I understand bottom of oceans have huge pressure differentials and lack of light.
However I don’t see why we can’t use two fiber optic cables (one for light one for camera) to explore the bottom of the ocean. When I say fiber optics for camera I mean the slender cameras they use during surgeries.
I’m sure these strands of plastic/glass can handle way more pressure than human body or metal submersibles.
In: Engineering
They’re hard to manuever and the sensors are too small to record the very little amount of light there, so the images will be noisy, then the water at these depths blocks a lot of light, and the ocean is too big.
What they can use to get very high resolution pictures of oceans is specialized sonar devices which bounce sound waves around.
You probably *could* do that. The problem is that just dropping a fiber optic line with a camera and light on the end down into the depths of the ocean isn’t very useful. Without any method to move it around or point it at things all you have is several thousand feet of fiber optics with a camera flopping on the end.
Of course you could add in some kind of stabilizing structure, mounting points for propellers and their associated housings so they can be pointed in various directions, power supplies and electronics to control all those things, maybe some kind of manipulator and collection devices so you can take samples… But at this point what you are making is a tethered submersible. We have those.
Sure you could do that. But then you’d just get a video stream from… somewhere. You want to know where exactly you are and to be able to move around so you can investigate the interesting bits. Which means you need to get electrical power down there as well and some method of propulsion. This means we need a rather large device at the end of the cable.
It’s already done, with a big robot attached to that fiber optic. A 4km long endoscopic probe wouldn’t be very practical.
Eg: [https://nautiluslive.org/](https://nautiluslive.org/) (you can watch them explore live during expeditions)
edit: ok i’m cheating, that fiber optic transmit data.
This idea is not scalable. The bottom of the oceans is so enormously gigantic, unimaginably huge, that you could spend a budget of a rich country on mapping with optic cameras every year just to progress a tiny fraction.
The answer is more among the lines of “how much does outfitting, insuring and sending a ship with full crew and scientists (all of which expect salary) to the middle of ocean and use expensive equipment to record some seafloor mud – daily?”
It’s being done here and there of course, but imagine that insane cash flow put into trying to cure cancer or invent better batteries or cure crop diseases or whatever. Science – like everything else – is not free and generally, must serve some sort of greater purpose. Most universities, governments and even private parties just can’t afford and/or justify such expeditions.
We can and do use unmanned subs tethered to a support vessel to explore the ocean floor. The problem isn’t getting something down there to have a look around, the reason we haven’t explored most of the ocean floor is that there’s just so much of it to explore and not enough reward to justify spending the kind of time, effort and money that would be required to explore it so we tend to focus our efforts on specific points of interest rather than general looking around.
It’s also worth noting that a simple visual look probably isn’t the most useful method for exploring anyway as you can’t see very far and even a thin layer of sediment would hide a lot so we tend to use sonar to scan larger areas more quickly
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