Table of contents for Unknown Worlds in Unknown Worlds

“It feels like I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be,” says Jack Laverick, a PhD student at Oxford University, as he recalls being the first person to see part of a 100m-deep Caribbean reef. “This kind of exploration can give you tingles.” He’s one of a new breed of scientists that are venturing deeper than most scuba divers ever go. Divers can now descend into the ‘twilight zone’, from 50m down, where sunlight begins to fade. Few have visited these depths, but now so-called rebreathers are making it possible. Although invented before scuba equipment, rebreathers have only recently become safe enough for use in research. Instead of bubbling exhaled air into the water they recycle it, scrubbing out carbon dioxide and topping up the breathable oxygen. Dominic Andradi-Brown, another deep-diving PhD student from…

Measuring 1.5m in length and weighing 180kg, OceanOne is quite unusual for a remotely operated underwater vehicle. Described as a ‘robo-mermaid’, it has a head, two cameras for ‘eyes’ and a pair of fully articulated arms, complete with wrists and fingers. OceanOne acts as an underwater avatar, allowing its controllers on the surface to feel as though they’re diving down to inaccessible depths while remaining safe and dry. Not only can its human pilot see what the robot sees via the stereoscopic cameras in its head, they can feel what it’s holding thanks to haptic feedback that’s transmitted from sensors in the robot’s hands. To a certain extent, OceanOne can even think for itself. On board processors analyse camera footage and adjust the thrusters in the robot’s tail to make…

It’s a myth that medieval folk thought the Earth was flat – a mix of anti-religious propaganda and misinterpretation of stylised maps When science fiction writer Jules Verne wrote Journey To The Centre Of The Earth in 1864, he probably knew that his plot was pure fantasy. Verne’s characters Otto, Axel and their guide Hans, only made it a few miles down, but the idea that anyone could even contemplate travelling to the Earth’s core had been dismissed before Victorian times. The idea of the Earth having a meaningful centre goes hand-in-hand with the planet being shaped like a ball, and we’ve known that we don’t live on a disc for a long time. It’s a myth that medieval folk thought the Earth was flat – this actually came from…

Back in the ’50s, while the Space Race was in full swing, a motley crew of scientists came up with an equally ambitious project. They wanted to drill to the edge of Earth’s mantle-the Mohorovičić discontnuity, nicknamed the Moho. In 1909, Croatian geologist Andrija Mohorovičić discovered the boundary between our planet’s crust and mantle. He noticed that around 30km down, seismic waves caused by earthquakes sped up, suggesting that the rocks down there were completely different in composition. We now know that the mantle lies 30-60km below continental crust, yet only around 5km below oceanic crust – within reach of drills. The first drilling mission was a success – boring to a depth of 183m. But then politics played a lethal hand, funding was cut and Project Mohole was canned.…

Volcanoes may not, generally speaking, take as many lives as earthquakes and floods – 92,000 in the last 100 years. But the greatest of volcanic outbursts can bring about a global freeze, worldwide harvest failure and unimaginable loss of life. Around 74,000 years ago, a colossal super-eruption of the Toba volcano in Sumatra may have brought our race to the brink of extinction, while as recently as 1783, famine caused by the climatic impact of an eruption of Iceland’s Laki volcano may have led to as many as six million deaths worldwide. There are at least 1,500 active volcanoes around the world, of which around 50 erupt every year. To most people the idea of a volcano erupting equates to the outpouring of red-hot lava, but this is rarely a killer.…

The race to Mars has begun. First out of the gate was the underdog – Mars One. This private company, staffed by former NASA and ESA employees, plans to put people on Mars within 10 years. And now NASA’s Orion programme is in full swing (see page 87). But, as well as all that cold, dark space standing between us and Mars, there are a huge number of obstacles that both teams will have to overcome. How would we launch a colony ship? How would the human body cope? What if something goes wrong? We put these questions to some of the world’s leading experts, in a bid to find out how we’ll finally set foot on the Red Planet……

Prof Mason Peck How will we get to Mars? Prof Peck, former Chief Technologist at NASA, outlines Mars One’s plans for making the challenging journey to the Red Planet HOW WOULD YOU SEND A CREW TO MARS? The four-person crew will travel to the Red Planet in a transit vehicle – a small space station that will be assembled in low Earth orbit before the crew arrives. In-orbit assembly allows us to build large space systems, like the International Space Station (ISS), that we’re unable to launch intact from Earth, for technical or financial reasons. Once the crew is onboard, the transit vehicle will fire its engines and begin its journey to Mars. This will be the astronauts’ home for seven months, and they’ll eat, sleep and train in the…

Prof Charles Cockell Prof Cockell is director of the UK Centre for Astrobiology. His lab investigates life in extreme environments. He explains what life will be like for inhabitants WHAT WILL THE FIRST FEW DAYS BE LIKE? The new settlers’ first priority will be putting in place the basic essentials for survival, and ensuring backup systems function. They’ll need to ensure that all oxygen production and recycling equipment is working, and if they’re topping up their oxygen from water gathered from the atmosphere (by breaking it down using electrolysis), they’ll need to check that the extractor fans collecting atmospheric water are up and running. In the first weeks, the food the colonists will eat will not be home-grown. They’ll be eating dried and preserved rations in boxes. However, they may…

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time. They were predicted to exist by Albert Einstein in 1916, although he then got cold feet and retracted his prediction the following year, only to re-make it in 1936. Specifically, gravitational waves are a prediction of Einstein’s revolutionary theory of gravity, the ‘General Theory of Relativity’, which he presented in Berlin in November 1915, at the height of World War I. Whereas Isaac Newton had maintained that there was a ‘force’ of gravity between the Sun and Earth, like a piece of invisible elastic tethering the Earth to the Sun and keeping it forever in orbit, Einstein showed that this is an illusion. No such force exists. Instead, the Sun creates a ‘valley’ in the space-time around it, and the Earth…

1 THE CASCADIA MARGIN The Ocean Exploration Trust recently found 500 spots off the US west coast where methane bubbles out of the seabed like champagne, and where several little-known species thrive. 2 GREENLAND In 2012, researchers stumbled across a coral reef while taking water samples 900m down off Greenland’s southern coast. Little is known about it, but similar reefs in Norway are 8,000 years old. 3 SILFRA FISSURE In the middle of Iceland, this is the only place where you can swim in the crack between two continents (the Eurasian and North American plates). It gets 2cm wider every year. 4 YUCATÁN PENINSULA Thousands of deep sinkholes form part of the longest underwater cave system in the world. The caves are flooded with freshwater overlying saltwater and many remain…

Tagging elephant seals on an Antarctic beach isn’t a job for the faint-hearted. Mature males weigh up to four tonnes and can easily mistake a human for another seal looking for a fight. “Elephant seals don’t have good vision,” says Dr Horst Bornemann, a researcher from Germany’s Alfred Weneger Institute for Polar and Marine Research. “You want a team who can anticipate their behaviour and fend off territorial males.” There’s a good reason for working with such colossal, bad-tempered animals in remote, sub-zero conditions, though. Southern elephant seals, the deepest-diving seal species, can dive below 2,000m for hours at a time, so fixing small, electronic sensors to their heads can transform them into a fleet of researchers. These sensors gather data on the seals’ movements – how deep they dive,…

“It’s as close to being in space as you can be on the Earth,” says Oxford University’s Prof Alex Rogers, as he recalls his journey to a depth of 3,380m inside the Japanese submersible Shinkai 6500. “You are so remote from your normal environment. There’s a real sense of isolation.” Rogers is science director of a new deep-ocean research initiative called Nekton. On the first Nekton expedition in 2016, he explored the deep sea around Bermuda inside a Triton submersible. This two-person, three-tonne sub is relatively small and lightweight compared to many other submersibles, and highly manoeuvrable. It also has a huge acrylic dome, giving scientists fantastic views of the ocean for observation and research. “The submersibles are absolutely fantastic. It’s very James Bond,” says Rogers. Among the things that…

SCIENTIST: Inge Lehmann DATE: 1929 to 1936 DISCOVERY: Earth has a solid inner core On 17 June 1929, at around 10:17am local time, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck the South Island of New Zealand. Waves from the quake were recorded on seismometers around the world, notably in Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Baku, Sverdlovsk and Irkutsk. These devices consisted of a heavy weight, suspended from a frame. When the Earth and the frame vibrated, the inertia of the weight prevented it from moving with them, creating a difference in motion that could be captured by a pen on a rolling sheet of paper. The first accurate seismometers responded to up and down movements in a horizontal arm but, shortly before the New Zealand earthquake, a new kind of seismometer using a vertically suspended weight…

Armed with a head torch, canisters and electrodes, Yamini Jangir waits as the lift descends into the darkness. Dank air closes around her. She passes roughly hewn layers of rock, hacked back years ago to make way for the lift shaft. The lift cage eventually judders to a halt, 1.5km below the surface. Picking her way along the gold mine’s maze of passages, she finally locates an old metal pipe. Siphoning off the water inside, she inserts the electrodes and waits for her prey to ‘bite’. The airless, dark depths of a gold mine in South Dakota might not seem like the best place to look for life. But here, deep under the surface, microorganisms surviving on electricity alone could hold clues as to what kick-started life on Earth, and…

With over 100 mountains exceeding 7,200m, the Himalayas are the world’s highest mountain range. Topping them all is Mount Everest, at a staggering 8,848m tall. If approaching from Tibet, climbers travel along the East Rongbuk Glacier to Advanced Base Camp, before ascending the North Col, reaching progressively higher camps along the North Face, before making the final push to the summit. DID YOU KNOW 2,011 The number of stacked London buses needed to equal the height of Mt. Everest.…

This summer, NASA will launch one of its most ambitious space missions to date: the Parker Solar Probe. Travelling at a blistering 720,000km/h (450,000mph), the spacecraft will repeatedly dive closer to the Sun than any previous spacecraft in history. It will venture so close that the probe team refers to it as ‘touching’ the Sun. In fact, it will dive in and out of the Sun’s atmosphere, known as its corona. And it’s not going to be alone up there. In February 2019, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch a solar mission of its own, called Solar Orbiter. This craft will not go as close to the Sun as its NASA counterpart but it will still be bathed in intense sunlight, almost 500 times that experienced by a spacecraft…

Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light, can escape. Hence the blackness of a black hole. The modern picture of black holes is provided by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The theory tells us that a mass like the Sun creates a valley in the space-time around it, into which other bodies fall. In this picture, a black hole is a bottomless well from which light cannot escape without being sapped of every last shred of its energy. For reasons we do not fully understand, nature appears to have created two main classes of black holes: ‘stellar-mass’ black holes and ‘supermassive’ black holes, ranging in mass from millions of times the mass of the Sun to almost 50 billion times its mass.…

Until about a century ago, it was thought that not much lived in the deep sea. With its average depth of around 3.5km, crushing pressures and permanent darkness, few people bothered looking there – what could possibly hope to survive in such a hostile environment? According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 95 per cent of the oceans are still completely unexplored. But today’s scientists have ditched the old ideas of a deep, empty ocean and flat, featureless seabed. They’re keen to take a closer look beneath the waves and the latest generation of research equipment is opening up the depths like never before. New technology is helping scientists to understand the vital role the oceans play in the global climate and find bizarre creatures that offer…

“Very small, gentle submarines.” That’s how oceanographer Dr Pierre Testor from Paris’s Pierre and Marie Curie University describes the underwater robots he works with. In the 1980s, scientists came up with the idea of longrange vehicles that could explore hard-to-reach areas of the oceans. Today, fleets of autonomous robots, known as gliders, scour the seas for months at a time, gathering crucial data about how the oceans work. When Testor began his glider studies a decade ago, the worry of not knowing if costly equipment would make it back in one piece was tempered by the excitement of new discoveries. “I felt I was starting to do oceanography in a different way,” he recalls. Since then he’s seen gliders used in all spheres of ocean science, from physics to biology.…

Mud and sponges probably don’t feature highly on most scuba divers’ bucket lists. But scientist and explorer Brian Murphy, based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has his sights set on the sediments lurking at the bottom of lakes and the gooey animals clinging to submerged shipwrecks. And for good reason. He recently brought back a blob of mud from Lake Michigan and found it contained bacteria that make two previously unknown molecules. Lab tests showed that this class of compounds is lethal to the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, a disease that existing drugs are struggling with. “For millions of years bacteria have fought one another,” says Murphy. “We’re just harnessing that power.” Around the world, superbugs are on the rise. Back in 2016, two patients in the US…

SPINY CRAB With its spectacularly spiky body armour, this crab is immensely well protected as it stalks the seabed. Even its colour is protective, helping it hide in the dark depths because seawater absorbs red light. “You lose [red light] pretty quickly as you go down, so everything becomes blue,” says Dianne Bray who was part of the expedition that found this specimen. This means that red pigments appear black, which would make the crab incredibly difficult to spot. Most deep-sea animals haven’t evolved red vision – an added bonus for this crustacean. Faceless fish, zombie worms and herds of sea pigs were among the wonders hauled up from the ocean depths by a research team working off Australia’s east coast last year. Scientists from seven countries spent a month…

THE CAVE RAIDER NAME: Dr Hazel Barton JOB TITLE: Microbiologist BASED: University of Akron, Ohio, USA I started caving back in sixth form at school, long before I became a scientist. When I started working as an environmental microbiologist, it seemed natural to combine the two. I study microbial ecosystems in deep and remote caves, trying to work out how microorganisms can grow in the dark with so few nutrients. We work at depths of up to 500m – the microbiology gets more interesting the deeper you get. We’ll spend around a week in a cave, exploring its structure and taking samples of microbes. The expeditions are huge undertakings, about as logistically technical as climbing Everest. We rig our own ropes, and carry all our camping gear and research equipment,…

Your job is part presenter, part biologist, part conservationist, part explorer… what a fun job! Having fun is not difficult. It’s one of the few talents I have – enjoying myself. So it’s obvious why you do this – you’re having a ball! People say: “But you’re so old. Why are you working?” Well, I’d pay to carry on doing what I’m doing! Despite all the remote places you’ve visited, you live in the city. I’m a very urban man. London is the most fantastic place if you’re interested in learning, music… the greatest libraries in the world are here, the greatest natural history museum in the world is here, the music is unrivalled. But I have it both ways. I can pop off to Borneo for three weeks. What’s…

1 FIELDS EXPERIMENT Makes direct measurements of electric and magnetic fields and waves in the solar wind, and of density fluctuations and radio emissions. 2 INTEGRATED SCIENCE INVESTIGATION OF THE SUN (ISIS) Observes highly accelerated electrons, protons and heavier particles, and correlates them with solar wind and coronal structures. 3 WIDE-FIELD IMAGER FOR SOLAR PROBE (WISPR) Provides images of the solar wind, shocks and other plasma structures as they approach and pass the spacecraft. 4 THERMAL PROTECTION SYSTEM (TPS) An 11.43cm-thick carbon-composite shield that will withstand temperatures outside the spacecraft that reach nearly 1,377 °C. 5 HIGH GAIN ANTENNA Used to communicate with Earth. The downlink data rate when close to the Sun will be around 167kb/s. Not much compared to modern broadband speeds. 6 SOLAR ARRAY COOLING SYSTEM Operating…

MAGGIE LIEU Age: 23 From: Coventry Profession: PhD candidate in astrophysics Why did you apply? It’s always been my dream to work for NASA, but it seemed like privatised space travel would become important in my lifetime. I didn’t know about the project until the deadline, so I threw together a video on the day and just applied. What did being selected feel like? It was surreal. I looked up Mars One and it was more serious than I’d thought. I told my mum I had been shortlisted and she just said, “yeah okay”. I got a call a few weeks later when she saw me in the newspaper – she didn’t realise it was real. It gets more real every day. What do you think it will feel like…

Dr Kevin Fong Dr Fong has worked with NASA and is author of Extremes: Life, Death And The Limits Of The Human Body. He explains how the body would cope on Mars WHAT SHOULD A DOCTOR ON A TRIP TO MARS BE MOST WORRIED ABOUT? A Mars mission crew doctor will have their work cut out. Prevention is always better than cure, so keeping the crew healthy by making sure they eat the right diet, stick to an exercise programme and generally take care of themselves would be important. But a crew physician would be responsible for providing healthcare should any medical emergency arise. With space and power at a premium, and the physician having to be everything from general practitioner and casualty doctor to anaesthetist and surgeon, that would…

Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars other than our Sun. We currently know of 3,584, and the number rises every week. About one-third of nearby stars have planets, and a further third have dust disks from which planets congeal. Consequently, in our Milky Way, there are almost certainly more planets than stars – and there are several hundred billion of those. Before the discovery of the first extrasolar planetary system, the expectation was they would be like the Solar System, with rocky inner planets like Earth and Mars, and gas giant worlds like Jupiter and Saturn orbiting farther out. The shock has been that most extrasolar systems are utterly unlike ours. Many extrasolar systems have giant planets, known as ‘hot Jupiters’, orbiting closer to their stars than the orbit of…