By Andrew Lewis 

We know almost nothing about the deep seafloor. After decades of exploration, it is still the least understood habitat on Earth. This blind spot has long vexed National Geographic Explorer Katy Croff Bell, who has led dozens of ocean expeditions around the world. After all, the deep sea encompasses some two-thirds of the globe and plays a key role in sequestering carbon and regulating the climate. So Bell and a few other researchers recently set out to quantify the gaps in our knowledge.

For almost a decade, Dr. Katy Croff Bell has been working to make the deep sea more accessible. Her pace picked up in 2018, when she convened nearly 250 researchers at the MIT Media Lab to discuss ways to increase our knowledge of the seafloor, from cheaper sensors and machine learning to community engagement and robotics. By the event’s close, Bell had a realization: Why couldn’t one piece of technology be cheap to make, easy to operate, and suited for a wide variety of vessels?