Deep Sea Exploration History: Vehicles and Discoveries

99.999% of the deep seafloor remains unexplored 🔍️🌊 In almost 70 years of deep-sea exploration, humans have still only observed an area smaller than the city of London. What’s more, the majority of these dives have focused on coastal waters near high-income nations, leading to a gap in our knowledge of the vast majority of the open ocean and less developed countries. This lack of data, and bias in the data we do have, is significant. The deep ocean plays a key role in climate, biodiversity and

Step aboard the pinnacle of ocean exploration: the OceanXplorer. With her own submersibles, wet and dry labs, and hologram technology, every inch is designed to push the limits of marine discovery further than ever before. Watch her and her crew in action in #OceanXplorers, Sundays at 9/8c on National Geographic. Now streaming on Disney and Hulu. | National Geographic TV

A dive into the deep sea reveals twinkling lights in the midst of darkness. This light doesn’t come from the sun—sunlight can’t penetrate to these depths—it comes from the animals that live here. Scientists call this living light show bioluminescence—when living organisms create their own light using a chemical reaction. MBARI Senior Scientist Steve Haddock and his team are working to decipher the secret language of light in the deep sea. His team’s work has revealed that bioluminescence is actu