question: Why is deep sea exploration so difficult? We have had the technology for a long time, has it reached some kind of plateau that scientists cant figure out?
comment: The difficult part is getting the funding. The engineering has been figured out for a long time, but no one has quite figured out how to finance non-military applications of it. Historically, exploration has been dependent upon either political will or financial incentive. At the moment, both are lacking with regard to deep-sea exploration.
passages: However, the voyage to the ocean bottom is still a challenging experience. Scientists are working to find ways to study this extreme environment from the shipboard. With more sophisticated use of fiber optics, satellites, and remote-control robots, scientists one day may explore the deep sea from a computer screen on the deck rather than out of a porthole.
  
  Section::::Milestones of deep sea exploration.
  
  The extreme conditions in the deep sea require elaborate methods and technologies, which has been the main reason why its exploration has a comparatively short history.
   The deep sea is one of the less explored areas on Earth. Pressures even in the mesopelagic become too great for traditional exploration methods, demanding alternative approaches for deep sea research. Baited camera stations, small manned submersibles and ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) are three methods utilized to explore the ocean's depths. Because of the difficulty and cost of exploring this zone, current knowledge is limited. Pressure increases at approximately one atmosphere for every 10 meters meaning that some areas of the deep sea can reach pressures of above 1,000 atmospheres. This not only makes great depths very difficult to reach without mechanical aids, but also provides a significant difficulty when attempting to study any organisms that may live in these areas as their cell chemistry will be adapted to such vast pressures.
   The development of subsea oil and gas fields requires specialized equipment. The equipment must be reliable enough to safeguard the environment and make the exploitation of the subsea hydrocarbons economically feasible. The deployment of such equipment requires specialized and expensive vessels, which need to be equipped with diving equipment for relatively shallow equipment work (i.e. a few hundred feet water depth maximum) and robotic equipment for deeper water depths. Any requirement to repair or intervene with installed subsea equipment is thus normally very expensive. This type of expense can result in economic failure of the subsea development.
   In the following, important key stones of deep sea exploration are listed.
  
  BULLET::::- 1521: Ferdinand Magellan tried to measure the depth of the Pacific Ocean with a weighted line, but did not find bottom.
  
  BULLET::::- 1818: The British researcher Sir John Ross was the first to find that the deep sea is inhabited by life when catching jellyfish and worms in about depth with a special device.
   Contrary to early hopes that seabed mining would generate extensive revenues for both the exploiting countries and the Authority, no technology has yet been developed for gathering deep-sea minerals at costs that can compete with land-based mines. Until recently, the consensus has been that economic mining of the ocean depths might be decades away. Moreover, the United States, with some of the most advanced ocean technology in the world, has not yet ratified the Law of the Sea Convention and is thus not a member of the Authority.
   depth limits of discoveries probably reflect the limits of exploration (lack of submersibles capable of depths over 1,000 m (3,281 ft)).
   The oceans depths and temperatures contains some of the most extreme conditions for any species to survive. The deeper one travels, the higher the pressure and the lower the visibility gets, causing completely blacked out conditions. Many of these conditions are too intense for humans to travel to, so instead of sending humans down to these depths to collect research, scientists are using smaller submarines or deep sea drones to study these creatures and extreme environments. 
  
  Section::::Types of Species that live in Extreme Environments.
   Section::::First Funding Period.:Resources and Risks.
  
  The research area "Resources and Risks" (B) focused in turn on different resources, their mining and recovery potential but also their sustainable utilization and possible occurring risks. It was divided into six research teams, that focused mostly but not exclusively on economic research ranging from topics such as fishery and the common pool problem to molecular interdependencies within marine organisms for medical research to resource deposits and their safe exploitation and even to submarine hazard research regarding earthquakes and tsunamis.
  
  Section::::Second Funding Period.
   Many of these problems are avoided by the use of surface supplied breathing gas, closed diving bells, and saturation diving, at the cost of logistical complexity, reduced maneuverability of the diver and greater expense.
  
  Section::::Dealing with depth.
  
  Both equipment and procedures can be adapted to deal with the problems of greater depth. Usually the two are combined, as the procedures must be adapted to suit the equipment, and in some cases the equipment is needed to facilitate the procedures.
  
  Section::::Dealing with depth.:Equipment adaptations for deeper diving.
   The high water pressure at this depth makes designing and operating exploratory craft difficult. The first descent by any vehicle was by the manned bathyscaphe "Trieste" in 1960. This was followed by the unmanned ROVs "Kaikō" in 1995 and "Nereus" in 2009. In March 2012 a manned solo descent was made by film director James Cameron in the deep-submergence vehicle "Deepsea Challenger". Between 28 April and 4 May 2019, the "DSV Limiting Factor" completed four manned dives to the bottom of Challenger Deep.
  
  Section::::History of depth mapping from the surface.
   Deep-sea exploration
  
  Deep-sea exploration is the investigation of physical, chemical, and biological conditions on the sea bed, for scientific or commercial purposes. Deep-sea exploration is considered a relatively recent human activity compared to the other areas of geophysical research, as the depths of the sea have been investigated only during comparatively recent years. The ocean depths still remain a largely unexplored part of the planet, and form a relatively undiscovered domain.
   Papua New Guinea was the first country to approve a permit for the exploration of minerals in the deep seabed. Solwara 1 was awarded its licence and environmental permits despite three independent reviews of the environmental impact statement mine finding significant gaps and flaws in the underlying science ( see http://www.deepseaminingoutofourdepth.org/report/).
  
  The ISA has recently arranged a workshop in Australia where scientific experts, industry representatives, legal specialists and academics worked towards improving existing regulations and ensuring that development of seabed minerals does not cause serious and permanent damage to the marine environment.
  
  Section::::Resources mined.
   All but one of the current areas of exploration are in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, in the Equatorial North Pacific Ocean south and southeast of Hawaii. The remaining area, being explored by India, is in the Central Indian Basin of the Indian Ocean.
  
  Each area is limited to , of which half is to be relinquished to the Authority after eight years. Each contractor is required to report once a year on its activities in its assigned area. So far, none of them has indicated any serious move to begin commercial exploitation.
   Subsea technology in offshore oil and gas production is a highly specialized field of application with particular demands on engineering and simulation.
   Volatile weather conditions in Europe's North Sea have made drilling particularly hazardous, claiming many lives (see Oil platform). The conditions also make extraction a costly process; by the 1980s, costs for developing new methods and technologies to make the process both efficient and safe, far exceeded NASA's budget to land a man on the moon. The exploration of the North Sea has been a story of continually pushing the edges of the technology of exploitation (in terms of what can be produced) and later the technologies of discovery and evaluation (2-D seismic, followed by 3-D and 4-D seismic; sub-salt seismic; immersive display and analysis suites and supercomputing to handle the flood of computation required). 
   BULLET::::- It is most important to secure deep sea biological data from so far inaccessible sources and to collate them in a data information system which guarantees long-term stewardship and public access.
  
  BULLET::::- Biological and geochemical studies were mostly carried out separately which seems to be a systematic, scientific pattern and poses a problem in deep sea research. Interdisciplinary studies are essential to better understand of deep sea processes.
   Section::::New Technologies and Underwater Exploration.
   In the past, the study of marine biology has been limited by a lack of technology as researchers could only go so deep to examine life in the ocean. Before the mid-twentieth century, the deep-sea bottom could not be seen unless one dredged a piece of it and brought it to the surface. This has changed dramatically due to the development of new technologies in both the laboratory and the open sea. These new technological developments have allowed scientists to explore parts of the ocean they didn't even know existed.
   Mesopelagic activity was first investigated by use of sonar because the return bounces off of plankton and fish in the water. However, there are many challenges with acoustic survey methods and previous research has estimated errors in measured amounts of biomass of up to three orders of magnitude. This is due to inaccurate incorporation of depth, species size distribution, and acoustic properties of the species. Norway's Institute of Marine Research has launched a research vessel named Dr. Fridtjof Nansen to investigate mesopelagic activity using sonar with their focus being on the sustainability of fishing operations. To overcome the challenges faced with acoustic sampling, WHOI is developing remote operated vehicles (ROVs) and robots (Deep-See, Mesobot, and Snowclops) that are capable of studying this zone more precisely in a dedicated effort called the Ocean Twilight Zone project that launched in August 2018.
   The complexity, medical problems and physiological limits, such as those imposed by high pressure nervous syndrome, the accompanying high costs of professional saturation diving to extreme depths and the development of deep water atmospheric diving suits and remotely operated underwater vehicles in offshore oilfield drilling and production effectively ended the need for ever deeper, non-atmospheric manned intervention in the ocean. These practical factors make watch depth ratings of more than marketing curiosities.
  
  Section::::Experimental Sea-Dweller DEEPSEA CHALLENGE watch.
   The Authority has signed seven contracts for the exploration for polymetallic sulphides in the South West Indian Ridge, Central Indian Ridge and Mid-Atlantic Ridge with China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association (18 November 2011); the Government of Russia (29 October 2012); Government of the Republic of Korea (24 June 2014); Institut français de recherche pour l’exploitation de la mer (Ifremer,France, 18 November 2014); the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources of Germany (6 May 2015); and the Government of India (26 September 2016) and the Government of the Republic of Poland (12 February 2018).
   BULLET::::- Aluminauta DSV made completely of aluminum by the Reynolds Metals Aluminum Company, for the US Navy, once held the submarine deep diving record. It is no longer operational.
  
  Section::::List of deep submergence vehicles.:Deepsea Challenger.
  
  BULLET::::- Deepsea Challengera DSV made by the Acheron Project Pty Ltd, has reached Challenger Deep, the world's deepest seabed.
  
  Section::::List of deep submergence vehicles.:Limiting Factor.
   Oil exploration is an expensive, high-risk operation. Offshore and remote area exploration is generally only undertaken by very large corporations or national governments. Typical shallow shelf oil wells (e.g. North Sea) cost US$10 – 30 million, while deep water wells can cost up to US$100 million plus. Hundreds of smaller companies search for onshore hydrocarbon deposits worldwide, with some wells costing as little as US$100,000.
  
  Section::::Elements of a petroleum prospect.
   BULLET::::- the Taranaki Basin in New Zealand
  
  BULLET::::- the Kara Sea north of Siberia
  
  BULLET::::- the Arctic Ocean off the coasts of Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories
  
  Section::::Challenges.
  
  Offshore oil and gas production is more challenging than land-based installations due to the remote and harsher environment. Much of the innovation in the offshore petroleum sector concerns overcoming these challenges, including the need to provide very large production facilities. Production and drilling facilities may be very large and a large investment, such as the Troll A platform standing on a depth of 300 meters.
   A 2017 technical analysis stated that the technical challenges are enormous, and that "Without a genuinely strategic program plan, the great promise of an OWEP [Ocean Worlds Exploration Program] is highly likely to remain unfulfilled." The report noted that development of OWEP-enabling technologies must currently compete for priority with other Solar System objectives, which is not useful for strategic planning. The report recommends common, multi-mission technical infrastructure and secure funding to develop it.
  
  Section::::Science.
  
presuppositions: We should be doing more deep sea exploration because we have the technology. Deep sea exploration is technologically difficult.
corrections: The difficulty is in getting the funding to do the research. Deep sea exploration is not technologically difficult, but getting funding for non-military applications is currently difficult.
raw_presuppositions: We should be doing more deep sea exploration because we have the technology. Deep sea exploration is technologically difficult.
raw_corrections: The difficulty is in getting the funding to do the research. Deep sea exploration is not technologically difficult, but getting funding for non-military applications is currently difficult.