You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Salome Buglis has an office that looks a little different than most.

My work is in the islands of the Galapagos, which is a volcanic archipelago about a thousand

kilometers west from Ecuador and it's slap bang on the equator.

Salome is a marine ecologist and she spends part of her year in the Galapagos Exploring.

In land, she says the islands have a bare harsh looking rocky landscape.

But when you go to the water it's just paradise.

There's just so much life.

But most of the time, for Salome's research, she's in a boat and something else does the

underwater exploring.

An ROV is a remotely operated vehicle.

So it's essentially like a drone, but that looks like a microwave on a long tether.

And that's because underwater GPS doesn't work.

At the end of 2018, Salome and her team were searching in the Galapagos Marine Reserve

for underwater mountains, called sea mounts.

They can rise hundreds to thousands of meters from the sea bed and are often hotspots for

biodiversity.

She had a $10,000 national geographic grant to do this work.

But toward the end of the expedition, she still didn't have all the data she wanted.

My heart was slightly sinking because I felt like, oh my god, we spent so much money.

I've made these like ROV pilots and our V team come all the way to the Galapagos to help

me.

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