Just as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Day 2019, hundreds of astrophysicists, engineers, and astronomers gulped champagne from plastic cups and cheered in an auditorium at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in Columbus, Maryland. The famed Queen guitarist Brian May — who also happens to be an accomplished astronomer with vivacious, curly gray hair — stood in front of everyone, cheering too.
It was certainly unusual for everyone to be here, partying, but they had good reason to celebrate. In just 33 minutes, a legendary NASA spacecraft, New Horizons (which is navigated by Johns Hopkins’ scientists), was expected to swoop by a mysterious, ancient object, 1 billion miles past Pluto. It would be the farthest world ever visited by an exploration craft — and by extension — humanity.
Pictures of the weird, red snowman-shaped world came back to Earth days later, after streaming some 4 billion miles through the solar system. People had never laid eyes on such a world before — a place frozen in time from our early solar system, a place where scientists could peer into a relic of our wild cosmic past, preserved in the coldest parts of space.
But here on Earth, OceanX did something similar, nearly 3,000 feet under the ocean. In 2013, marine biologist Edie Widder, sitting inside the yellow submarine, used a flashing light to attract a giant squid — a creature of ancient sealore — to the submersible. They filmed the creature as its mighty purple tentacles lashed out at the light, before the enigmatic monster darted back into the shadowy water, whence it came.
“That was considered the holy grail of natural history photography,” said Widder.
Years later, Widder, a renowned biologist, again found herself on the OceanX’s mothership, the Alucia. Sitting in the dining area, where the tables and chairs are bolted to the floor in case of rocking waves, Widder yearned for more deep sea exploration. At 67 years old — and after decades of watching the degradation of marine environments “with increasing dismay” — Widder lamented humanity’s still relatively large ignorance of the sea. She pondered why the U.S. maintains the expensive International Space Station, but doesn’t have an aircraft carrier-sized ocean exploration vessel.
The ocean isn’t just an alien realm. It controls the planet. Its whims bring decades-long shifts in climate, and it absorbs over 90 percent of Earth’s accumulating heat, from global warming. It’s changing as it grows increasingly acidic. It’s a world we need to understand.
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