At the elbow of Cape Cod, where the road ends and the water begins, is the small town of Woods Hole. It appears too tiny for what takes place there. However, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s scientists and engineers have been creating the bizarre devices that transport people to the planet’s deepest regions for the past 60 years. Additionally, they are currently working in secret on a project that has the potential to alter our understanding of the ocean floor.
To put it briefly, the strategy is to get to the trenches. Not the entire seafloor, which is now mostly covered. Nearly 99 percent of the seabed is now accessible thanks to the 2022 upgrade to the renowned submersible Alvin, which raised its limit to 6,500 meters. It sounds like the task is nearly finished. It isn’t. Things start to get weird in the final 1%. There hasn’t been much activity in the hadal zone, which consists of long, narrow trenches that descend from 6,000 to almost 11,000 meters. The majority of it has never been seen.
The car that Woods Hole is wagering on is named Orpheus, and its size is unexpected when you first see it in a picture. It’s tiny. roughly the same size as a motorcycle. Orpheus, which was developed in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—the same team that created the Mars rover navigation systems—uses cameras, lights, and software instead of the bulky sonar that deep-diving robots typically use. It is about 550 pounds in weight. In contrast, the hybrid car Nereus, which was lost in the Kermadec Trench in 2014 after its hull probably collapsed, weighed almost ten times as much.
Talking to people in the program makes it difficult to ignore that loss. Systematic science in the deepest trenches virtually ceased when Nereus, the only vehicle of its kind on Earth, failed. Engineers now believe that a single, costly, complex machine isn’t the solution. It’s a fleet. What they refer to as a “cubesat philosophy,” which is derived from the design of small satellites for space, is small, inexpensive, and replaceable. One can be replaced by another if it is crushed at 10,000 meters.
Whether the plan will succeed as the designers had hoped is still up in the air. At full ocean depth, the pressure is about 16,000 pounds per square inch, which is the same as putting fifty jumbo jets’ worth of weight on one human hand. Down there, materials exhibit peculiar behavior. Batteries, optics, plastics, and any potentially living thing’s soft tissues also do. According to interviews with Tim Shank, the deep-sea biologist who has spearheaded much of this work, each trench seems to have its own signs of life, with closely related species evolving in isolation like inverted islands. That’s enough justification to leave.
Although no one at the institution would describe it as such, there is also something almost philosophical happening here. The oceans of Europa and Enceladus, the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn where liquid water may reside beneath thick crust, are being studied in part as a stand-in for the hadal zone. NASA and the Orpheus team are openly using one as a practice run for the other. The irony that the path to other worlds passes through the bottom of our own is difficult to ignore.
As you watch this happen, it seems like the deep ocean is finally being treated like the frontier that it truly is. The renowned James Cameron submarine, DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, is currently located at Woods Hole. It is a unique marvel that only ever made one descent. Orpheus is a unique character. Maybe less heroic. less dramatic. but perhaps more beneficial. The trenches have been waiting for a while. They are resistant to surrendering.
