Tag archives for Ocean Exploration
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James Cameron, the movie director and National Geographic explorer-in-residence who made the world’s deepest solo dive last year, donated his DEEPSEA CHALLENGER sub and formed a partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or WHOI. The scientists at WHOI will work with Cameron to use the sub’s technologies on other research platforms and expeditions.
Learn more about the new partnership on the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE website.
Get to know all the National Geographic explorers with this interactive mural.
National Geographic Explorer, Enric Sala will spend the next month exploring the Desventuradas Islands off the coast of Chile. He will lead the Pristine Seas Project, which aims to find, survey and help protect the last wild places in the ocean.
Sala, a marine ecologist, is dedicated to finding ways to reduce human impacts on sea life. Between February 8th and March 7th, he will look for ways to preserve one of the last pristine environments left in South America.
During the trip, the team will use a submarine that has 360-degree vision and spherical glass drop cameras to film depth up to 4,000 meters (2.5 miles)!
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence James Cameron explored the deepest point on the surface of the Earth for about three hours on Sunday before resurfacing. Although Cameron’s expedition to the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep location was shorter than planned due to a hydraulic fuel leak in his sub called the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, he was able to get a look at the deepest ocean floor, which he described as bleak. “It looked like the moon,” he said. He didn’t see much in the way of sea life, either. “I didn’t find anything that looked alive to me, other than a few [shrimplike] amphipods in the water,” he said from aboard the research vessel Mermaid Sapphire.
Among the 2.5-story-tall sub’s tools are a sediment sampler, a robotic claw, a “slurp gun” for sucking up small sea creatures for study at the surface, and temperature, salinity, and pressure gauges. Although Cameron had originally planned to collect samples with the sub’s hydraulic arm, the leak made that impossible. Despite the setbacks, Cameron and the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER made history by making the deepest solo dive ever! Cameron, well-known for his films Titanic and Avatar is also an ocean explorer. He dived to the wreckage of the Titanic 33 times.
Read more about James Cameron’s dive on National Geographic News.
Read about the discovery of giant amphipods on News Bites.
See ocean pictures on National Geographic Kids.
Photograph by Mark Thiessen, National Geographic
The 10-year Census of Marine Life wrapped up on Monday. The project launched more than 500 expeditions over the past decade and uncovered 6.000 new species, like the fathead sculpin fish pictured above, nicknamed “Mr. Blobby.”
See pictures of more newly discovered species on National Geographic News.
Learn more about the census on the Census of Marine Life website.
Explore a shipwreck and raft a raging river when you play Waterlogged!
Photograph courtesy Kerryn Parkingson, NORFANZ
The wreck of the famous ocean liner R.M.S. Titanic was rediscovered by oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard and photographer Emory Kristof on September 1, 1985. Last Wednesday marked the 25th anniversary of the find. New high-resolution pictures of the wreckage mark the anniversary.
The photographs were taken as part of Expedition Titanic. This expedition is using technology such as sonar imaging to virtually preserve the ship as it is now, and to estimate how long the wreck might last. In these pictures, people can get a good look at the decay of the wreck from “rusticles” and time.
See more pictures and learn about the wreck of the Titanic on National Geographic News.
Get to know Robert Ballard in this interview on National Geographic Kids.
Photograph courtesy Premier Exhibitions, Inc. and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
