Engineer leading effort to develop robotic landers that will travel up to 7 miles deep

Kevin Hardy is a bit like Jacques Cousteau. There’s poetry to the way he talks about exploring the sea. The engineer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla says, “If you go to places no one has ever been, you’ll see things no one has ever seen.”

He was talking about the deepest waters on Earth, places that never experience sunlight. Hardy is leading a broad new effort by Scripps to develop robotic landers that will journey up to seven miles deep and use cameras and instruments to explore “the other Earth,” as Hardy calls it.

The project arises from simple yet profound questions: What sort of life exists in the cold, high-pressure reaches of the deep ocean? How have the animals down there adapted to such extreme conditions? And what can be learned about the natural forces at work in the deep, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes?

The questions resonate in Scripps’ Sverdrup Hall, where the new lander lab is located. The building also is home to people like biologist-ecologist Lisa Levin, who listed additional questions on a recent afternoon when the conversation turned to sea cucumbers, a creature that can be found in deep, deep water:

“What is it about the skin of an animal or the lifestyle or their food that allows them to live at low temperatures and high pressure?” Levin says. “What are they eating? Does anybody eat them? Do they live forever if nothing eats them? How quickly do they grow? How do they reproduce?”

Scientists know comparatively little about deep sea trenches because they’ve historically been difficult and expensive to explore. Scripps researcher John Isaacs lowered “Monster Cams” into deep water in the 1960s. Some of the images he captured were interesting, but the technique was too crude for wide use.

Other scientists tried to improve on his work, with limited progress. Newer, unmanned probes have helped demystify the ocean. But they operate in comparatively shallow waters. And there are fewer than a dozen manned, deep-sea research submarines in use around the world.

Researchers say they need things like robotic-landers, which drop through the water at 4-5 mph, pulled to the bottom by iron anchors. It’s an emerging area of technology that has been greatly advanced by Hardy, who developed a 14-foot lander that helped director-explorer James Cameron film the solo dive he made to the bottom of the Mariana Trench near Guam last year.

Cameron was able to maneuver his one-man submersible close to the lander, extending the reach of his Deepsea Challenge mission.

The director recently donated the lander to Scripps to spur further research. Scripps is upgrading the robot for new missions, possibly including a deep dive later this year off Puerto Rico. Scripps also is building a series of smaller robotic landers that will be deployed from “ships of opportunity,” or vessels that can easily carry a lander and drop it over the side during transit.

Cameron looks forward to the results. During a recent visit to Scripps he said, “The sub and my dive got so much press. But a very large part of the true science that was brought back (on the Deepsea Challenger) was done by (the lander). This is a relatively low-cost, relatively easy-to-deploy vehicle. In terms of getting science done, this is a very powerful platform.”