May 13, 2014 — It’s the risk that comes with exploring the unknown: Saturday afternoon, 6 miles under the sea, a remote-controlled robot probing one of the coldest, deepest ocean trenches on Earth blew apart.
The one-of-a-kind Nereus, built by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, had just embarked on a three-year project to explore deep-sea ecosystems and the weird, unknown critters that inhabit the ocean’s most remote trenches. Researchers said the loss of the $8 million sub is a huge disappointment for the expedition’s scientists and a major setback for ocean science, with a next-generation rover capable of probing such depths still in the design stages.
“Without Nereus, we currently have nothing that will enable us to reach that part of the ocean,” said Larry Madin, director of research at Woods Hole.
Scientists still don’t know exactly what happened to Nereus at the Kermadec Trench, the fifth-deepest ocean trench, which is off the coast of New Zealand. But they have a good guess: 6.2 miles below the surface, pressures 1,000 times greater than the ones at sea level probably led to the implosion of one of Nereus’s pressure housings, chambers that protect sensitive electronics and other gear from the extreme pressures. The force would have set off a chain reaction, causing the submarine to fail. Bits of debris from the robot have been recovered at the surface.
“It’s an ever-present risk,” Madin said. “The way things go down there, everything’s operating normally and suddenly everything goes dark, and when it’s 6 miles down in the ocean, you don’t have a good way of knowing what’s happened — you can only make inferences based on what you know of the system and the forces that could be acting on it.”
Read the full story from The Boston Globe