Data comes from sensors, but there’s one place our sensors don’t really go. Underwater. Putting sensors in a river or lake or ocean sucks. Running a wire is costly, inflexible and likely to be damaged. Wireless networks don’t work well underwater because radio waves don’t travel well in water. Particularly frustrating is that there’s no practical way to get a signal across the boundary from water to air.
So much of life on Earth is underwater. Much of Earth’s climate action is in the oceans. Mining, fishing, shipping are all massive ocean dependent industries. We need to know what’s going on underwater, but data comes to a halt at the shore.
Some of the limited exploration that has been done shows colossal damage from dredging, overfishing and dumping waste. Opportunities to reverse those actions and brighter futures for subsea farming, mining rare earth metals and other resources await if we could make it more practical to figure out what’s going on.
Something like underwater Wi-Fi could radically change our relationship to this world we have barely explored.
CSignum has invented just that. Their EM-2 technology uses electromagnetic fields to carry data, without the use of cables, from underwater or underground to topside devices which can be mounted on the shore or on piles, buoys, or structures such as wind turbines or bridges and positioned above, on, or below the water.
Their product is already shipping, already deployed and already enabling new monitoring applications in rivers and oceans.
Deep Future is about bringing the superpowers we get from our computers to the biggest problems and biggest opportunities in the world. CSignum can be a kingpin that opens up the oceans.