-prem software. This is largely because we still have to be able to use this software and work with the data on ships, not connected to the internet. The result is a data lifecycle from raw collection to actionable insight that can take months to serially move from ship to processor, to geophysicist, to ultimately the engineer and management teams who need access to the final geospatial products of a survey.
Bedrock’s solution - a more efficient way.
To enable this to happen at unprecedented speeds, we re-architected the way we could acquire & access seafloor data. Everything we’ve designed is meant to take a marine survey and turn it into a modern data product, whether it was a newly acquired dataset or historically available survey. By selling services and not the technology directly, our designs directly impact our ability and ease to provide a great end-to-end solution.
As a result, our marine survey services have a completely different operational profile. Our system can be mobilized in days, not months, and they can be shipped anywhere quickly. Our sonar suite operates above 200kHz, outside the auditory range of marine mammals. This is only possible because we’re closer to the seafloor meaning we aren’t disturbing sea life with our surveys. Subsea is inherently steadier than the surface - so the data we gather has higher quality and resolutions that are definable and far exceed surface systems in most cases. Vehicles are launched and managed from shore meaning land-based infrastructure (electricity, the internet, and vehicles) can be used, and humans are kept far out of harm's way.
Mosaic™ replaces shipping hard drives and disjointed on-prem management of survey data. It’s survey-agnostic and supports massive uploads and downloads to and from the cloud. It’s designed to span current serial, siloed workflows within organizations and particularly with other 3rd party orgs across the seafloor data lifecycle—surveyors, processors, geophysicists, engineers, data managers, or data owners. Permission the parts you want some to see, upload, or download, all wrapped in a simple, clean user interface.
The result are surveys that take a couple of weeks to complete, not months.
A needed, deeper understanding.
On top of the immediate energy needs, the world is in desperate need of a leap forward in our understanding of how our oceans work. It is no coincidence that when we look for other life in the universe, the first thing we seek are bodies of water. The most influential ecosystem that supports and enables all life on Earth is not fully understood or explored yet. Further, as you increase the number of datasets and up the resolution required to define “explored”, the percentage shrinks far below the claimed 20%. That means there is a single failure point for all living creatures here. It is unacceptable that we know so little at this point and that must change quickly - and this is exactly the void Bedrock exists to fill.
To build on that point, we’re proud to also announce our first attempt at making it easier than ever to access and publish to a public seafloor library. Sign up for a free account in Mosaic™ and anyone, anywhere can upload to, or download whatever is currently published to the Mosaic Public map which all users will have access to. This was designed to support, not replace the existing public data storage problems, pipeline challenges, and QA/QC capabilities as we all try to piece the full ocean map together. As a public benefit corporation, this is our first step to meeting our promise and we can’t wait to see what comes from it.
We believe this is a better way forward. And we are excited to share that solution with you today.
Signup for mosaic™ beta.
Reserve your survey services today.
To the depths & beyond,
- Bedrock
P.S. - If you believe it’s time for action, we’re aggressively hiring and looking for the modern explorers out there to help us.
