Ocean

Researchers have developed a new solar-powered desalination system that produces high amounts of drinkable water and uses a technique inspired by the movement of deep-ocean currents to avoid the common problem of salt clogging.

The CEO and co-founder of Triton Submarines takes us through some highlight dives from an extraordinary career, from salvaging the "smoking gun" from the Challenger space shuttle, to filming with James Cameron, to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

It takes guts to start a company. It takes a lot more guts to start a company manufacturing cutting-edge private submarines. And as Triton's CEO and co-founder explains, it takes even more guts to slap down your money and become the first customer.

2023 is not a great year to be running a submarine company, but we caught up with Patrick Lahey, co-founder of Florida's Triton Submarines, for a three-part chat about a remarkable career with highlights as low as a human being can possibly go.

Back in 2020 we told you about the QuenchSea, a foot-pump-powered portable device for desalinating sea water. Well, its makers are back with the QuenchSea Reel, which uses deep-ocean water pressure to do the same job.

The flapping motion of a new robotic jellyfish is not only good for propulsion, but it can also draw small bits of debris up from the ocean floor without contact. Such a robot could remove trash from delicate ocean environments, like coral reefs.

In July last year, Saildrone launched one its sensor-packed unmanned aquatic drones on a voyage of discovery in the North Pacific, tasked with filling in ocean mapping blanks around Alaska's Aleutian Islands as well as off the coast of California.

Green hydrogen can't be viewed as environmentally friendly if it drinks huge amounts of fresh water, or results in the bulk output of toxic chlorine, according to RMIT researchers who say they've come up with a cheap technique that does neither.

If you're designing robots for the exploration of oceans on other planets, you want something that's tough, versatile and easy to store in a spacecraft. It turns out that soft-bodied robots inspired by a marine organism may be the perfect choice.

Imagine if you were tasked with sorting and separating thousands of tiny fossils, most of them less than a millimeter wide. It would quite a tedious, time-consuming task … which is why scientists have recently created a robot to do the job.

The green economy desperately needs huge quantities of battery metals, and they're sitting right there on the deep ocean floor. Here's a device designed to harvest them with the minimum possible impact to one of the world's last untouched ecosystems.

The seafloor is rich in valuable metals, but gathering them is disruptive to the environment. An international project has now tested a system called Apollo 2, which can vacuum up metal nodules without kicking up sediment.