50 Fun Facts About Ocean Exploration

Which film director piloted the submersible Deepsea Challenger alone to the bottom of Challenger Deep in 2012?

James Cameron made the first solo dive to the ocean's deepest point and spent about three hours exploring the bottom. The descent alone took two hours and 36 minutes.

Which ocean liner's wreck did a French-American team with Robert Ballard find in 1985, about 12,500 feet down?

Titanic lay undiscovered for 73 years, and the search was made possible partly by first surveying the wrecks of two lost Cold War nuclear submarines for the US Navy.

HMS Challenger, whose 1870s voyage laid the foundations of oceanography, later gave its name to which NASA craft?

A space shuttle orbiter, Challenger, was named after the ship, which spent 1872 to 1876 sounding the oceans and turned up about 4,700 new species.

Jacques Cousteau and engineer Émile Gagnan invented which piece of diving gear in wartime France?

The Aqua-Lung fed a diver air from a tank only on each breath, thanks to a demand regulator. It became the first scuba set to win worldwide popularity.

Kathy Sullivan, who in 2020 became the first woman to reach Challenger Deep, was already famous in which profession?

Astronaut Kathy Sullivan was the first American woman to walk in space, in 1984. Her dive made her the first person to visit both space and the deepest point of the ocean.

Which legendary deep-sea animal was first photographed alive in its natural habitat in 2004, by Japanese researchers?

Giant squid were finally snapped 900 metres down off Japan's Ogasawara Islands, wrapping a baited line in a ball of tentacles. The team picked the spot by following sperm whales, which hunt them.

Which fish, thought extinct since the age of the dinosaurs, turned up in a South African fishing catch in 1938?

Coelacanth fossils stop about 66 million years ago, so museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer's find astonished scientists. The living genus, Latimeria, is named after her.

Which American founding father had the Gulf Stream charted after asking why British mail ships crossed so slowly?

Benjamin Franklin had his cousin Timothy Folger, a Nantucket whaling captain, sketch the current on a chart with notes on how to avoid it. Mail captains who ran against it were losing weeks.

Before inventing the bathyscaphe, Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard set altitude records in the 1930s flying which craft?

A balloon with a sealed aluminium cabin took Auguste Piccard into the stratosphere in 1931, the first person to get there. He then turned from the sky to the deep sea.

Russia's two Mir submersibles planted a titanium national flag on the seabed in 2007 at which location?

The North Pole seabed lies 4,261 metres under the ice, and the dive was the first crewed descent to it. The flag backed Russia's territorial claim in the Arctic.

Which bathyscaphe carried Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh to Challenger Deep in 1960?

Trieste took 4 hours 47 minutes to sink to the deepest seabed on Earth, and an outer window pane cracked on the way down. No crew returned there for 52 years.

In 1934 William Beebe and Otis Barton were lowered over half a mile into the sea off Bermuda inside which craft?

Bathysphere was the name of their hollow steel ball on a cable, and its 3,028-foot dive stood as a record for 15 years. Beebe became the first biologist to watch deep-sea animals where they live.

Which US Navy-owned research submersible, run by Woods Hole since 1964, has made more than 5,000 dives?

Alvin is named after Allyn Vine, the Woods Hole scientist who inspired it. In 1966 it was used to locate a hydrogen bomb lost in the sea off Spain after a midair accident.

In 1977, scientists diving at the Galápagos Rift found which seafloor features unexpectedly teeming with life?

Hydrothermal vents were expected to be as barren as the rest of the dark seabed. Instead the divers found dense colonies of clams and other animals, fed by bacteria that live on chemicals in the hot water.

Which deep-sea animals have no mouth or gut as adults and live on food made by bacteria inside them?

Giant tube worms never eat: bacteria living inside their bodies turn dissolved chemicals into food for them. The worms can grow taller than a person.

Which traditional unit for measuring sea depth, equal to six feet, began as the span of a man's outstretched arms?

Fathom comes from the Old English word for a pair of outstretched arms. Boatmen measured shallow water with a sounding line marked off in them.

Which technology let Germany's Meteor expedition chart the South Atlantic seafloor in the 1920s without weighted ropes?

Sonar times the echo of a sound pulse off the bottom, and the Meteor took 67,000 such depth readings. They showed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge runs unbroken through the South Atlantic.

Which French novelist imagined Captain Nemo exploring the deep in the submarine Nautilus, long before real ones could?

Jules Verne began serialising the story in 1869, when real submarines were primitive. His Nautilus is regarded as ahead of its time for describing many features of modern ones.

Which explorer gave the Pacific Ocean its name after threading a strait near South America's tip in 1520?

Ferdinand Magellan renamed the Mar del Sur, or South Sea, as the Mar Pacifico, the peaceful sea. He was killed in the Philippines before his expedition finished circling the globe.

Which British navigator commanded HMS Endeavour on a 1768 voyage to watch Venus cross the Sun from the Pacific?

James Cook then opened sealed orders telling him to search for a rumoured southern continent. He spent six months charting New Zealand and reached Australia's east coast.

Thor Heyerdahl and five companions sailed 101 days across the Pacific in 1947 on which balsa-log raft?

Kon-Tiki covered 6,900 km from Peru before smashing into a reef in the Tuamotus. Heyerdahl built it with ancient materials to show that early South Americans could have made the crossing.

Which Royal Navy survey ship carried the young naturalist Charles Darwin around the world in the 1830s?

HMS Beagle was there to survey coastlines, and while the crew did that work Darwin travelled ashore studying geology and natural history.

John Harrison's 18th-century sea clocks finally let sailors on the open ocean work out which measure of position?

Longitude was such a deadly puzzle that Parliament offered up to £20,000 for a solution. Harrison, a joiner turned clockmaker, was paid only in stages, the last when he was 80.

Prince Henry the Navigator sponsored 15th-century voyages down the coast of West Africa for which European country?

Portugal's prince directed the systematic exploration of West Africa and the Atlantic islands using a new ship, the caravel. He is often credited with starting the Age of Discovery.

Vasco da Gama's fleet, rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, opened the first all-sea route from Europe to where?

India was reached in May 1498, when the fleet landed near Kozhikode on the Malabar Coast after crossing from Kenya. The route opened the spice trade to European ships.

Which Ming-dynasty admiral commanded seven treasure voyages across the seas between 1405 and 1433?

Zheng He sailed for the Yongle Emperor, and his voyages helped stretch state trade networks all the way to the Swahili coast of Africa.

Roald Amundsen and six crew took three years in the small sloop Gjøa to become first through which Arctic sea route?

The Northwest Passage had never been completed by a single vessel until Gjøa, a 70-foot sloop, finished the transit in 1906. The boat survives as a museum ship.

Fridtjof Nansen deliberately froze which purpose-built ship into pack ice in 1893 to be carried across the Arctic?

Fram, meaning 'Forward', had a hull shaped so that squeezing ice would push it up to sit on top instead of crushing it. The expedition lasted three years.

Which ship of Ernest Shackleton's was found in 2022, strikingly well preserved, 3,008 metres down in the Weddell Sea?

Endurance sank in 1915 after becoming trapped in pack ice, nearly 107 years before the find. The wreck is protected as a historic monument under the Antarctic Treaty System.

Which former wartime minesweeper did Jacques Cousteau turn into the research ship that starred in his films?

Calypso was built in Seattle, lent to Britain's Royal Navy and later worked as a ferry in Malta. A millionaire bought it in 1950 and leased it to Cousteau for a symbolic one franc a year.

Jacques Cousteau's 1956 undersea film The Silent World was the first documentary ever to win which major film prize?

The Palme d'Or went to no other documentary for 48 years. Cousteau's divers shot 25 kilometres of film over two years and used only a tenth of it.

Which Texas investor piloted the submersible Limiting Factor to the deepest point of all five oceans by 2019?

Victor Vescovo had already climbed the Seven Summits, including Everest. On the Pacific's deepest seabed he reported finding new species and some sort of plastic waste.

Which US agency turned a former Navy ship into the Okeanos Explorer, a vessel dedicated to exploring the seabed?

NOAA fitted the ship with cameras that give real-time views of the ocean floor, so scientists ashore and the public can follow each dive as it happens.

Project Mohole, a 1960s American effort drilling from a ship off Mexico, tried to reach which layer of the Earth?

The mantle lies much closer to the sea floor than to dry land, so the team drilled at sea. To hold the ship still over deep water they invented dynamic positioning.

The international Argo programme tracks ocean temperature and salinity worldwide using a fleet of thousands of what?

Drifting floats in the Argo fleet sink to 2,000 metres every 10 days, then rise to the surface taking measurements. The data goes ashore by satellite and is free for anyone to use.

About three-quarters of deep-sea animals studied in the eastern Pacific share which ability?

Bioluminescence, making light by chemistry, is rare near the coast, at about 2.5% of organisms. In the dark open ocean it becomes the norm.

Which US Navy officer, nicknamed 'Pathfinder of the Seas', wrote the first comprehensive oceanography book in 1855?

Matthew Maury was left unfit for sea duty by a leg injury, so he studied thousands of ships' logs instead. His wind and current charts drastically shortened ocean voyages.

Which English astronomer built a diving bell refreshed by weighted barrels of air and stayed down over an hour in it?

Edmond Halley, of comet fame, took five companions 60 feet down in the River Thames and stayed for over an hour and a half.

The deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean, the Milwaukee Deep, lies in a trench named after which Caribbean island?

Puerto Rico lies immediately south of the trench, which runs for 810 kilometres along the boundary of the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea. Its floor is more than 8,300 metres down.

Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the ocean, lies about 190 miles southwest of which US island territory?

Guam lies to the northeast of the deep, whose floor is about 10.9 kilometres down. Mount Everest would fit there with more than a mile of water above its summit.

Which geologist, barred from research ships as a woman, drew the 1950s maps that revealed the Atlantic's rift valley?

Marie Tharp plotted depth data that her colleague Bruce Heezen collected at sea. The valley she spotted along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge suggested the seabed was being pulled apart.

Which American oceanographer, nicknamed 'Her Deepness', dived untethered to the seabed off Oahu in 1979 in a JIM suit?

Sylvia Earle set a women's depth record of 381 metres on that dive. Her other nickname is 'The Sturgeon General'.

Which Disney character gives a nickname to Grimpoteuthis, a deep-sea octopus with two prominent ear-like fins?

Dumbo octopuses swim with those fins, one above each eye, much as the elephant of the 1941 film flies with his ears.

Seabed chimneys that pour out scalding, mineral-rich water are known to scientists by which nickname?

Black smokers release water that can top 400°C. When it meets the near-freezing sea, its dissolved minerals turn into particles that pile up and make the chimneys taller.

Which ocean layer, found only in trenches below about 6 kilometres, is named after the Greek god of the underworld?

Hadal zone habitats cover less than 0.25% of the world's seafloor, yet the trenches that hold them span over 40% of the ocean's depth range.

Which German battleship, sunk in the Atlantic in 1941, did Robert Ballard's expedition locate on the seabed in 1989?

Bismarck was scuttled by its own crew as British ships closed in, to stop the enemy boarding it and to let the men abandon ship.

Which country's Prince Albert I opened an Oceanographic Museum in 1910 that Jacques Cousteau later directed?

Monaco's prince invited the leading oceanographers of the day to the opening. Cousteau ran the museum from 1957 to 1988.

Air-breathing divers who surface too quickly risk 'the bends', caused by bubbles of which gas forming in their tissues?

Nitrogen is the main inert gas in air, and it dissolves into the body under pressure. Its bubbles often settle in joints, bending victims over in pain, hence the nickname.

Which Norse explorer is thought to have reached North America about 500 years before Columbus and called it Vinland?

Leif Erikson grew up in Greenland, where his father had founded the first Norse settlement. The Icelandic sagas tell of his voyage west.

Vitus Bering, a Danish-born officer in Russia's navy, gave his name to the strait separating Siberia from which land?

Alaska and Siberia are only about 82 kilometres apart at the strait's narrowest point. Bering first sailed into it in 1728.