Challenger Expedition

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

in the annals of science, an exploring expedition undertaken 1872-76 for the purpose of making deep-sea soundings. The Challenger was a British man-o'-war under command of naval officers. It carried a full equipment of apparatus for the investigation of ocean phenomena. It carried also a party of scientists. The good ship steamed 70,000 miles and was gone three and a half years. The expedition crossed the Atlantic, by way of the Canaries, Madeira, and the West Indies , to Nova Scotia . Thence the route lay south to the Cape Verde Islands, and on around the world, via Cape of Good Hope , Australia, China, Japan, Chile, Strait of Magellan, and home to England again. The ocean was dredged for ooze, dragged with nets for fish, and sounded with plummets for depth. Hitherto unknown oceanic plateaus, currents, submerged volcanoes, depths, and precipices were discovered. Thousands of specimens of odd animals, previously unseen by man, were brought up by the dredge and preserved in glass jars. Professor Wyville Thompson and his assistants brought home an immense amount of scientific material, and information charts were made of the oceanic floor, currents, and winds. The fauna, flora, and life conditions of the deep sea were studied as never before. The results of the investigation were published, under the supervision of Sir John Murray, in fifty royal octavo volumes, with 29,000 pages, 2,000 plates, and a large number of maps and pictures. One of the results is a physical map of the bottom of the oceans. From the top of Mount Everest in Asia to the bottom of Aldrich Deep in the Pacific Ocean is a drop of more than ten miles. The results of the expedition also seem to substantiate the belief that animal life originated on land and not in the sea; that the sea is peopled with degenerate land animals; the further from shore and the deeper the sea, the more degenerate, sightless, colorless, and grotesque are the forms of life. The action of cold currents occasionally changes the temperature of deep sea localities so remarkably as to kill off sea animals, which may, in such cases, cover the sea bottom for leagues with their dead bodies. The information gathered has been used freely by writers of physical geography. Among the results of the expedition were measurements of the greatest depth of the oceans. The depths are given in feet: Atlantic 27,366 Pacific 30,000 Indian 18,582 Arctic 9,000 Southern 25,200