The Azores Deep-Sea Research group visit every seamount in the Azores.
A team of marine researchers in the Azores is revolutionising how we explore the deep sea. With support from the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, they have completed their goal of exploring the archipelago’s waters down to 1,000 metres depth and are now looking to share their game-changing technology.

Thanks to an insatiable thirst for discovery, humans have explored the earth’s poles, conquered its highest mountains, and even ventured into the cosmos. However, much of our oceans remains shrouded in mystery.

Though the shallows are well-documented, the deeper we go, the less is known about the world’s oceans, with only approximately 25 per cent of the sea floor having been mapped as of 2023. Traditionally, exploring the murky depths around 1,000 metres below sea level has only been the preserve of a small number of scientists, due to the complex technology and associated costs involved.

That is all changing thanks to the Azor drift-cam, an extraordinary invention dreamed up by a team of marine scientists forming the Azores Deep-Sea Research group in the University of the Azores, Portugal.

Marine scientist and co-creator of the Azor drift-cam Telmo Morato has been exploring the Azores archipelago’s waters for over three decades. Such deep-sea research required prohibitively expensive equipment such as Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and manned submersibles.

“We started thinking, ‘What can we do to change this, instead of just complaining and asking for more funds and more money and more vessels?’” recalls Morato, “That’s when we thought, ‘Can we go smaller, simpler, and cheaper?’”

So, in 2019, the Azor drift-cam was born: two action cameras, LED lights, a parallel laser system for scaling, and depth and pressure sensors all housed within a minimal steel structure, and with a steering wing to keep it facing forward. The drift-cam’s user-friendly system can be operated from small vessels, copes well with an undulating seabed, is adept at escaping entanglement in fishing lines and, crucially, can cover a lot of ground.

According to another of the drift-cam’s co-creators, Carlos Dominguez Carrió, “In one ROV dive, you generally cover maybe one kilometre of seabed. With the Azor driftcam, we can perform several dives every day and come back to shore with four, five, six kilometres of seabed covered in a single day.”

This new low-cost solution for deep-sea exploration opened up a whole new world of independent research to the team that simply was not possible before. So, they set themselves the ambitious goal of exploring every geomorphological structure in the Azores down to 1,000 metres depth.

Over six years and 1,000 dives later, with support from the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, the Azor drift-cam has allowed Morato and Dominguez Carrió to achieve their goal.

Covering over 500 kilometres of deep seabed, the team have recorded approximately 150,000 occurrences of animals in the deep seas of the Azores – compared to just 3,000 recorded occurrences before the device.The collected images are increasing our understanding of the diversity and spatial distribution of deep-sea species, and helping the Azores’ government to define the new, larger borders of the Azores Marine Park, the local Marine Protected Area network.

Despite the Azor drift-cam’s unqualified success, Morato and Dominguez-Carrió have even greater ambitions for their creation. Because it is cheap, portable and easy to run, they are convinced it can be rolled out in deep-sea environments all over the world, particularly in those countries where funding is in short supply.

One of the crucial elements of the drift-cam is that it can be entirely constructed from off-the-shelf components, either bought locally or ordered on the internet, and the construction is simple enough that it does not require the involvement of an engineer.

“The Azor drift-cam really changed the game,” says Morato, “Think of all the islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific, or the South Atlantic that could use this technology to explore their own waters.”

Morato and Dominguez-Carrió are making this dream a reality by open-source sharing their designs of the device, and hosting workshops to train researchers from all over the world in its use. One of the recipients of this largesse is Angelo Bernardino, a professor of Oceanography from Brazil whose work is also supported by the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative.

“Rolex fund different ideas, bold ideas, and that’s sometimes a risk,” he says. “The purpose of Telmo’s group here was to try something different, and with this kind of support you can take risks, you can just try something and see if it works. In their case, it’s worked extremely well. We have people from the north and south Atlantic, from Africa, Brazil, from Europe, learning how to use this simple equipment to advance understanding of deep-sea life.”

Thanks to Morato and Dominguez-Carrió’s extraordinary invention, the mysterious deep ocean is becoming more familiar, helping to ensure that we can protect its unique ecosystems for future generations.

ABOUT THE PERPETUAL PLANET INITIATIVE
For nearly a century, Rolex has supported pioneering explorers pushing back the boundaries of human endeavour. The company has moved from championing exploration for the sake of discovery to protecting the planet, committing for the long term to support individuals and organizations using science to understand and devise solutions to today’s environmental challenges.

This engagement was reinforced with the launch of the Perpetual Planet Initiative in 2019, which initially focused on the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, as well as longstanding partnerships with Mission Blue and National Geographic Society.

The initiative now has more than 30 other partnerships in an expanding portfolio. They include, for example, Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile, offspring organizations of Tompkins Conservation, the Under The Pole expeditions, the Monaco Blue Initiative, and Coral Gardeners. Rolex also supports organizations and initiatives fostering the next generations of explorers, scientists and conservationists through scholarships and grants, such as Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society and The Rolex Explorers Club Grants.