Orpheus Ocean of New Bedford, Massachusetts is building robotic vehicles to descend into extreme depths to collect data from the seafloor.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.” Something strange has been

Soft robots that power themselves from their surroundings are moving from lab curiosity to strategic technology, promising machines that can swim the deepest oceans, survive the vacuum of space, and disappear into everyday clothing. Instead of rigid frames ...

Today we mourn the loss of The Nereus, a research robot that was exploring the Kermedec Trench, north east of New Zealand. This trench is one of the deepest parts of the ocean, and the pressure there was too much for The Nereus to handle. It imploded late ...

BERGEN, Norway (Reuters) - From the safety of their research vessel, scientists are exploring one of Earth's last frontiers - the sea floor - to discover more about valuable minerals vital in the manufacture of smartphones. The scientists, from the ...

Far below the reach of sunlight, a deep-sea robot descended to 1,300 m and sent back images of something that, on paper, should not be there at all. In a stretch of the Pacific that scientists thought they understood reasonably well, the machine’s ...

For decades, Antarctic sea ice behaved in a puzzling way. Even as global temperatures rose, sea ice around the continent was expanding. Then, in 2016, the trend abruptly reversed — ice levels dropped and have remained low ever since.

When we dream of landscapes, we might imagine rolling valleys or rugged mountains. But there is a whole landscape hidden from human view: the secret world of the seafloor. Half of Earth's oceans are more than 3.2 km deep. Beneath them lie cavernous plains ...