What Is The Deepest Part Of The Ocean What Type Of Animals Live In The Deep Abyss

News Release 09-118

The Abyss: Deepest Part of the Oceans No Longer Subconscious

Nereus is first undersea vehicle to enable routine scientific investigation of bounding main depths worldwide

June 2, 2009

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The Abyss is a night, deep place, just information technology'southward no longer subconscious. At least when Nereus is on the scene. Nereus is a new blazon of deep-sea robotic vehicle, chosen a hybrid remotely operated vehicle (HROV).

Nereus dove to 10,902 meters (6.8 miles) on May 31, 2009, in the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, reports a squad of engineers and scientists aboard the research vessel Kilo Moana.

The dive makes Nereus the world'due south deepest-diving vehicle, and the first vehicle to explore the Mariana Trench since 1998.

"Much of the ocean's depths remain unexplored," said Julie Morris, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the project. "Ocean scientists now have a unique tool to gather images, data and samples from everywhere in the oceans, rather than those parts shallower than half-dozen,500 meters (four miles). With its innovative technology, Nereus allows united states to report and empathize previously inaccessible bounding main regions."

Nereus'south unique hybrid-vehicle design makes information technology ideally suited to explore the ocean's last frontiers, marine scientists say. The unmanned vehicle is remotely operated by pilots aboard a surface ship via a lightweight, micro-thin, fiber-optic tether that allows Nereus to dive deep and be highly maneuverable. Nereus, all the same, can also exist switched into a free-swimming, autonomous vehicle fashion.

"Reaching such extreme depths is the pinnacle of technical challenges," said Andy Bowen, project manager and primary developer of Nereus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). "The squad is pleased that Nereus has been successful in reaching the very bottom of the ocean to return imagery and samples from such a hostile earth. With a robot like Nereus we can at present explore anywhere in the body of water. The trenches are about unexplored, and Nereus will enable new discoveries there. Nereus marks the beginning of a new era in ocean exploration."

Nereus (rhymes with "serious") is a mythical Greek god with a fish-tail and a human being's torso. The vehicle was named in a nationwide contest open up to loftier school and college students.

The Mariana Trench forms the purlieus between ii tectonic plates, where the Pacific Plate is subducted beneath the small Mariana Plate. Information technology is office of the Pacific Ring of Burn down, a 40,000-kilometer (25,000-mile) area where most of the earth's volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur. At 11,000 meters, its depth is well-nigh the height a commercial airliner flies.

To reach the trench, Nereus dove nearly twice as deep as research submarines are capable of, and had to withstand pressures 1,000 times that at World's surface--crushing forces similar to those on the surface of Venus, co-ordinate to Dana Yoerger of WHOI and Louis Whitcomb of Johns Hopkins Academy, who adult the vehicle'due south navigation and control system and conducted successively deeper dives to test Nereus.

"We couldn't exist prouder of the stunning accomplishments of this defended and talented team," said Susan Avery, president and director of WHOI. "With this technology trial successfully backside usa, we're eager for Nereus to go widely used to explore the most inaccessible reaches of the sea. With no function of the deep seafloor across our reach, information technology'southward exciting to think of the discoveries that await."

Merely two other vehicles have succeeded in reaching the Mariana Trench: the U.S. Navy-built bathyscaphe Trieste, which carried Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh there in 1960, and the Japanese-built robot Kaiko, which made 3 unmanned expeditions to the trench between 1995 and 1998.

Trieste was retired in 1966 and Kaiko was lost at body of water in 2003.

The Nereus technology team believed that a tethered robot using traditional technologies would be prohibitively expensive to build and operate. So they used unique technologies and innovative methods to strike a remainder between size, weight, materials price and functionality.

Building on previous feel developing tethered robots and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), the team fused the ii approaches together to develop a hybrid vehicle that could wing similar an aircraft to survey and map broad areas, then be converted quickly into a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that can hover like a helicopter virtually the seafloor to carry experiments or to collect biological or rock samples.

The tethering system presented ane of the greatest challenges in developing a price-constructive ROV capable of reaching these depths. Traditional robotic systems use a steel-reinforced cable made of copper to ability the vehicle, and optical fibers to enable information to be passed between the ship and the vehicle. If such a cable were used to reach the Mariana Trench, it would snap under its own weight before it reached that depth.

To solve this claiming, the Nereus team adapted fiber-optic technology developed by the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Heart Pacific to bear real-time video and other data between the Nereus and the surface crew. Similar in diameter to a human pilus and with a breaking forcefulness of simply viii pounds, the tether is composed of glass fiber with a very sparse protective jacket of plastic.

Nereus brings approximately 40 kilometers (25 miles) of cable in two canisters the size of large java cans that spool out the fiber as needed. By using this very slender tether instead of a large cable, the team was able to subtract the size, weight, complexity and cost of the vehicle.

Another weight-saving accelerate of the vehicle is its use of ceramic spheres for flotation, rather than the much heavier traditional syntactic foam used on vehicles like the submersible Alvin or the ROV Jason.

Each of Nereus'southward ii hulls contains betwixt 700 and 800 of the 9-centimeter (3.5-inch) hollow spheres that are precisely designed and fabricated to withstand crushing pressures.

WHOI engineers besides developed a hydraulically operated, lightweight robotic manipulator arm that could operate nether intense force per unit area.

With its tandem hull blueprint, Nereus weighs virtually 3 tons in air and is about four.25 meters (xiv feet) long and approximately 2.3 meters (most 8 anxiety) wide. It is powered by more than 4,000 lithium-ion batteries. They are like to those used in laptop computers and cell phones, but have been carefully tested to exist used safely and reliably under the intense pressure of the depths.

"These and future discoveries by Nereus volition be the result of its versatility and agility--it'due south like no other deep submergence vehicle," said Tim Shank, a biologist at WHOI who is aboard the expedition. "It allows vast areas to be explored with great effectiveness. Our true achievement is not just getting to the deepest point in the oceans, but unleashing a capability that now enables deep exploration, unencumbered by a heavy tether and surface send, to investigate some of the richest geological and biological systems on Earth."

On May 31, the squad took the vehicle to 10,902 meters, the deepest dive to date. Testing will keep over the side by side few days and the team will return to port on June v. On this initial engineering prowl, Nereus's AUV way was non tested.

On its dive to the Challenger Deep, Nereus spent more than 10 hours on the lesser, sending live video dorsum to the ship through its fiber-optic tether and collecting biological and geological samples with its manipulator arm, and placed a marker on the seafloor signed by those onboard the surface ship.

"The samples nerveless by the vehicle include sediment from the tectonic plates that meet at the trench and, for the first time, rocks from deep exposures of the Globe's chaff close to mantle depths south of the Challenger Deep," said geologist Patty Fryer of the University of Hawaii, too aboard the expedition. We will know the total story once shore-based analyses are completed back in the laboratory this summertime. We tin integrate them with the new mapping data to tell a story of plate standoff in greater detail than ever before achieved in the world's oceans."

Boosted funds for Nereus were provided by the Office of Naval Enquiry, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Russell Family Foundation and WHOI.

-NSF-

The HROV Nereus has successfully reached the abyss: the deepest part of the world'southward oceans.
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The hybrid remotely operated vehicle Nereus collects sediment from the Mariana Trench.
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The Mariana Trench, the deepest function of the world's oceans, is near Guam.
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The Mariana Trench is the boundary between ii tectonic plates: the Pacific and the Mariana.
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Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF, (703) 292-7734, email: cdybas@nsf.gov
Stephanie Murphy, WHOI, (508) 289-3340, electronic mail: samurphy@whoi.edu

Related Websites
Nereus Slideshow: http://world wide web.whoi.com/page.do?pid=10076&tid=201&cid=33893&ct=362#
Nereus Animation: http://www.whoi.com/folio.exercise?pid=10076&tid=1061&cid=48563&cl=33973

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