OVER the next three years a team from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, will be using a to explore the , a rift in the bed of the Caribbean Sea that plunges to more than 5000 metres below the surface on a roughly east-west line between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.
The trough contains the deepest seabed volcanoes in the world, and the expedition’s scientists expect among other things to learn much about the biology of those turbulent depths. It is an exciting prospect: the seabed is one of the two last frontiers on Earth – the other is consciousness – and is as rich a field for exploration as the universal frontiers of outer space or the interior of atoms.
“The seabed is one of two last frontiers on Earth. The other is consciousness”
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I find it interesting and heartening that few people question the point of exploring ocean beds. Just finding out what is there promises reward enough, but there is also the possibility of discoveries with significant practical applications. Exploration of the deep is already responsible for a number of them, including advances in cancer treatment and fibre-optics technology.
This aspect of deep-sea work is an instance of the general importance of frontier exploration. This idea was central to about the importance of westward expansion in America’s history. Turner saw the boundary between civilisation and the wilderness as a theatre of new challenges demanding new responses and institutions. Turner claimed that these challenges and responses helped create a society different from its European roots, characterised by those idols of the American way – freedom and entrepreneurial energy.
The frontiers represented by deep ocean biology and geology are very different, of course, but the Turner thesis is suggestive even here. The technologies required to explore them and the discoveries that could result offer to generate a new understanding of the largest ecosystem on the planet, where life takes highly unusual forms. Think of what has already been found around Pacific undersea volcanoes: , that live around hydrothermal vents at massive pressures and temperatures. We can expect to learn not only more about the world we live in, but about the possibilities for life in the diverse environments of other worlds.
The three-year project involving Autosub6000 and its companion, the (which won its spurs on expeditions to the Antarctic and the Portuguese coast), has been given half a million pounds by the . Even with the cost of development and construction of these two vehicles and the which will launch them, this is a trifle in comparison to what big physics needs and receives. And yet the potential of finding out what lies on the world’s deepest frontiers is no less significant than what might soon tell us. The value of new knowledge cannot be written on a price tag.
This is true also because of the hope that much of this new knowledge will be practical. That is a legitimate part of the case to be made to major funding agencies – governments, mainly – when the chance comes to tackle a frontier. As Turner saw, a society that explores is in little danger of becoming stale. That applies to a society’s collective intelligence as well as its scientific muscle: they both need to be challenged and exercised. Like all front-line science, the Autosub6000 project is good news because it takes us to a genuine frontier, with all the promise it offers.