New age of undersea exploration

Right at this moment, some 930 million miles away, a sophisticated robot loaded with scientific gear is laying bare the mysteries of the sixth planet. With stunning photos of Saturn, its rings, and its moons, the Cassini-Huygens probe is captivating scientists and the public with images of an alien and distant world. The exploration of space, whether by astronauts, robotic probes, or sophisticated telescopes, surely represents the height of technological achievement. It's also the most prominent of the too few overlaps between science and engineering on the one side and philosophy, romance, and just plain amazement on the other.


The blue planet

Still, as bizarre as Saturn is, with its hula-hoop rings and enough moons to honor a busload of deities, the watery parts of our home planet also have some strange secrets to reveal. And scientists here on the "blue planet" are using a vast array of instruments--including a growing armada of Cassini's deep-diving kin--to make discoveries that rival anything in the solar system for pure otherworldly wonder.

The seas cover some 70 percent of our planet's surface, obscuring Earth's deepest valleys, longest mountain ranges, and most of its active volcanoes. Our ancestors may have forsaken the watery cradle of life hundreds of millions of years ago, but the very land we evolved to walk upon is constantly being born anew as a crystalline mush of magma oozes up out of the mantle and hardens to form rock at ridges running like zippers down the major ocean basins. And some of the creatures we left behind, like the monstrous 6-foot tube worms living in the sulfurous heat of hydrothermal vents a mile and a half below the surface, seem almost more suited to Saturn's moon Titan than to our supposedly familiar planet. Yet for all the mysteries that await, human eyes and scientific probes have seen a scant 5 percent of the vast underwater world, leaving oceanographers and biologists to grumble that we know more about the surface of Mars and the dark side of the moon than we do about our own oceans.

But the time for complaints is over. Building on the success of international programs starting in the 1960s, marine scientists are now throwing their collective weight into a series of all-out efforts to explore our oceans like never before--and to do it before human impacts, like pollution, overfishing, and global warming, change them forever. More than 300 marine biologists from 53 countries have joined in an ambitious effort, the Census of Marine Life (C oML), to catalog all the species in the sea--including an estimated 5,000 fish and hundreds of thousands of other organisms still unknown to science--by 2010. Hundreds of geologists involved in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program are boring deep beneath the seafloor to investigate the history and structure of the Earth. And spurred in part by recent reports from the National Academy of Sciences and the federal U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is redoubling its efforts to explore the unknown sea. With other federal agencies and international partners, it is establishing a global system to measure and monitor a wide range of environmental and climate parameters. "Up to this point, marine science has been pretty fractured," says Vice Adm. Conrad Lautenbacher (Ret.), the NOAA administrator. "But if we really want to understand how the oceans impact the world and how we can manage them, we need to have a broad, coordinated program of exploration and observation.