submersibles

11.23.09

Another League Under the Sea: Tomorrow's Research Subs Open Earth's Final Frontier

Armed with better batteries and stronger materials, new submersibles aim to go deeper than ever before and open up the whole of the unexplored ocean to human eyes

By Abe Streep Posted 08.05.2009 at 11:46 am 4 Comments

Flying Low: The Deep Flight II sub uses stubby wings that propel it down like an airplane goes up. Nick Kaloterakis

By liberal estimates, we’ve explored about 5 percent of the seas, and nearly all of that in the first 1,000 feet. That’s the familiar blue part, penetrated by sunlight, home to the colorful reefs and just about every fish you’ve ever seen. Beyond that is the deep—a pitch-black region that stretches down to roughly 35,800 feet, the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Nearly all the major oceanographic finds made in that region—hydrothermal vents and the rare life-forms that thrive in the extreme temperatures there, sponges that can treat tumors, thousands of new species, the Titanic—have occurred above 15,000 feet, the lower limit of the world’s handful of manned submersibles for most of the past 50 years.

Now engineers want to unlock the rest of the sea with a new fleet of manned submersibles. And they don’t have to go to the very bottom to do it. In fact, only about 2 percent of the seafloor lies below 20,000 feet, in deep, muddy trenches. If we extend our current reach just 5,000 feet—another mile—it will open about 98 percent of the world’s oceans to scientific eyes.

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Unmanned Sub Dives the Marianas Trench on a Hair-Thin Tether

Nereus becomes the third craft to explore the bottom of the Marianas Trench

By Marshall Louis Reaves Posted 06.09.2009 at 3:55 pm 5 Comments

On May 31, the unmanned submersible Nereus became only the third craft ever to reach the full depth of the Marianas Trench, 35,770 feet below sea level. Built by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the sub is a hybrid of a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The Nereus runs on its own battery power, but researchers on a mother ship send it commands over a single hair-thin fiber-optic line that’s 25 miles long but weighs just 1.35 pounds.

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