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Into The Deep

Sea explorer Graham Hawkes is ready to take a historic plunge. In the next few months, he will venture deep into the Pacific Ocean in an awesome new vessel. Most ocean-exploring vehicles drop straight down through the water. Some creep slowly along the ocean floor gathering samples and information. But Deep Flight I, which Hawkes helped design, zips around like a fighter plane.

Steering with joysticks, Hawkes can make the vessel roll, turn, dive and shoot for the surface. He'll get a close-up view of the wondrous life and landscape of the dark, silent world under the sea. "These vehicles are so small and light, you can send them anywhere," says Hawkes.

For years people have said the last unexplored frontier is outer space. But we really don't have to leave our planet to boldly go where no one has gone before. About 75% of the earth's surface is covered by the sea, and we haven't come close to seeing it all. "We know more about Mars than we do about the ocean," says Sylvia Earle, a marine biologist who helped create Deep Flight I.

What's Down There?
With Deep Flight I and a fleet of other new vessels and robot craft, explorers hope to discover all sorts of riches in the sea. Among these riches are unusual living creatures. Some may prove useful as sources of medicine, food and chemicals.

The deep ocean is home to some of earth's oddest creatures. The anglerfish, the gulper eel and other deep dwellers have crushproof bodies that allow them to survive the ocean pressures 5,000 feet down. Some have body parts that can glow in the dark to attract prey.

At even greater depths, researchers have found bizarre eight- inch-long tube worms, and clams that are the size of dinner plates. They live in the boiling-hot waters near ocean vents. The vents are cracks where seawater seeps into the earth's crust and then shoots back up like a geyser. With temperatures reaching 750°F, it's amazing that anything lives nearby!

The vents constantly spew out valuable minerals like iron, copper, nickel, cobalt and manganese. The material hardens into chimneys known as "black smokers." (One of the biggest is nicknamed Godzilla.) Parts of the Pacific sea floor are littered with potato-size nuggets of these minerals. Mining companies are eager to scoop them up.

The Very, Very Bottom
The ocean floor is not flat. Valleys, canyons, mountains and even volcanoes shape the underwater world. The deepest known point is in the Mariana Trench near the Pacific island of Guam. In 1960 two scientists in a research vessel traveled 35,800 feet down-- about seven miles--to explore it. A Japanese vessel went nearly that deep again last year.

Japan has a good reason to explore the ocean bottom. Southern Japan sits on a shaky part of the sea floor where three pieces of the earth's crust meet. Those pieces, called tectonic plates, shift slightly each year. The shifting can trigger earthquakes like the one that killed 5,500 people in Kobe, Japan, in 1995. Scientists say studying the plates may help them predict earthquakes.

A Costly Quest
It costs millions of dollars to explore the deep sea. Not everyone agrees on how to do it. Some explorers say we should focus on the part of the ocean that is 20,000 feet deep or less. That's about 97% of the ocean. Exploring the deepest 3% requires more expensive equipment and is more dangerous.

But other scientists say exploring the very deepest part of the ocean will be worth the risk and cost. Greg Stone, a marine biologist in Boston, Massachusetts, says we can count on finding new animals and other discoveries we can't even imagine. "We won't know what it holds until we've been there," he says.

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