His work created new advances in marine technology including the FLIP Floating Instrument Platform, the Deep Tow vehicle for study of the seafloor, and the use of acoustics for underwater navigation and geodetic positioning.

[2] FLIP has been used to study the acoustics of whales and other marine mammals, heat exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere, and the effects of seismic waves on water.

Because these devices sent out broad-beam sound waves from the sea surface, details of the seafloor shape remained obscured by fuzzy smeared-out echoes.

Spiess’ solution to the resolution and mapping problem was twofold; bring the echo sounder close to the seafloor and locate the device within a seabed survey navigation network.

[6] During the mid 1970s, several Deep Tow cruises to the mouth of the Gulf of California at 21o N resulted in production of a geologic map of the East Pacific Rise (EPR) spreading ridge axis.

One of Spiess' projects during the RISE expedition (with Bruce Luyendyk) was to use the crewed submersible ALVIN for seafloor gravity measurements across the axis of spreading.

[9] The diving expedition ultimately resulted in the discovery of high temperature black-smoker vents for which Spiess and his coauthors received the Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the best paper published in Science magazine in 1980.