U.S. government scientists are assisting investigators from marine research institutes and universities in three locations: the Hudson Canyon off the coast of New York and New Jersey, deep reefs and sea-floor vents in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida, and the Davidson Seamount off the coast of central California. But for the most part, the humans are staying dry and more or less comfortable aboard research vessels. The real work will be done by an array of plastic-and-steel gadgets called Remotely Operated Vehicles—ROVs for short. While undoubtedly lacking the star-quality of R2D2, the cute ’droid in the Star Wars movies, ROVs can swim like nobody’s business.

“More than 95 percent of the underwater world remains unknown and unseen,” President Clinton said earlier this month in announcing three programs designed in cooperation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to delve further into the deep. “What remains to be explored could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth, links to our maritime history, to cures for disease.”

Clinton also announced that the Department of Commerce will convene a panel of ocean experts to develop a proposed national ocean exploration strategy. The department is to make its report in four months.

OCEANS VS. SPACE

“We’re delighted to hear the president acknowledge that there is still a lot of exploration to be done on our own planet,” says Marcie McNutt of California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which is conducting the Davis Seamount study. “At the same time we’re aware that this is coming at the end of the Clinton administration. There’s always concern whether the next one will decide to go off in another direction.”

Ocean advocates have long complained that much more money is devoted to the exploration of space—another hostile environment that is also much farther away. McNutt estimates that the government spends only one-tenth on ocean studies what it pays for the space program.

And yet, advocates say there’s so much to explore underwater. During the past few decades, the common view of the ocean as a vast, featureless and largely lifeless plain has been transformed by a series of stunning revelations made possible by deep-sea manned research submarines and ROVs. While not exactly able to think for themselves, ROVs equipped with space-age remote-sensing devices have given humans close-up looks at astonishing landscapes: globe-encircling mountain ranges that dwarf all but a few dry-land peaks; vast trenches filled with creatures from nightmares; and heretofore unknown life forms that thrive in the boiling temperatures around fissures that expose the earth’s fiery core like open wounds.

AND JASON DOESN’T GET SEASICK

Studies of the amazing creatures found around thermal vents have led to a re-examination of how life first formed on the earth—even the very nature of life, and the possibilities that it exists elsewhere in the universe. Discoveries of sunken treasures like the Titanic and a 2,000-year-old Roman shipwreck in the Mediterranean have shed new light on human history. And remote observation of the deep ocean has revolutionized understanding of the fundamental dynamics of earth processes that result in such potential calamities as earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis.

Visionaries from Jules Verne to Jacques Cousteau foresaw colonies of humans living on the ocean floor, perhaps to escape some environmental catastrophe on the surface or simply to accommodate the Earth’s ever-burgeoning population. But, owing to the extremes of environment—human habitation of the deep seems less likely than ever, leaving the field to clever devices that are impervious to water and pressure.

Gadgets like a little machine called Jason.

Barely the size of a sub-compact car, Jason—first developed during the 1980s by the U.S. Navy—scurries around shipwrecks and hot vents with equal ease, its little thrusters controlled by human “pilots” viewing progress on video screens hundreds or thousands of feet above on the surface. Undersea pioneer Bob Ballard has used Jason and similar vehicles to investigate the remains of the Titanic, the torpedoed Lusitania, the German battleship Bismarck, and American ships lost during WWII at the battle of Guadalcanal.

Ballard’s Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Conn., also uses another, larger vehicle named Argus—an underwater surface-towed “sled” equipped with three pivoting underwater video cameras, lights, an electronic still camera, and a scanning sonar system. A second vehicle named Little Hercules, closer in size to Jason, provides broadcast-quality underwater video with a sophisticated arrangement for lighting its subjects. On the drawing board is a new, larger ROV, Hercules, and a side-scan sonar sled, Echo, designed to be towed in very deep water.

GIANT SQUID HUNT

The latest generation of ROVs also include the advanced robot Tiburon; the robot Odyssey, which was used to search for New Zealand’s waters for giant squid; and the world’s deepest-diving robot, Japan’s Kaiko, which has explored the cold darkness at the bottom of the Challenger Deep—at almost seven miles down (11 km), the deepest known part of the world.

Though manned vehicles like the U.S. Navy’s NR-1, Deep Flight, and the French submersible Nautile still have their advocates, the ocean exploration industry increasingly has come to rely on ROVs to go where humans can’t go—at least, not as easily.

“When you’re designing a manned submersible, the priority is to protect the human occupants,” says the Monterrey Bay Institute’s McNutt. “Everything else, including science, comes after that. ROVs can be designed with other things in mind, like maneuverability and ability to do complex tasks underwater.”

McNutt doesn’t underestimate the impact that human heroes like astronauts and deep-water aquanauts have on the public imagination. But, she says, “If I had my choice between sending one hero to the bottom of the ocean or using video hook-ups from an ROV to send all the school-children in the country there, I’d rather let all the kids go.”

Eye in the Sky is a weekly series that brings you the story behind the headlines using satellite imagery, remote sensing, aerial photography, and maps. This feature is developed by National Geographic News with the sponsorship of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) and Earth-Info. Check out maps and imagery at http://www.earth-info.org.