Answer by Ryan Carlyle, BSChE, Subsea Hydraulics Engineer
I’m one hundred and twenty miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico right now, working on installing seafloor equipment for an oil project. No one spends more time exploring the deepest oceans than the oil industry. In the last twenty years, there has been a veritable explosion of deepwater exploration, with extensive subsea surveys for pipelines and anchors and oil well infrastructure. We have fantastic subsea robots that let us see and work down to 10,000 ft depth — as well as a host of seismic imaging systems to see below the seafloor, sonar, Doppler current sensors, monitoring buoys, and so forth. The equipment to explore the oceans exists today and is in routine use for energy exploration. For example:
Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs):
Trench digger for burying subsea pipelines:
So as someone whose job deals with exploring the ocean deeps — see my answer to— I can tell you that the ocean is excruciatingly boring. The vast majority of the seafloor once you get >50 miles offshore is barren, featureless mud. On face, this is pretty similar to the empty expanses of outer space, but in space you can see all the way through the nothing, letting you identify targets for probes or telescopes. The goals of space exploration are visible from the Earth, so we can dream and imagine reaching into the heavens. But in the deep oceans, visibility is less than 100 feet and travel speed is measured in single-digit knots. A simple seafloor survey to run a 100 mile pipeline costs a cool $50 million. The oceans are vast, boring, and difficult/expensive to explore — so why bother? Sure, there are beautiful and interesting features like geothermal vents and coral reefs. But throughout most of the ocean these are few and far between. This is a pretty normal view from a subsea robot:
Despite the difficulty, there is actually a lot of scientific exploration going on in the oceans. Here’s a pretty good public website for a science ROV mission offshore Oregon:
To reinforce my point about it being boring, here’s a blog entry from that team where they talk about how boring the sea floor is:
What IS really interesting in the deep ocean is the exotic life. You see some crazy animals that are often not well-known to science. Something floats by the camera 5000 ft down, and you say “what the hell was that?” and no one knows. Usually it’s just some variety of jellyfish, but occasionally we find giant* isopods:
*This is a moderately small specimen. They have been recorded at 2.5 ft long.
Or giant alien squid monsters:
Unfortunately, deep-sea creatures rarely survive the trip to surface. Their bodies are acclimated to the high pressures (hundreds of atmospheres), and the decompression is usually fatal. Our ability to understand these animals is very limited, and their only connection to the surface biosphere is through a few food chain connections (like sperm whales) that can survive diving to these depths. We’re fundamentally quite disconnected from deep ocean life.
Also, there is no hope of ever establishing human habitation more than about 1000 ft deep. The pressures are too great, and no engineering or materials conceivable today would allow us to build livable-sized spaces on the deep sea floor. The two times humans have reached the deepest part of the ocean, it required a foot-thick flawless metal sphere with barely enough internal space to sit down. As far as I can tell, seafloor living is all but impossible — a habitable moon base would be vastly easier to engineer than a seafloor colony. See my answer to
To recap: we don’t spend more time/money exploring the ocean because it’s expensive, difficult, and uninspiring. We stare up at the stars and dream of reaching them, but few people look off the side of a boat and wish they could go down there.