From Fiji to France to Central Australia, stories abound of lands lost beneath the sea. Some are likely founded on millennia-old memories of coastal submergence, offering us clues today.
It should be obvious to this diver that this is a shipwreck and not a reef, but what about to someone looking at a image of this spot taken from an aircraft?
LookBermuda/Flickr
It’s difficult to tell a shipwreck from a natural feature on the ocean floor in a scan taken from a plane or ship. This project used deep learning to get it right 92% of the time.
Tube worms, anemones and mussels clustered near a hydrothermal vent on the Galapagos Rift.
NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Galapagos Rift Expedition 2011/Flickr
Oceanographer Robert D. Ballard, who is best known for finding the wreck of Titanic, has written a memoir recounting his biggest discoveries and calling for more ocean exploration.
Our robot is inspired by the common moon jellyfish.
Willyam Bradberry/Shutterstock
We undertook a 28-day voyage to explore a possible lost continent in a remote part of the Coral Sea, in an area off the coast of Queensland. Here’s what we found.
A bathymetric map showing SS Iron Crown on the sea floor.
CSIRO
Finding the wreck of SS Iron Crown, lost underwater for more than 70 years, was the (relatively) easy part. It’s what we can learn from now on that’s the challenge.
Fluorescent image of the coral Pocillopora damicornis. The field of view is approximately 4.1 x 3.4 mm.
Andrew D. Mullen/UCSD
As ships resume the search for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in the depths of the Indian Ocean this week, we often hear that the oceans are “95% unexplored” and that we know more about the surface…
So little is known about what lies beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean.
AAP/ Richard Wainwright
Not long after the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was declared missing, the world’s attention was focused on a remote, poorly known area of the Eastern Indian Ocean as the possible location of the lost…
An unmanned Bluefin-21 of the type used in the underwater search for MH370.
EPA/Leut Kelli Lunt/Australian Department of Defense
The ongoing search for missing flight MH370 has shown how finding objects such as debris on the ocean is difficult, but finding them underwater in the deep ocean is much more challenging. As of Tuesday…