We are used to finding examples of digital twins in the industry. These models are capable of simulating real situations, of recreating products or services in order to be able to test them sooner than in real life. These versatile virtual emulations allow you to monitor and optimize any behavior without too many risks. At this point, they are very common in different sectors, from the manufacturing and automotive industries to health, energy or smart cities. Now, a French project with Spanish cooperation is working to achieve a digital twin of the oceans.
“The goal is to produce an interactive and dynamic digital representation of the ocean for better decision-making and sustainable action,” explains Benoit Morin, project leader. It adds that it “will provide a consistent, high-resolution, multidimensional, near real-time virtual description of the ocean, including its physical, chemical, biological and socioeconomic dimensions.”
It is being promoted by iFremer, the French institution for marine research, which has collaboration, among other institutions, with the Spanish Puertos del Estado. Founded 40 years ago, some 1,500 scientists, engineers and technicians work there and it has a presence in the three great oceans with bases in Réunion (Indian), Tahiti (Pacific) and Brest (Atlantic). To undertake this project, it has partnered with the technology company NetApp, specialized in intelligent data capture and management.
NetApp, founded in 1992 in California, helps them in this case – like 95% of the Ibex35 companies in Spain – to store, manage, protect and analyze their data in different environments. Benoit Morin, head of the Datarmor AI project at iFremer, explains to us that, for him, the data journey is very similar to the water cycle that we have all studied in school. In his case, this collection takes place “from the abyss to the surface, from the coast to the open sea.”
“This enormous collection of data will allow us to fulfill the purposes of the organization: protect and restore marine ecosystems, protect marine species and also explore the possibilities of marine resources, whether in energy, mineral resources, quality water health, in the search for resources in aquaculture and marine biotechnology…”, explains Morin. And he adds that as we have a history of data, we will be able to make predictions and measure, for example, the impact of climate change on the oceans and on humans… “It will allow us to ask questions and obtain new answers,” he adds. Regarding the level of development and detail that they can achieve in their measurements and calculations, he also explains that, for example, predictions of temperature, precipitation or wind could already be made by specific directions, by exact locations of a few meters if necessary.
Regarding this flood of data, Guillaume de Landtsheer, vice president of NetApp in France, reminds us that “according to IDC, the total volume of data generated globally will double approximately every two years.” “This is mainly driven by the growth in the use of connected devices, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and increasing digitalization across industries,” he adds.
To capture all this data, iFremer has several oceanographic vessels and autonomous vehicles capable of reaching depths of up to 7,000 meters. With one of them, for example, they were exploring the sunken remains of the mythical ‘Titanic’ in another research project. One of those ships, the Marion Dufresne, houses a 650-square-meter floating laboratory, which many scientific centers on land would like.
It is also no coincidence that France was the promoter of a project of this magnitude. Benoit Morin justifies this by recalling that his country “has the second largest maritime area in the world with 10 million square kilometers and marine protected areas today cover more than 45% of the continental coast.” “We also have 10% of the coral reefs and 20% of the atolls on the planet in the overseas territories,” he justifies. It therefore has the necessary space to place sensors on buoys, witnesses at different depths and even on animals that send information in real time to the different bases.
On a more technical aspect, NetApp explains to us that, in this capture, storage and management process, “metadata and data must be easy to find for both humans and computers.” “To optimize data reuse, metadata and data must be well described so that they can be replicated and/or combined in different environments,” says Guillaume de Landtsheer. And all this information applied to the oceans will result in better knowledge of the environment. Among other projects, this digital twin of the oceans includes the construction of an atlas of marine genomes of 4,500 marine species. “The absence of reference genomes hinders the progress of metagenomic approaches, a problem known as dark omics,” adds Benoit Morin.
By the time the digital twin project is completed, iFremer will be in a position to precisely know not only parameters that improve the necessary conservation of this key space and its habitats, but also for its sustainable economic exploitation of its resources. As examples of the latter we can review everything from detecting the best fishing grounds to locating the perfect locations to take advantage of ocean currents or winds and thus generate energy.
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