Challenger voyage

Scientists on board HMS Challenger discovered a huge diversity of life in the deep sea, disproving the theory that nothing lived below 550 metres. These jars and slides are from the voyage, the first major expedition to investigate every physical and biological aspect of the oceans.

HMS Challenger left British shores in 1872 for a three-and-a-half-year voyage around the world. Experts on board brought back thousands of jars, bottles, tins and tubes of samples from the ocean floor. Many of the dried and cleaned sediments looked like sand, but were actually made up of billions of microfossils, tiny shells of single-celled organisms.

At the time little was known about the deep ocean. Some scientists even argued life could not exist deeper than 550 metres. So when telegraphic cables, trailed along the ocean floor, were raised for repair and found covered in tiny crustaceans, it sparked a quest to find out more.

Challenger criss-crossed the oceans - from South America to the Cape of Good Hope, from Antarctica to Australia, onto the Fiji Islands and Japan, then around the southern tip of South America and back up to Britain. The team of scientists on board recorded temperatures, currents and depths of more than eight kilometres. Fifty volumes of research were produced and they are a unique legacy still in use today.

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