![]() ![]() Indeed, one of Darwin's peers, naturalist Edward Forbes, was an enthusiastic champion of marine dredging as an aid to study the life at the bottom of the sea. "You think about Charles Darwin, when he was a student in Edinburgh, learned how to dredge." "In parallel to that, there's this tradition of marine natural history dredging, which is something that very much started in Britain, and a few other people took it up in the United States," says Rozwadowski. Understanding more about the topography of the ocean became more pressing once telegraphy became more widespread, says Rozwadowski – the only way telegraphs could connect North American with the UK, for instance, was via cables laid along the sea floor. Then the Royal Navy, no longer having to support troops in Crimea, filled the vacuum left when the US fell into civil war. "The antecedents are in two basic directions – one is the hydrographic works that's been done by especially British and American hydrographers." The US led the way in terms of deep sea until the 1860s. "You don't get a three-and-a-half-year circumnavigation voyage out of thin air," she says. Slowly and surely, they would provide the building blocks of a mission as ambitious as the Challenger's. Smaller, less ambitious expeditions in the decades before the 1870s were instrumental in the Challenger setting sail, says Helen Rozwadowski, the founder of the maritime studies program at the University of Connecticut. The 19th Century was when what we would now call oceanography came of age. It was only in the 1760s that the first dedicated oceanographic mission – a Danish expedition to the seas around Egypt the Arabian Peninsula – took place, gathering specimens using nets and simple dredging equipment. ![]() These early attempts were sporadic, however, and only ever explored a tiny fraction of the oceans at a time. But much of the ocean – especially its cold, invisible abyss – remained a mystery.Īfter the age of exploration, and Europe's violent colonisation of much of the globe, attention started turning to what lay under the surface of the sea. Coastlines were charted, species hauled up in nets were drawn and pored over, and depths recorded with weighted lines. The rush to claim an undersea mountain rangeįor centuries, oceanography remained in relative infancy.The deep-sea mining tracks on the ocean floor.The voyage that birthed oceanography (BBC Travel).From the Greek for river – okeanos – came the word ocean. When the Ancient Greeks first started exploring outside the Mediterranean, some 2,900 years ago, the discovery of a strong north-to-south current made them believe they had discovered a huge river. But while their cartography mapped the shorelines, the seas around them were regarded as a realm of ship-claiming monsters and gargantuan serpents. The ancient Roman and Greeks had painstakingly – and fairly accurately – mapped the coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea. But despite their vital place in commerce and colonial power, the deep oceans might as well have been on another planet. With freight-carrying jet aircraft a century away, and railways yet to traverse huge swathes of the world, massive amounts of world trade relied on ships. The oceans were the highways of the late 19th Century. And along the way it discovered species living in the dark depths below. This voyage, which Murray was part of, changed the way we view the oceans. ![]() A three-year-long voyage – one of scientific observation rather than naval power projection – which traversed the globe on a 68,000-nautical mile (125,900km) journey. It has entered history thanks not to a famous fighting career but a reputation earned by something far more painstaking. HMS Challenger was a Royal Navy ship built in the 1850s. The vessel he lived on for three years in the 1870s is what ties together the house on the firth, the deepest part of our ocean abyss, and Nasa's spacecraft. One was the command module for the Apollo 17 Moon mission while the other was part of the Space Shuttle fleet, and the first of them to be lost – Challenger.Ĭhallenger Lodge was once owned by John Murray, a famous pioneer of oceanography whose travels took him almost as far as it is possible to get from Edinburgh and still be on Planet Earth. The building shares its name with the one of the deepest parts of the ocean and two Nasa spacecraft. It was once a private house, but now the imposing stone structure on Boswall Road, on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh, is part of a palliative care hospice. ![]()
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