Aryan Shah: "In 2050, we'll have mapped the entire seafloor"

Aryan Shah is the co-founder and CEO of InX Tech – a deep tech startup dedicated to “pioneering the next generation of AUVs [autonomous underwater vehicles].” A third year student at Imperial College London, he recently gave a TED Talk on the importance of ocean exploration. I’d highly recommend checking it out.

Before you do though… earlier this week, Aryan and I chatted about ocean mapping: what it is; why it’s crucially important; and how InX plans to reduce the cost of it.?

A summary of the conversation we had, edited for brevity and clarity, can be found below.

Aryan, you predict that “in 2050, we’ll have mapped the entire seafloor.” What sort of map are we talking about here?

There are lots of different metrics that you can map the ocean by. Temperature. Salinity. Current speed.?

Another is depth. Everybody thinks that the ocean floor is just sand. Level, boring, very uniform sand. Maybe for a small section it is but if you look at the wide-scale picture, there’s peaks, troughs, mountains, volcanoes, caverns, trenches, canyons. There are all these beautiful geological structures and, for the most part, we don’t know anything about them.?

Why is it important that we do?

When we map the depth and shape of the seafloor with sonar, the amount of things we can do with the data we collect is absolutely infinite.?

We’ll be able to build new wind farms, and create marine protected areas, and that’s just scratching the surface.

So many people need the data, particularly those living in coastal areas at risk of tsunamis. Where there’s an area prone to tsunamis, the shape of the seafloor can really dictate how the waves move above it. Their velocity. How far inland they’re going to move. Plate tectonic activity and geological structures collapsing underwater can also dictate the size of the waves.

Having data means that communities can better prepare for tsunamis. If we have an estimate of how far a wave could theoretically inundate the coastline, we can put measures in place to protect people. We’ll have a clearer sense of which structures are going to be destroyed and how far people should evacuate.?

A seafloor map can be the difference between life and death.

Wow! I’d never considered it like that. It sounds to me that sea floor maps have a huge role to play in both climate change mitigation and adaptation. Of course, the sooner we map the seafloor, the better. How’re things progressing??

Seabed 2030 are the principal people building the map at the moment.?

We’ve been trying to map this world for hundreds and thousands of years. In 2017, when Seabed 2030 was launched, 6% of our oceans were mapped. Today, it’s 24.9%.?

Seabed have their own data as well as what their partners have given them. I believe very heavily in their mission (to map the ocean by 2030) and we’re looking to partner with them soon.

…so a fully mapped ocean is really a matter of when, not if. It’s possible it could be done well before 2050. That’s amazing news but are there any barriers that might slow down progress?

Conflict is always going to be a big challenge. Mapping the entire ocean with things like, unfortunately, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is going to be really hard. We don’t want to make anyone unhappy; a submarine might be used solely for mapping purposes, but somebody else might not think so… We don’t want to spark any further conflicts.??

Another key barrier is cost. Today, companies who want surveys, like wind power companies, pay at least ￡200,000 a day for missions. They’re paying to charter out specialised boats and submersibles with trained personnel onboard and it can take months to get data into customer’s hands.?

How can we bring down costs?

Right now, there are a few companies producing autonomous vehicles that can be deployed at sea and collect the data themselves. They can be programmed with waypoints and to follow an action plan. When they’re done, they can send data straight up to satellites.

The number of companies doing that is increasing every year which is amazing. Hopefully, the amount of ocean we map each year will increase because of them.??

With our autonomous underwater vehicles (UAVs) at InX, we want people to just drop them into the sea, at any coastline. You won’t need to take them 40km out. They’ll also have fuel cell technology on board which will grant them months of unmanned operations.

Our customers won’t need to charter support vessels to produce surveys, which will reduce the cost of getting them done.

It’ll democratise access and empower so many people. Coastal communities that actually need them will be able to get them done at a fair price. Because of that, we’ll inadvertently get more data collected. Ocean mapping won’t just be left to experts, it’ll become more of a crowdsourced initiative.?

…and crowdsourcing will, presumably, accelerate the rate at which the ocean is mapped. It sounds like the solution really could be that simple. But is there anything else we can do to speed up progress?

There is. Space exploration has been popularised by SpaceX and the work Elon Musk is doing. But there’s not currently as much hoo-ha and whoop-de-doo about the ocean, even though it’s our greatest ally in the climate crisis. It’s the largest carbon sink in the world and so much knowledge comes from it.?

Everybody thinks “Oh, we’re going to colonise Mars.” Yes, but we’re not going to have a planet to live on if we keep focusing on things that are so, so far in the future.

People are becoming more aware of why the ocean is so important but not aware enough. We really need to make it as hyped as space. We need to up the amount of media and conversations about the ocean. Keep it on peoples’ minds.?

Whenever there’s a space launch, even if it’s just delivering a satellite, the amount of coverage it gets is insane. What about these crucial, ocean based launches?

I hope the media covers more of them.

It makes perfect sense. I understand you’re building a proof-of-concept at InX, right now. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for future launches.

Aryan, it’s been lovely to chat. Thanks for your time.

Read this far? Then I have a question for you: what's YOUR vision for 2050? If you'd like to explore it in detail (and fine-tune your startup's vision, in the process), why not drop me a DM? I'm currently running FREE 1:1 sessions to help a small number of founders do just that. First come, first served!