Barely 150 years ago only the top few fathoms of the world's oceans were known about. Scientists and naturalists had concluded that due the great pressure, lack of light and extreme cold that the deep waters of the Earth were lifeless, Azoic.

One man who disagreed, was Professor Charles Wyville Thomson, and in the 1860s he persuaded the British Government to lend two Royal Navy ships, HMS Lightning and HMS Porcupine to conduct deep ocean surveys of the waters between the Faroe Islands and the Hebrides.

The results were so successful, that a major round the world oceanographic survey, using the converted frigate HMS Challenger, was now put into practice and Challenger departed Portsmouth in December 1872 on a voyage that would last three and a half years.




http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-history/expeditions-collecting/hms-challenger-expedition/index.html

Challenger's route:




The Royal Society stated the voyage’s scientific goals as:
To investigate the physical conditions of the deep sea in the great ocean basins (as far as the neighbourhood of the Great Southern Ice Barrier) in regard to depth, temperature, circulation, specific :gravity and penetration of light.
To determine the chemical composition of seawater at various depths from the surface to the bottom, the organic matter in solution and the particles in suspension.
To ascertain the physical and chemical character of deep-sea deposits and the sources of these deposits.
To investigate the distribution of organic life at different depths and on the deep seafloor.

Soundings taken on the 23rd March 1875, reached a depth of 4475 fathoms, (8184 metres). Modern sonic soundings have confirmed a depth of 10994 metres a short distance from Challenger's original position. The site is known as Challenger Deep:

Bathysaurus ferox one of the more than 4000 new species found during the Expedition:

Challenger was so important to oceanographic research that the first space shuttle was named after her.

Triceratops wrote:

Bathysaurus ferox one of the more than 4000 new species found during the Expedition:

The deepsea lizardfish which confirmed in the minds of many that mariners’ tales about the oceans being so vast and deep and capable of containing any number of weird creatures and mythical monsters such as the Leviathan, the Kraken and Godzilla etc could not so easily be dismissed. Since when a large number of ‘living fossils’ have been discovered (although Nessie herself remains elusive).

One such (and at the other end of the size spectrum) is Monoplacophora, a small mollusc previously known only as a fossil but discovered alive on the deep bed of the Pacific in 1952 by the Danish Scientific Research Foundation. Their ship KDM Galathea II undertook a round-the-world expedition between 1950-2 to mark the hundredth anniversary of the voyage of the first KDM Galathea. That earlier expedition had been a circumnavigation undertaken between 1845-47. It had ostensibly been inspired by the voyages of HMS Beagle, and Galathea did indeed make significant discoveries in natural history recorded by distinguished naturalists aboard such as botanist Ferdinand Didrichsen, zoologist Wilhelm Behn and herpetologist Johannes Reinhardt.

However, political and trade considerations were also high on the agenda. Ever since having been defeated in 2 conflicts with Britain during the Napoleonic Wars and which had resulted in the destruction of the Danish fleet and the loss of Norway, Copenhagen had adopted an increasingly pragmatic approach in its relations with London. By the 1840s, the Danish government and the Kongelige Octroyerede Danske Asiatiske Kompagni (the Danish Asiatic Company) had concluded that their best interests in Asia would be served by aligning themselves with the British Empire there. To that end the Asiatiske Komapagni effectively dissolved itself in 1843 and sold its possessions in India to the British East India Company. These included the towns of Trankebar in Tanjore and Frederiknagore (Serampore) in Bengal. In return, the Danes received preferential treatment from the British vis-a-vis the China trade which had opened up as a result of the recent First Opium War. Nevertheless, Denmark retained sovereignty over the Nicobar Islands, the survey of which was one of Galathea’s missions following the formal handover of Tranquebar and Serampore to the British. The survey of the Nicobar Islands, however, concluded that there was little to be gained economically from those remote territories and so they too were later sold to the British in 1868.



(A 1950s book celebrating the voyage of Galathea II)
     
A third Galathea expedition took place between 2006-7 which looked at, among other things, the effects of climate change on marine zooplankton. You can read more about the 3 Galathea expeditions here:
         
Galathea-ekspeditionerne (Danish language)

Galathea expeditons (English language)

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