The Seasteading Institute is still seeking an Oceanography Researcher who can identify specific regions best suited for the progression of seasteading. Here’s our Executive Director with some thoughts on how we could scale down the project to make recruiting easier while still getting useful information:
Patri writes: We have, surprisingly, not been able to find an oceanographer who will work for less than $200/hr (which seems insane!) for our location study. At this point, we would be pretty happy with just the following: a “heatmap” of the seas & oceans showing the highest waves – ideally a prediction of the highest wave in a 300-year storm, but we’d just take “highest Hs over 10 years of observation”, or any similar “max wave weight” statistic that would correlate well with the metric we want. It needs to be full global ocean coverage, so data buoys aren’t enough. Satellite data seems ideal, although perhaps hindcasting will work well enough for this purpose. We’re looking for any references or ideas about how we can get this done at a reasonable cost. If it can be done efficiently (10s of hours?), we’d be willing to pay a premium over what grad students usually earn. It would also make great resume material!
TSI is also offering a $500 referral bonus if you can help us find someone to fulfill the full contract, and a $100 bonus will be paid for referring someone who can complete the “heatmap” work described above. For more detailed information about the research required from the position, please see our Location Research document.
When might I visit Seasteading’s headquarters to discuss how I can help with your mapping needs? I’m a local Naval Architect from Webb Institute starting a GIS Certificate program in a couple of weeks and looking for just this kind of marine mapping project, both short- and long-term.
Geoff Wilkie