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Daunting enough is the fact that most of our ocean remains unmapped—but what about the mysteries that take place inside that ocean? James Cameron, one of the world’s best-known film directors, has teamed up with BBC Studios and the ocean exploration initiative OceanX to unravel some of the most intriguing head-scratchers swimming around the deep sea. Their findings are documented in the new National Geographic series “OceanXplorers,” an exclusive clip from which we reveal below.
Each of OceanXplorers’ six episodes details an expedition on OceanX’s 285-foot research vessel, which the billionaire-owned organization aptly named OceanXplorer. The ship boasts four laboratories, a media center (perfect for NatGeo’s show and for OceanX’s widely-loved TikTok profile), a helicopter, two three-person submersibles, two remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs), and a sonar array capable of mapping 19,685 feet underwater. On board the OceanXplorer were dozens of mariners, media experts, and researchers, including mechanical engineer and ROV pilot Eric Stackpole and professional adventurer Aldo Kane, both of whom spoke with us about the project.
Credit: OceanX
“The OceanXplorer is one of the most capable research ships on the entire planet,” Stackpole said. “It feels to me almost like being on the USS Enterprise, because this ship can go anywhere in the world and make discoveries that have never been touched before. To be aboard the OceanXplorer with world-class scientists, having conversations around the dinner table with them, felt honestly surreal.”
Debuting Aug. 18 on National Geographic and Aug. 19 on Disney+ and Hulu, OceanXplorers tracks six marine expeditions crafted for television by executive producer James Cameron. In one expedition, the OceanXplorer crew set out to study the fascinating yet elusive navigation skills that drive hammerhead migration. Sensitive to water temperature, these sharks swim toward the equator in search of warmth every winter. While hammerheads, like other sharks, use electroreceptors to communicate and hunt, the OceanX team wanted to uncover whether hammerheads could also tune into Earth’s magnetic field to navigate the ocean.
As the OceanXplorer sliced through the crystal-clear waters off the coast of Florida, marine researchers used the vessel’s imaging equipment to track a few migrating sharks. It was Kane who eventually helped Dr. Erin Spencer and Dr. Yannis Papastamatiou, two marine ecologists, tag a hammerhead by clamping a sensor onto its dorsal fin.
“Being in the water with [hammerhead sharks] makes you feel incredibly small,” said Kane, who has served as a Royal Marine Commando, climbed Mount Everest, organized undercover meetings with drug cartels, and abseiled into an active volcano. “They’re incredibly big and glide through the water with such ease—it’s phenomenal.”
Equipped with an accelerometer and a camera, the sensor tracked the hammerhead’s speed and captured its surroundings as it moved throughout the water. The result was hours upon hours of footage that revealed the hammerhead’s daily life—and unique migratory techniques—in unprecedented detail.
“One thing that has been underappreciated among scientists up until recently is the value of a camera itself,” Stackpole said. “Even though it’s just taking images, there’s so much data you can extract. You can see how quickly a shark’s tail flaps back and forth, you can get a sense for how fast it’s traveling. This helps us extract a ton of information about an animal and its environment.” Though the shark’s tag contained similar technology to what can be found in today’s smartphones, Stackpole says those minute sensors gave the team a “comprehensive view” of what was going on underwater.
“In a way, that imagery was the final piece of our jigsaw puzzle,” Kane said. “Before, scientists would get data like the speed of a shark’s tailbeat or its depth underwater, but still wonder what the shark was doing. Now, they can say: ‘This is what the shark was doing, this is what the data says, and here’s the context of why the shark was acting that way.'”
Their hammerhead expedition yielded more than just shark research. As the OceanXplorer crew scoured the ocean, their manned submersibles, Neptune and Nadir—which can each dive up to 3,280 feet—and ROVs stumbled upon a series of strange topological features. Under the ocean’s surface were pillar-shaped land masses stretching upward from the seafloor, adding questions and answers to scientists’ larger effort to map the ocean’s topography.
“If you go on the internet and search for what the bottom of the ocean looks like, it will show you a sort of map, but that’s usually very inaccurate,” Stackpole said. “It’s implied from satellites that travel overhead and measure differences in gravity. Thanks to the OceanXplorer’s bathymetric sensors and the subs, we were able to understand on a broad level for the first time what certain parts of the ocean look like.”
Credit: Yannis Papanastasopoulos/Unsplash
Given OceanX’s mission to increase the amount of ocean research available to the rest of the world, it’s likely scientists from other organizations will likely receive access to this data—and other information gleaned throughout the OceanXplorers program—in the coming months. Stackpole, whose career has involved producing low-cost ROVs and smart buoys through his startups OpenROV and Sofar Ocean Technologies, is particularly passionate about research accessibility in marine science.
“Our intention is always to get more people involved,” he said. “OceanXplorers is an opportunity to bring the rest of the world to the rest of the world. It’s not just about the data we collect, but also about the experiences we had. With the show, people will see our successes and our failures, plus what it looked like to make hard decisions on the fly as our environment changed. We’re looking forward to bringing the world with us on those adventures.”
It took about two weeks for the crew to film their hammerhead expedition, which appears in the episode “Hammerhead Highway” via National Geographic, Hulu, and Disney+ on Aug. 25. But Stackpole was careful to extoll the years of work that led the OceanXplorers team to seabound success.
“In some episodes, you’ll see moments in which a researcher has spent over a decade trying to get a glimpse of something we saw on the show,” he said. “When that’s revealed, it’s an incredible feeling.”