Question: What would you a scientist would like to explore?

Jon Copley answered on 20 Jun 2010:

In a word: the unknown. For me, that’s what science is – exploring the unknown – whether its what we don’t know about how cells grow and develop, or how brains work, or what we don’t know about our galaxy and Solar System, or in my case what we don’t know about the deep ocean and how our planet works.

So I think that any unknown is worth exploring in science – and I don’t think any particular unknown is more worthwhile to explore than any other (because there have been plenty of breakthroughs that have benefited our lives that have come as complete surprises – by definition, we can’t tell what exploring an “unknown” will give us, in advance!).

But I’ve personally chosen to spend my time explore the deep ocean, because I think that’s where I can do most to help. I didn’t train as a cell biologist, or a brain scientist, or an astronomer. As an ecologist, the deep ocean contains the biggest unknowns that I can reach and explore in my lifetime.

Within the deep ocean, most of the exploration that I do is at undersea volcanoes that form a chain 40 000 miles long, which snakes all around our planet like the seam on a tennis ball. It’s our world’s longest mountain range and largest geological feature – but fifty years ago we had no idea it was even there.

It amazes me that we’ve been crossing the oceans for thousands of years, but the oceans have always been just a blank on maps – until now. Three hundred years ago no-one actually knew how deep the oceans were, or the shape of the landscape down there. Now, at last, we have the technology to go into the deep ocean to explore it.

But because that journey of discovery has only just begun, it will take many lifetimes to explore even just the underwater volcanoes where I work, because they are so vast. So I’m particularly interested in using new technology to speed up our exploration of the deep ocean, for example letting robots do the initial mapping and survey work, and then have them tell us when they find something “interesting”, which we then go and investigate with our ships (because otherwise our ships will take centuries to explore all the ocean on their own).

So right now, where do I want to explore next? I want to visit some undersea volcanoes in the middle of the Atlantic, between the islands of the Azores and Iceland. Why? Because by accident some of my colleagues have recently detected conditions down there that support colonies of deep-sea creatures, but they are likely to be different to all those we have seen so far before. So that area is like a missing piece in a global jigsaw puzzle of ocean life, which we need to put together if we are going to understand the patterns of life in our planet’s largest habitat.

At the moment I’m raising the funding we need for an expedition to explore there – we have some funding from National Geographic to make a TV documentary about what we find, but not quite enough yet to hire the ship that we want to use.