Open Access Oceans and Three Million Virtual Dives with Dr. Erika Woolsey
Summary
Most of us will never go scuba diving on a healthy coral reef. Dr. Erika Woolsey, National Geographic Explorer, marine scientist, and co-founder of The Hydrous, is trying to fix that. In this episode, we talk about:
The time she was a dive buddy for for 450 people in headsets in Washington, DC
What healthy coral reefs actually sound like (spoiler: not silent)
Why she thinks of motherhood and the ocean as parallel invisible worlds
Why "don't convince, connect" might be the single most useful piece of advice for anyone trying to move people to care about anything.
Plus whale sharks, butterfly fish, and a baby on a research station in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef!
Get Connected
The Hydrous: thehydro.us
Erika's website: erikawoolsey.com
National Geographic Live tour info: nationalgeographic.org/events/national-geographic-live
Takeaways from this episode
Don't convince. Connect. Erika spent the early part of her career relying on data and graphs to communicate ocean science and learned that they weren't doing the job she thought they were. Most of her talks don't have graphs in them anymore. She now makes it personal, makes it interesting, makes it beautiful, and meets people where they actually are rather than where you think they should be. As she puts it, we're all up on our own individual ladders wondering why people don't see things from our perspective, and we all need to come down.
Start with outcomes, not features. When Erika made her first VR film Immersed, the team packed it with infographics, animation, narration, and music. The feedback: too much going on. Her advice for anyone building XR experiences (or really any kind of immersive or persuasive content) is to start with one or two clear outcomes for the audience and design backward from there. VR is a powerful tool for emotional connection and presence, but it's not great for knowledge consolidation. Pick your goal and the medium follows.
Make coherent experiences. Erika models her virtual dives on actual dive profiles: descend, explore, ascend, safety stop for reflection, surface and bring the lessons back to land. The reflection part is the part many people skip, but research shows that's where the learning actually happens. Whatever you're building, leave space for an on-ramp and an off-ramp around the main experience.
Resources and fun stuff related to this episode
IREEF (International Research on Extended Reality for Education and Engagement of Future Ocean Decision-Makers): A collaboration between Erika, Dr. Géraldine Fauville (University of Gothenburg), and Dr. Danny Pimentel (University of Oregon), funded by the Unity Charitable Fund, mapping the field of Ocean XR. Their 2025 paper "Ocean XR: A Deep Dive Into Extended Reality for Marine Education and Ocean Literacy" was published in Ocean and Society.
Reef bioacoustics rabbit hole: Healthy coral reefs are loud (snapping shrimp, parrotfish chomping on coral, urchins scraping algae, fish grunting). Coral larvae actually use these sounds to navigate. They listen for a healthy reef and swim toward it. Researchers have played healthy reef audio through underwater speakers near degraded reefs to lure larvae back, and in some studies, it works. The reef literally calls these babies home.
Reef Song: The project from Erika's colleague Dr. Rohan Brooker at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), exploring how reef acoustics can help us understand (and hopefully restore) the relationships between corals and fish on the Great Barrier Reef.
National Geographic Live Diving the Great Barrier Reef: When the time is right, the most celebrated reef on Earth turns into a snow globe as millions of coral polyps reproduce to send the next generation afloat. This incredible display disguises a harsh truth: the Great Barrier Reef is under attack. More than half of the coral here has died, with a warmer ocean bleaching vast sections. But there is still plenty to see and plenty to save. We go on assignment in a series of dives with marine biologist and National Geographic Explorer Erika Woolsey to meet the most colorful residents of this underwater jungle.
