The last weather ship in the world lies anchored in a severe and lonely place in the Norwegian Sea. Since 1948, its crews have taken water temperatures to produce the longest continuous set of deep-ocean data available. After about 4 decades, those data revealed a dramatic, persistent rise in the temperature 2,000 meters deep. Is it a sign of a fundamental change in deep-ocean circulation? Of global climate change? Uwe Send, an oceanographer at the University of Kiel in Germany, says no one knows. “The problem is, we don’t have this information but in a very few places in the ocean,” he says.
Despite satellites that monitor ocean-surface conditions and recent advances in sensor technology, less than 5 percent of the world’s ocean bottom has been explored, according to a recent report from the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy.