The Ocean Science Radio team chats with "Deep Sea" Dawn Wright, a geographer and oceanographer and Chief Scientist at ESRI (The Environmental Systems Research Institute) - one of the world's leading suppliers of GIS software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications. We cover why mapping the bottom of the ocean is important, some cool ocean mapping history, and her recently released book "Mapping the Deep: Innovation, Exploration & the Dive of a Lifetime" about her 2022 dive to the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep.
Andrew: One of the facts that gets continuously hit home on our podcast and in the ocean science community at large is that we know more about the topography of the surface of Mars than the bottom of our own ocean.
Frances: The ocean makes up roughly 70% of our planet and, to date, we have really only mapped out barely 1/5th of the ocean. Today we have the chief scientist of the mapping company ESRI to talk about mapping the ocean, why it is important, and her new book chronicling her voyage to the deepest part of the ocean, 10,000 meters beneath the Pacific Ocean’s surface.
Andrew: So let’s take a deep dive to the bottom of the ocean on this episode of Ocean Science Radio:
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Andrew: Welcome back to Ocean Science Radio, the podcast that brings you the latest, greatest and sometimes deepest stories in the ocean. I am Climate and Ocean communications specialist, Andrew Kornblatt
Frances: And I am shark biologist, aquanaut and aspiring badass, Dr. Frances Farabaugh. We're thrilled to have Dr. Dawn Wright, a renowned oceanographer and author, as our guest. Dr. Wright has made groundbreaking contributions to ocean science and mapping, including her recent dive to the Challenger Deep, the deepest point on Earth.
Andrew: Not to mention her adorable Golden retriever and penchant for legos, Dawn recently released a book named Mapping the Deep. This captivating book showcases her life, the innovative technology that made it possible, the fascinating history of the area and the diverse marine life it harbors and the profound importance of understanding our ocean's depths.
Frances: Without further ado, Dawn, please introduce yourself.
Dawn Wright: I'm Dawn Wright. I'm the Chief scientist of Esri or the Environmental Systems Research Institute.
Andrew: Dawn, for those in the audience who may not be GIS nerds, what IS ESRI?
Dawn Wright: Esri is a mapping company we are sometimes lovingly called the company that creates the equivalent of Google Maps on steroids.
Frances: Dawn also gives us an overview of GIS.
Dawn Wright: it's a technology that enables people in just about every scientific field on the planet to use maps and data to solve hard problems. Problems like how to protect the earth via establishing and monitoring wildlife preserves or marine protected areas. How to grow things such as where best to increase agricultural crop yields how to deliver things in terms of logistics, optimization and management. What are the optimal locations for stores such as Starbucks? Starbucks is one of our biggest customers, how to care for people.
Andrew: ESRI has a series of core services and applications that help organizations to monitor severe weather events or changing patterns in climate, or how to assess or detect or predict or quantify the impact of climate change on areas.
Frances: This is all about questions of space and time and GIS is often used in terms of the different layers of data that can be integrated to help people to reveal patterns or linkages or relationships, essentially to turn complexity into clarity.
Dawn Wright: We have a, a large team that does this, again, for all different sectors, markets, disciplines, but we do have a very large ocean team that works specifically with NOAA and NASA and the USGS and many universities and nonprofits on maritime safety and renewable energy and ecosystem services, mapping biodiversity habitat mapping ocean governance and so on. So we are a fairly small company with around 5,000 employees, but we are used by probably up to 650,000 organizations around the world now. And our technology is in 12,000 colleges and universities, and over 12,000 nonprofits including the big NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy and National Geographic, and most of the world's governments.
Dawn Wright: It's a fun company to work for.
Andrew: Dawn, can you tell us a bit more about what exactly some of these agencies use ESRI for?
Dawn Wright: So using NOAA as an example our technology is used in all of the main line offices of, so they're using our mapping and our spatial analysis technology in the National Ocean Service, the National Weather Service the, the national satellite service in their marine operations, fleet Marine education the office of atmospheric Ocean and Atmospheric Research. Same thing with, with universities. We, ocean scientists use our technology as an analytical tool as a mapping tool, and also as a science communication, a storytelling tool. We have a very popular app that is open source, actually called story maps. And we see Noah, for instance, we can't keep up with the story maps that they create. They, they have a wonderful catalog of story maps that, again, are used to tell stories about maritime safety about renewable energy, siting about recreation and tourism in the ocean, about the various ecosystem services that the ocean provides. A lot of stories are told about resource protection and marine protected areas within that.
Frances: Talking about the ocean specifically, can you do a brief overview of why mapping the ocean is so important, and why is it so hard?
Dawn Wright: Well, let me talk about first why it's so hard. We are a water planet, and I think just about everyone knows the statistic in terms of 70 or 71% of the surface of our planet is, is water. We're an ocean planet, and yet it seems that we know so much more about far away planets or about the moon than we know about our own planet. And again, that is because our planet is covered by water, and it's hard for sensors our current evolution of sensors to see through this water. So the, the, the water, the ocean is actually a massive mapping obstacle that, that's in the way
Frances: But these same types of sensors are very, very ineffective in water. The energy there, is simply absorbed in the water. So we have to use a different type of energy in the ocean, which is sound energy - sound navigation and ranging - more commonly known by the acronym - SONAR.
Andrew: And sound travels much more efficiently underwater than it does in air. We've actually learned a lot in terms of developing sonar technology from marine mammals in the way that they communicate with each other. Think whale calls and dolphin calls, they're all using sonar. So the gold standard for mapping in the ocean is sonar. And in terms of getting to the bottom of things with the sea floor, we use echo sounders, which can be attached directly to the hull of a ship or a vehicle or a buoy.
Dawn Wright: But usually they, these are mobile vehicles such as ships or remotely operated vehicles or autonomous underwater vehicles. It, it's the sonar mapping that is critical. It's hard though, because it takes so long and you, the way that it works is that a device sends a down a fan of sound waves, which the the sensor decipher into a three-dimensional portrait of, of the sheath, the sea floors shape and composition, while also collecting water temperature and salinity along the way. But it's very, very slow work. So for instance, if you're trying to, to map a region of the sea floor with a ship, and you're going at the normal cruising speed of a ship, which is normally around 10, 10 to 12 knots that's the equivalent, is the speed of riding your bicycle on land. So if you think about trying to map the entirety of an area such as the, the Monterey Bay, for instance, which is in my neck of the woods out here in California, and you're trying to do that at the speed that you ride your bicycle
Dawn Wright: And so that's why we, we face this quandary right now where we have only a, a, a small percentage of the ocean floor mapped at the same resolution that we have of at the same coverage and resolution that we have of entire planets, such as the Moon and Mars and, and Venus.
Frances: But back to the question, why do we wanna do this mapping?
Dawn Wright: Well, again, there are all types of these citing or questions of where that we need these maps for. So thinking about offshore energy, since I'm here in California, we, we think about and discuss this quite a bit, where are the best places to put wind, wind energy turbines or tidal energy structures or wave energy boys? You need the mapping in order to, to cite that infrastructure. What is the best place, where are the best places to do that? Or even the fact that we have this podcast, your podcast or other, other shows, radio shows, streaming videos, all of that is dependent on our maps of the sea floor.
Dawn Wright: This does not get talked about enough, I think, I don't hear about it enough. But we have over 1.3 million kilometers of cables, submarine cables that traverse the ocean floor. And these cables account for about 95% of all of the intercontinental data traffic on this planet, including phone calls and streaming videos. And these, these signals that are, that are needed to, to broadcast our shows. So mapping of the sea floor helps to keep that information flowing. It helps to maintain the current network of cables, and also to cite the best places to put new ones. We need accurate maps of the ocean including the sea floor to help keep the thousands of ships that are safely moving goods around this planet. We need these maps for habitat restoration on the sea floor. And in the ocean, especially for designing and maintaining new marine reserves or marine parks.
Dawn Wright: We need to map the ocean for fisheries management, especially for, for commercial fishing in terms of coastal areas, shoreline change analysis, especially as we are building new infrastructure on our coast or new communities on our coast. How is the shoreline going to change, especially with the onset of sea level rise or with hazards that hit our coast, such as storms or tsunamis. Maps of the ocean floor are absolutely critical for tsunami runup modeling. When these waves finally feel the bottom and rush on shore, where are those waves going to go and how should we plan evacuation routes accordingly can go on and on and on. But those are, those are just a few of the reasons why we need to map. And these are many of the reasons that are explained a little bit more in my book.
Andrew: OOOOH, Good segue, Dawn. Want to officially introduce your book and give the audience a little summary?
Dawn Wright: So the full title of the book is Mapping the Deep Innovation Exploration and the Dive of a Lifetime, and it includes a, a forward by Kathy Sullivan, who is not only a good friend of mine, but she was the first American woman to walk in space and also the first woman to visit Challenger Deep, the deepest place on this planet. So she is now the most vertical person in the universe having soar to the heights and, and to the depths. And Kathy was also a, a former administrator of Noah or the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
‘Dawn Wright: And the, the purpose of the book, or the book is, is part an adventure memoir. It tells the story of my dive to Challenger Deep that took place in 2022, but also the various adventures and ups and downs that I've had along the way as a scientist. And also a call to action to pay attention to the ocean and to better understand the ocean and to participate in varying activities to, to protect and to better use the ocean. And this is not a book just for people who live on coast near coasts or, or on coasts or in islands or near water. This is hopefully a book for everybody, because everybody can play their role in understanding and valuing and protecting the ocean.
Frances: So what was the motivation for writing this book? How did the idea get into your head?
Dawn Wright: Well, that's the interesting thing about this book because when you look at the book, it says Don Jay Wright with Esri Press. It was actually the staff at Esri Press who came up with the idea for this book and who, who actually put the book together in close association and collaboration with me. And Esri as a software company is a very interesting company because we do all kinds of other things that you, I guess, you wouldn't normally associate with a software company. And, and one of those things is that we have our own press, which started off as our publication outlet for the documentation that went with our software, but it has over the years grown into a full on academic, scientific and trade press. So we publish atlases we publish research monographs. We do publish of course books about our software and how best to use our software. And this is a, a book that Esri Press wanted to do to, to tell the story of, of Challenger Deep, my Dive to Challenger Deep. So they came up with the idea, they approached me about it, and they had been working with me on it over the last couple of years. And here we are
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Andrew: In your book you talk about something known as “the Five Deeps.” What ARE the five deeps?
Dawn Wright: So the five Deeps are a very important part of the story of Challenger Deep. That is, that that is told in this book. And actually the, the story of Five Deeps is told in, in other really amazing books such as Laraway, the Deepest Map, and Susan Casey's the Underworld. The Five Deeps are essentially the five deepest points in all of the major ocean basins of the world. And despite all of our scientific exploration and discovery and analysis, we did not know where these places were and exactly what the depths of those of these places were. This was especially discovered or thought about by Victor Vo, who I can spend some time talking about the Great Explorer Victor Vo. But when he heard that we did not really know or have a definitive, scientifically measured assessment of these places, the deepest places in the ocean, he set about to rectify that.
Dawn Wright: So over a 10 month period between 2018 and 2019, his Calahan Oceanic organization used the ship pressure drop and the submersible limiting factor to complete the five deeps expedition. So they were able to reach the Malloy deep in the Arctic and to measure exactly to the best of our scientific technologies reach in terms of how best we can measure these areas. They have a definitive depth for Malloy deep in the Arctic and for the Java trench in the Indian Ocean. And the deepest place in the Southern Ocean is, is the South sandwich trench. The deepest place in the Atlantic is the Puerto Rico trench, and then the deepest of them all is challenger deep, which is in the the Pacific, the Western Pacific. So not only had this not been done before, again, the oceanographic community was still unsure as to what the actual depths were in terms of these many regions.
Dawn Wright: So Calahan Oceanic, which is a private exploration organization, completely funded by Victor. They accomplished this and made a huge contribution in terms of not only visiting these deeps, but using mapping capabilities, the bathometric mapping capabilities of the pressure drop and using Arc GIS, by the way, in, in terms of, of mapping that data as well as the human occupied observational capability of, of the submersible limiting factor. Now I I do want to mention, I I want to spend some time on Victor Bisco because he, he is an absolutely amazing man, and he's, he's now my friend, but he is the, the founder, the funder, and the driving force of all of this. He purchased and refitted the ship and all of its support assets, all of the, the, the zodiacs the the, the crew, the, the technical specialists to maintain the submersible. He commissioned the designing and the building of the submersible limiting factor to ensure that it could safely and repeatedly go to all of these five deeps. And then he also piloted the sub to all of those record breaking dissents. Victor in his his Victor's Day job is a
Francess: So, the Challenger Deep is the deepest point of these different five deeps, but what else is special about this location that catches everybody's attention?
Dawn Wright: Well, you, you've got most of it there in terms of, of the depth. Challenger Deep is the, the deepest region within the world's deepest ocean trench, which is the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific Ocean. So that makes it the deepest place on this planet. Challenger Deep is officially now 10,935 meters deep, that's over 6.7 miles deep. And we've, the scientific community is known about Challenger Deep for, for some time since the 1870s. In fact challenger Deep is named after the HMS Challenger Expedition of the British Navy in the the 1870s and repeated mapping of this area has over and over again, confirm that this is the deepest place on the planet. This is why Jacques Picard and my friend, captain Don Walsh, made their record breaking descent in 1960 in the Triste. So, Jacques Picard and Don Walsh were the first two human beings to actually visit challenger Deep, and people have in their imagination Mount Everest.
Dawn Wright: We, we all hold Mount Everest to be special because it's the highest place on the planet. But my goodness, if you placed Mount Everest into Challenger deep, there would still be more than two kilometers or 1.2 miles of water still above it. And Mount Everest sitting in Challenger Deep, would be shrouded in complete darkness. Now, most people haven't been to Mount Everest, but we all do have that in our imagination. But millions of us have been to the Grand Canyon. That's another iconic place. And if you can think in your imagination about the taking the Grand Canyon and fitting the Grand Canyon in Challenger Deep, you need six of them. You could fit six Grand Canyons in Challenger Deep. So this place is Challenger Deep is really a special place.
Andrew: Another analogy that Dawn likes to use is the Burge Khalifa the world's tallest building in Dubai. With a total height of 829.8 m or 2,722 ft and minimum cost of 1,000 a night to stay there, the building has other reasons it is a favorite for analogy.
Dawn Wright: I'm a fan of the Mission Impossible Movies with Tom Cruise. And there's that one mission Impossible movie where he is on, he's, he's trying to, to do a caper on the actual Birch Khalifa. Anyway, you would need to stack 13 Birch Khalifas on top of each other to match the depth of this part of the ocean. This is also scientifically because it, we all want to know about the ecology and the geology and the, the physics in these special places. And we know that the hydrostatic pressure at Challenger Deep is a, just a bone crushing 16,000 pounds per square inch. That's way, way more crushing than the Titanic depth, because we know about the, the horrible tragedy of the Titan submersible the hydrostatic pressure. There was just a fraction of, of what is at challenger deep. When you get down to challenger deep, it's more than 1100 times the amount of pressure that you would feel at sea level. In fact people have described the pressure as the equivalent of about 25 fully laden jumbo jets pushing down on you
Frances: Dawn’s book is like an adventure log of her incredible dive down to the deepest point of the ocean. She shares with us a little bit of an overview of her dive and some things that stood out to her and what it was like going down to to the deep.
Dawn Wright: Well, that's the fun thing about writing this book, because as of the publication of this book, and as of the current time here in 2024, we don't know when there will be another dive to Challenger deep. So my dive with Victor SCO in 2022 was the, was the last one, the most recent one to, to challenger Deep. And as such that, that's a moonshot for, for a lot of us who, who work in the deep ocean, it was a fantastic opportunity. The descent was fairly ordinary for me because my research in my past life as a professor at Oregon State University was, was on sea floor mapping, particularly of hydrothermal vent areas on mid-ocean ridges or sea floor spreading areas. And a deep diving submersible is actually a very critical scientific tool that I used in my research. So I've, I've been in other submersibles such as the Alvin and, and the Pisces.
Dawn Wright: And so I had experienced a submersible descent before. It's just that this descent to challenger deep was longer because we, we descended to what's known as full ocean depth. When you go to challenger deep, you can't go any deeper. So it's the full depth of the ocean, and every descent is pretty wondrous and, and jaw dropping because you descend through all of the, the light levels in the ocean, for instance, from the beautiful blue at the surface to completely pitch black darkness, which most of the ocean is in darkness. And you, you see the bioluminescent creatures that live in that. So-Called Twilight Zone. And then when we were able to get to the bottom challenger Deep is different from other places that I visited on the ocean floor on sea floor spreading areas, the hydrothermal vents, there's a lot of activity there, a lot of vibrancy because those areas are famous for the underwater hot springs.
Dawn Wright: The hydrothermal vents that are habitat for the tube worms and crabs and mussels and shrimp, and all of the amazing things that so many people have seen in National Geographic videos. And in of it, the videos of other organizations such as the Schmidt Ocean Institute and, and others, ocean X and others who are able to get footage of these amazing habitats. Challenger Deep is not like that. Challenger deep is very forbidding. It's very hostile alien. In fact. It's very, it's very humbling
Dawn Wright: And as a geologist, I describe in the book some of the geological wonders that we saw, because being inside of a trench, you are right, there's the expression in the trenches, that means you're right there in the action. And we were at the iconic place where two tectonic plates on the ocean floor meet, and one plate is literally diving into the earth beneath the other. And so these are areas where, where rocks are broken, and they're vast fields of these crazy huge angular boulders. And it's also an area of, of intense and deep earthquakes and volcanic activity. And it's, it's just a, a, a wild place. So I, I immensely enjoyed it. And we also had a, a mission to accomplish, which was to test a, an underwater, of course, it's underwater
Andrew: There was one question that somebody posed to Dawn that she included in her book that I thought was really interesting, especially how she answered it. What if the sea floor isn't totally mapped 30 to 50 years from now and from now, what are the consequences of not mapping the sea floor?
Dawn Wright: I think the consequences. So, so the, what we are trying to do, there is a, a un United Nations endorsed official program called Seabed 2030. And the, the mission of Seabed 2030 is to get the entire sea floor mapped by the year 2030. And by mapping the sea floor, the, the idea is to map the sea floor in high resolution, which is at a resolution of 100 to 200 meters around the entire sea floor. And in all honesty, that is a huge aspirational goal. Seabed 2030 is likely not going to be able to get to a hundred percent by 2030, but hopefully by 2040 or 2050. Now, the, i, the idea is to do this because it must be done. So again, the, the consequences of not doing this I would say that the longer it takes us to get to that 100%, the more we'll be essentially playing with fire for all of the reasons that we've talked about before, about why it's important to, to map the sea floor in, in this high resolution we've talked about why we need these maps for citing energy infrastructure and submarine cables for public safety in terms of creating these run-up models for tsunamis and storms, and restoring and protecting habitats on our ocean floor, and how important these maps are for fisheries management for port security.
Dawn Wright: All of these re we, we are woefully under mapped to, to fulfill all of these tasks. We're only at 26.1%. And again, we're trying to, to get to a hundred percent, there's a little bit of light that we're seeing because we, we see more and more organizations are involved in CED 2030, and we're all trying as, as hard as we can to get to that a hundred percent as quickly as possible. We were only at 6% of the sea floor mapped in 2017.
Dawn Wright: And there's some leaders, some ocean leaders, such as Nina Jensen, she's the CEO of Rev Ocean in Norway. She has estimated that there is an additional 20% of the sea floor that could immediately be considered mapped, because there's that additional data is locked away in commercial data stores, data stores. So we're, we're working hard to convince our industry colleagues to see the wisdom in opening up their, their data. There's also the specter of, of deep sea mining. That's another huge consequence that is on the minds of so many people right now. The, in fact, there was a, an article that I read by Simon Winchester in the New York Times, which talked about the, the potential for a brutal scavenging aing, as he calls it, of the wealth that we know is lying untouched on the sea floor in terms of minerals and the specter of armadas, of mining ships with giant claws and, and drag lines to, to mine cobalt and nickel and zinc, maybe even gold.
Dawn Wright: But in so doing, they're going to potentially wipe out whole habitats areas that we have not even had a chance to understand what is there, let alone how valuable that might be there, there might be a cure for cancer or covid in some of these organisms that live in these areas that have been pinpointed as deep sea mining sites. So that, so the mapping must keep pace with that must exceed those aspirations so that we know what we're doing, and we can say no. In fact, most of us are saying, most of us in the scientific community are saying we need a pause on deep sea mining until we actually have this map completed in that until we know what is in these, these areas, there is a, the, the UN's International Seabed Authority, which has given permission to several state owned and private companies to, to prospect in the deep sea. And the permission could, could come as soon as, as this year or next, but we do not have the mapping done yet to inform those activities in terms of environmental impact assessment. And to be honest many of us in the scientific community don't trust these private companies to do the due diligence in creating the necessary high resolution maps. So that's a whole other podcast
Frances: Dawn, you feature a woman by the name of Marie Tharp in your book. Who is she and why is she so important?
Dawn Wright: Well, Marie Tharp is one of my heroines, and she is a shining star, a, a heroine to, to so many of us in the sea floor mapping community, especially those of us who are women. I would dare say that most of us in the sea floor mapping community consider Marie Tharp to be the mother of our science, the mother of our craft. She's essentially the inventor of marine cartography, or the art and science of, of making maps of the ocean floor. And Marie Tharp's story is becoming more well known now, especially by way of what I consider to be the definitive biography of her life, which is called soundings. That was beautifully written by Halle felt. And there are also several children's books now that feature Marie, such as Marie's Ocean is my favorite by Josie James Marie Thapa in the early 1950s.
Dawn Wright: She was a geologist working on mapping the sea floor with her, her colleague and mentor Bruce Hazen. And this was at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty birth observatory. And her maps revealed, gave us the first definitive look at the global sea floor. And her maps showed that the sea floor is not flat and featureless, but it's covered in canyons and ridges and mountains. And at that time, this really challenged the scientific establishment. And part of her story is that her findings were initially dismissed as quote unquote girl talk. In fact, there is a program an educational program that has been put together by my friend and leading sea floor mapping luminary Vicki Farini at, at Lamont that is called girl Talk. It's a, it's a sea floor mapping data workshop for, for young women in the New York area.
Dawn Wright: But her work turned out to be the spark that actually ignited the whole plate tectonics revolution, and truly advanced our understanding of how nearly everything on this planet works, because so much of, of what we understand of the earth is linked to plate tectonics how the earth heals itself, creates new crust that spreading centers, how it recycles crust that trenches, how the surface of the earth slide past slides past each other at these large strike slip fault, such as the San Andreas fault that, that we worry about here in Southern California. At any rate Marie Therapists is someone also who had a very unusual background in training for her time. She was trained in geology and mathematics as well as art and music. And she really had the courage of her convictions and of her intellect to posit one of these, one of the most fundamental proofs of continental drift within the, the rubric of plate tectonics theory, which is that a rift valley caused by the faulting was caused by the faulting of sea floor spreading.
Dawn Wright: But because she was a woman, her contributions were belittled or ignored at the time. She wasn't allowed to go to sea until near the end of her career. Nevertheless, it is Marie Tharp, who began the first systematic comprehensive attempt to map the entire ocean floor. And there are those of us who are called Thpo files, who, who admire her and who are in inspired by her. Even, even at Esri, you know, our, our Esri ocean base lab base map
Andrew: Dawn’s book is informative, gripping, and is written in such a way that putts you in the passenger seat of the submarine as it dives. At the end of the book there's a call to action to the reader. Dawn, can you tell our listening audience, what you hope people walk away from your book with?
Dawn Wright: Well, I want people to be inspired by my story. I think that's a lot of, most memoirs. That's, that's the point, is to to know and to understand that a person was able to do certain things, and especially for young people to, to see themselves also in my story, or not even necessarily to do exactly what what I did or what my path has been, but to see them themselves doing, accomplishing their own path and, and knowing that despite all of the, the obstacles that will, that will present themselves to move forward with, with joy and with confidence to to fulfill their dreams. I mean, this is really the story of, of one of my dreams fulfilled. And because the dream is centered on the ocean, I also want people to come away from this book with a, with a Love for the Ocean.
Dawn Wright: One of my colleagues at the University of Georgia, Mandy Joy, who is a fantastic scientist, and she's also the current recipient of the Don Walsh ocean Exploration Award for all of her work in discovering features on hydrothermal vents through submersible dives. She has talked about falling in love with the ocean. And I really agree with that. I want people to come away from this book, having fallen in love with the ocean, and she has cited what I know to be an African proverb that was co-opted by Jacques au. And that is, people protect what they love. We protect our family, we love our family, we protect our neighborhood because we, we love where we live or we love our country. Same thing with falling in love with, with the ocean. If we love the ocean and understand it, we will protect it and preserve it and make sure that it's used appropriately.
Dawn Wright: And that's, that is what the action item. And, and these really are actions. It's not just aspirational, but there's some specific actions that people can take in order to fall in love and, and protect the ocean. And I'll say also that for each chapter in the book, including that last chapter that has those action items, you can go to mapping the deep.com and there are additional resources to help you fulfill these actions. There are story maps and other articles, other podcasts, there are data sets, there are maps there are videos. There's even a, a Lego stop motion movie all kinds of resources to, to help you. And they're all free at mapping the deep.com, which accompanies the book.
Frances: Dawn’s book is full of amazing resources and is just an incredible read. The work of ESRI and the stories and content their team puts out on their work is astounding - we are partial to the ocean work ourself. So check it out.