ABSTRACT
Although phytoplankton ecology, which was not covered at all adequately by the Challenger scientists, made enormous strides over the next seventy or eighty years, deep-sea zoology, which was a primary objective of the expedition, made almost no progress over the same period. Consequently, the commonly held view of animal life in the deep ocean in the middle years of the last century, and expressed by N. B. Marshall in his book on deep-sea biology published in 1954, was almost indistinguishable from that held by Wyville Thomson and John Murray following the Challenger Expedition (see Chapter 15). In summary, this view was that a constant and monotonous deep sea, effectively isolated from the surface layers and, for that matter, from the rest of the planet, supported a rather small number of individual animals representing a similarly small number of species. Within twenty years after the mid-1950s these ideas were turned on their heads. We now know, or think we know, that the deep ocean is by no means as stable and monotonous as it was confidently regarded for almost a century after the Challenger. Instead, it exhibits a geological, physical, chemical and biological patchiness at spatial scales ranging from centimetres to hundreds of kilo metres, and is subject to disturbance on the same scales at intervals ranging from hours to millennia. Perhaps in response to this environmental diversity, the species richness of the deep-sea floor may, in the opinion of many deep-sea biologists, rival that of tropical rain forests. These startling new discoveries arose from a number of origins, but mainly the availability of new technologies, some, such as satellites and manned submersibles, relatively complex and expensive, others rather simple and cheap. But whatever the source, they should warn us that our faith in our apparent knowledge of the deep ocean should be tempered with caution. Transported to a modern research vessel or oceanographic labora tory, Challenger Expedition scientists would no doubt be greatly impressed by late twentiethcentury technology, but even more so by the new discoveries. In his thought-provoking personal view of the requirements of oceanography in the next twenty years, John Woods (Chapter 16) suggests that we need a quite different approach involving a quantum leap in our data gathering and analysis capabilities. If he is right, then by the year 2020 present-day oceanographers are likely to feel more estranged technologically than they currently do from the days of the Challenger. More importantly, will our present ideas about the largest environment on earth seem as curious and out-of-date as some of those of our Challenger forebears?
