A Deep Understanding

Kate Moran, president of Ocean Networks Canada, on the coast of the Salish Sea in British Columbia, Canada.

Ocean engineer and deep-sea explorer Kate Moran, M.S. ’82, is president of Ocean Networks Canada, a nonprofit that operates seafloor observatories, collecting data for scientists and citizens, alike. Her goal? To save humanity from climate catastrophe.

By Daniel Oberhaus

In May 2010, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu convened several of the nation’s elite scientists for an emergency meeting in Houston to help fix what was shaping up to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Three weeks earlier, an explosion had rocked a drilling rig operated by British multinational oil and gas company BP 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The rig was oozing tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico— and nobody was quite sure how to stop it.

BP had proposed multiple solutions for stopping the massive flow of oil gushing from the seafloor, but Chu doubted they would be adequate. So, he assembled a task force of scientists to evaluate solutions. The stakes were high: An incorrect plug on the well could fail to stem the flow of crude into the ocean, and worse, it could cause another blowout. Several Nobel laureates were among the task force, but one scientist stood out: Kate Moran, M.S. ’82.

Moran stood out not just because she was the only woman at Secretary Chu’s table, but also because she had started to become outspoken about the need for climate action. For several years, she had been sounding the alarm about how our dependency on fossil fuels was pushing the world to the brink of a global heating event unprecedented in our planet’s history. Her Arctic climate research had earned her a spot in then- President Barack Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Moran brought her knowledge of the Arctic, as well as extensive knowledge about ocean drilling, expertise honed from decades as a researcher and ocean engineer on exploratory drilling projects in and around the Arctic. The irony that her early career research had helped lay the foundation for ambitious deep-sea drilling projects like Deepwater Horizon was not lost on Moran, but now she could use her expertise to help bring an end to one of the most catastrophic environmental accidents in history.

“I was in this makeshift situation room and on conference calls with all these brilliant, brilliant people basically acting as an interpreter,” Moran recalls with a laugh. “These were, like, Nobel physicist types and I’m in there telling them how drilling casing strings work.”

Moran’s input turned out to be important in eventually plugging the Deepwater well that July. By the time it was finally plugged, 11 people were dead, more than 130 million gallons of crude oil had spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, and an estimated $17.2 billion in damage had occurred, with billions more expected to be needed for the relief effort. For Moran, the episode marked a change in her career trajectory. In her government role, she had seen the potential of policy to fix the world’s climate change problem. But she also saw its limitations. She wanted to make a more direct impact, which is how she ended up leading one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated networks of observatories in the most extreme and hostile environment possible: the ocean floor.

From Rhode Island to the Arctic

Becoming an oceanographic climate expert wasn’t Moran’s plan. She grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley. Her exposure to the ocean was mostly limited to summers spent working as a lifeguard on New Jersey beaches as a teenager. Her natural aptitude for physics led to an undergraduate degree in civil engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, but after a short post-graduation stint at a consumer products production plant, where she was exposed to the male-dominated world of engineering, she began looking for other career pathways.

“I got a lot of job offers, but there were never many women,” says Moran. “I realized I was kind of an anomaly.”

As Moran cast about for alternative job prospects, a professor from the University of Pittsburgh recommended the ocean engineering program at the University of Rhode Island. She looked into it and liked what she saw: more gender balance, young professors, and an opportunity to contribute to the burgeoning field of ocean engineering, which was driven partly by increased activity in seabed oil and gas drilling.

As a master’s student at URI, Moran had her first opportunity to conduct research at sea. She remembers getting terribly seasick during the expedition into the rough waters of the North Atlantic, but despite the rocky start, she was hooked. “That was the beginning of really falling in love with the ocean,” she says.

There were more expeditions as she worked on her master’s thesis, which was focused on the prospect of burying nuclear waste in the deep ocean. In 1981, during her final summer at URI, Moran joined an international expedition aboard a Canadian research vessel to the North Atlantic, and when the boat returned to dock at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia, one of the lab directors offered her a job on the spot. “I was given the opportunity at a very young age to lead Arctic expeditions,” Moran says. “The Bedford Institute opened up the world for me that day; I couldn’t believe I had those opportunities.”

At that time, the Canadian government was investing in energy programs, particularly around Arctic oil drilling. Moran found herself rubbing shoulders with rough-and-tumble oilmen, members of the Canadian Coast Guard, and a growing international contingent of scientists and engineers who hitched rides on Canadian government vessels as they trawled the frigid Arctic waters in search of black gold. “There was a lot of work for engineers because of all the new offshore exploration and production structures,” Moran says. “It was all oil and gas stuff, but I didn’t think it was bad then.”

Moran’s work involved collecting core samples from the seabed to study its composition and structure. The cores contained a wealth of scientific data, but they also helped the Canadian government assess the risk of offshore oil development of deposits that were buried beneath the Arctic seafloor. It was hard and often perilous work. Moran recalls one trip when a drilling tent exploded, and she found herself in the middle of an emergency effort to rescue the burned drillers and get them to the nearest hospital in Inuvik.

During one of these expeditions in the early 1990s, Moran and the international team aboard the R/V Polarstern made a discovery that would change the course of her career. While collecting deep core samples from the ocean floor, they realized that the sediment had the potential to contain a nearly pristine climate record of the area stretching back millions of years. It was a crucial missing piece of Earth’s climate history that could provide a glimpse of a climate-changed future.

Over the next decade, Moran and her co-lead, Jan Backman, along with many colleagues, worked on a proposal to return to the Arctic to collect more paleoclimate data. In the meantime, she received her Ph.D. from Dalhousie University in 1995 for her work on subduction zones, before returning to URI as a faculty member and, later, associate dean in the Graduate School of Oceanography. She also directed the Ocean Drilling Program at Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling, where she helped expand scientific understanding of life beneath the seafloor.

In 2004, Moran, Backman, and their colleagues finally had their proposal accepted to launch an expedition to the Arctic to collect core samples from the seafloor.

What they discovered was surprising. Scientists had previously collected samples showing roughly 800,000 years of Arctic climate history, but the team’s samples extended that by more than 50 million years, revealing that approximately 50 million years ago, the Arctic was a balmy 74 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, and that this semitropical environment had been driven by a massive release of greenhouse gasses at the time of the Paleocene- Eocene thermal maximum.

The discovery was a bombshell that not only filled a gap in Earth’s climate history, but also had important implications for Earth’s future. Before the discovery, climate scientists used computer models to make educated guesses at the climate of the distant past. But Moran and Backman’s team showed that those climate models had significantly underestimated how warm the Arctic was in the distant past.

The implications for the future were dire: Planetary warming caused by burning fossil fuels was already resulting in sea ice loss in the Arctic, which would cause reduction in the planet’s albedo—a mechanism that reflects light from Earth. But the models used to estimate the impact of those greenhouse gasses were based on limited data for the polar regions. As more of the gasses trapped in the Arctic were released into the atmosphere, global warming would accelerate and the rise in Arctic temperatures would cause the release of more greenhouse gasses. A very warm Arctic Ocean was a scenario not captured by climate models at the time.

It’s All About the Data

By the time Moran left for the 2004 expedition, she had already made a name for herself as an oceanographic expert who was at home among engineers and scientists in both academia and industry. But the Arctic samples she and her colleagues collected in 2004 launched her into the public eye. The results of the expedition were featured above the fold in The New York Times, Moran was asked to speak about climate change on international stages, and she was invited to serve in the Office of Science and Technology Policy during the first Obama administration, where she helped guide Arctic, polar, and ocean policy, and the emergency response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

It was during this time that Moran’s perspective on climate change—and her role in studying it—began to shift. For decades, scientists had seen it as their responsibility to collect and report on the facts, not to advocate for policy responses, including responses to climate change. But after the 2004 expedition and seeing the incredible warning signs about our planet’s future inscribed in their sediment samples, Moran knew she could no longer stand by as our species plowed headfirst into planetary catastrophe.

“I moved from a position of pure education to advocacy, following in the footsteps of others like Michael Mann,” Moran says. ‘I decided that I had to talk about climate change because I, personally, have the evidence of this big change happening on the planet. I began to realize that the scientific community may have done damage by not getting involved sooner, so I wasn’t shy in talking about it and hoped that others would join me.”

Moran saw her work in the Obama administration as a way to advance policies she knew would have to be implemented to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. But after two years, she saw the constraints of Washington election politics. In late 2011, as Moran was mulling her next career move, she received an offer from the University of Victoria to oversee the operation of NEPTUNE, one of the university’s world-class seafloor observatories. NEPTUNE, along with its sister observatory, VENUS, collects data from the deep ocean and transmits it to the surface via a cabled connection. Both observatories are hosted and operated by the University of Victoria by way of Ocean Networks Canada (ONC), a nonprofit with an ambitious mission to build a network of submarine data stations to collect around-the-clock information about Earth’s oceans.

“The way we understand the ocean is by going out to sea and collecting samples or satellite data that tell us about the surface of the ocean,” says Moran. “But ONC was unique and it seemed like a chance to make a big impact—to put together these pieces and really understand the ocean.”

For Moran, the position at ONC was the opportunity of a lifetime in a lifetime full of extraordinary opportunities. It was a chance to plug one of the biggest holes in our fight against climate change—a conspicuous lack of deep-sea data—and her four-decade career as a leading ocean engineer and scientist made her the perfect fit for the job. She simply couldn’t say no. Although she was initially recruited by the University of Victoria as the deputy director overseeing NEPTUNE, she was tapped for the role of ONC president within the year.

Under her leadership, ONC has expanded its network of observatories starting, fittingly, with one in the Arctic, which came online the same year she assumed the presidency. The expansion of ONC’s deep-sea observatories has continued apace, with the latest installation deployed in Antarctica earlier this year.

“Kate’s greatest contributions have been in determining what’s important and then doing everything in her power to make it come fruition,” says John Farrell, executive director of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and former associated dean of research and administration at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, who has worked with Moran for nearly three decades. “She has the ability to see and think beyond the immediate situation or challenge, understanding that they are part of a larger issue that needs to be resolved. She’s fearless, [and] she’s a leader, in the best sense of the word.”

Moran is, in many ways, the perfect leader to steward ONC on its mission. Her background in oceanographic engineering has helped the nonprofit build and deploy sophisticated observatories on the ocean floor, which Moran describes as one of the most difficult possible research environments. “There’s no GPS, no Wi-Fi, no light, temperatures are extreme, and the ocean is corrosive,” Moran says. “It’s a thousand times harder than building something for space; everything there is easy by comparison.”

At the same time, her deep understanding of climate change—and her advocacy for data-driven climate policy—has helped ensure that ONC’s work not only benefits scientists, but local communities, as well. She points to the Arctic observatory deployed during her first year on the job, explaining that the local Indigenous community near the observatory asked ONC to share sea ice thickness data. “The Indigenous communities wanted this data because they travel on ice. It was very humbling for me,” Moran says. “I realized that we should also be asking the Indigenous communities what they need to measure and providing ing them with the technology to observe the ocean for their own purposes.” It’s been a guiding principle for ONC ever since.

“Kate’s greatest contributions have been in determining what’s important and then doing everything in her power to make it come fruition.”

—John Farrell, executive director of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and former associate dean of research and administration at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography

The types of data collected by ONC’s observatories, and the application of that data, vary dramatically. In addition to taking continuous measurements of key variables such as carbon dioxide levels and temperature, the observatories have also been used to study the effects of carbon dioxide removal from the ocean with carbon sequestration technologies and the effects of biomass sinking to the ocean floor. Recently, an international group of physicists asked ONC to use their expertise in building deep-sea observatories to build a network of neutrino detectors—exquisitely sensitive instruments designed to detect an elusive type of fundamental particle called a neutrino, which physicists believe may hold the key to understanding the relationship between the four major forces of the universe, the formation of stars and black holes, and the essence of matter itself—essentially advancing our understanding of the origin of the universe. When the neutrino detectors are linked together, they will form a massive 1-cubic-kilometer underwater neutrino telescope, called P-ONE, in the Pacific Ocean.

But what does it all mean for the future of our planet? After more than four decades pushing the limits of our understanding of the ocean floor, Moran has a couple of crucial insights. The first is that there is a massive information gap in our understanding of the deep ocean, and collecting data about this relatively unknown part of our planet will be crucial in our fight against climate change. The second is that the impacts from a warming planet will, in all likelihood, be worse than almost anyone expected due to the feedback cycles from the release of trapped greenhouse gasses in the Arctic. She points to the period in Earth’s history 50 million years ago when the Arctic was semitropical as a portent of our future.

“That was an extreme event that caused mass extinction, but the rate that CO2 was being released into the atmosphere was so slow compared to what we’re doing now,” she says. “What we’re doing now is pointing toward a more extreme event that is probably more similar to a meteor impact in terms of geologic history.”

But, she says, this isn’t a reason to despair just yet. At this point, climate catastrophe is inevitable if we do nothing, but Moran has immense faith in the work of the tens of thousands of climate scientists and engineers who are racing to find solutions to arguably the biggest problem our species has ever faced. And that, says Moran, is exactly the point. “The good news is that during those other periods of extreme warming in Earth’s history, there were no people around,” says Moran. “But we’re here now, we understand what’s happening, and we’re working on it.”

PHOTOS: COURTESY OCEAN NETWORKS CANADA