History of research ships

In 1766, the Royal Society hired Cook to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun.

[2] The Endeavour was a sturdy boat, well designed and equipped for the ordeals she would face, and fitted out with facilities for her research personnel, Joseph Banks.

The search operations for the lost Franklin expedition were barely forgotten as Russia, Great Britain, Germany and Sweden set new scientific tasks for the Arctic Ocean.

Fridtjof Nansen's famous Fram took deep-sea soundings and carried out hydrographical, meteorological and magnetic surveys throughout the polar basin.

In 1884, a press item stating that the American Jeanette had sunk near the Siberian coast three years before inspired Fridtjof Nansen.

Three years after the loss of the Jeanette and de Long's death, some items of equipment and few sou'wester pants were found on the southwestern Greenland coast.

When Nansen heard about that there was only one possible explanation for him: These pieces had drifted surrounded by ice via the polar basin and along the East coast of Greenland until they ended up in Julianehab.

This hazarded a guess that there was a current which floated from somewhere between the pole and Franz Josef Land through the Arctic Ocean to the East coast of Greenland.

For this adventure Adrien de Gerlache purchased the whale catcher Patria for 70,000 francs, overhauled the engine, arranged additional cabins, installed a laboratory and renamed the ship Belgica.

In 1895 Georg Neumayer, director of the Hamburg naval observatory, launched the slogan "off to the South Pole" at the sixth international geographic congress.

Last but not least, motivated by reports of the Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink, who was the first person on the new continent, the congress declared the exploration of the Antarctica the urgent task for the following years.

From 1901 until 1903, Erich von Drygalski led the German Antarctic expedition and carried out extensive studies mainly in the southern part of the Indian Ocean.

Under the new name Scotia, this ship completed its way into the Southern Ocean and was very successful thanks to dredging and trawl catches at great depth in the Weddell Sea and off the coast.

Sir Ernest Shackleton, a member of the "Discovery-Expedition" of 1901, returned with the forty-year-old Nimrod back into the Antarctic in order to march to the South Pole but had to give up just 180 km before his goal.

While Scott travelled in the twenty-six-year-old Terra Nova, which had escorted him out of the ice in 1903, Roald Amundsen borrowed the reliable Fram for his South Pole expedition.

The failed attempt to cross Antarctica, for which Shackleton used the Endurance and Mawson's Aurora, was one of the last Antarctic expeditions before the outbreak of the First World War.

His longtime comrade-in-arms Frank Wild assumed the leadership and advanced as far as the South Sandwich Islands until pack ice induced him to turn around and make for home.

Other geomagnetic and oceanographic mapping expeditions followed e.g. the American research ship Carnegie in the Pacific Ocean from 1928 to 1929, the detailed reconnaissance in Indonesia by the Dutch Willebrord Snellius, the exploration of the waters around the Antarctic by the British William Scoresby and Discovery II and the expedition of the American schooner Atlantis that sailed from the West Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico between 1932 and 1938.

Since the envisaged research ships William Scoresby, Dana and George Bligh were inapplicable or unavailable respectively, the offer of the Egyptian government to take the "Mabahiss" was accepted.

During this period she covered the Red Sea, Bay of Biscay, Indian Ocean, and the Gulf of Oman—more than 22,000 nautical miles (41,000 km) whereas chemical, physical and biological assays were taken.

For this international experiment the German Meteor, the Danish Dana, and the French air-base vessel Carimare delivered data.

On the way back to Europe, the ship conducted oceanographic, biological and meteorological observations and every fifteen to thirty minutes echo soundings were taken.

Albeit the big seafaring nations enlarged the postwar marine research, especially the United States strongly reengaged, other expeditions of two smaller countries were vitally important.

Another significant find of the expedition was the discovery of a "living fossil", the monoplacophoran Neopilina galathea, dredged from the bottom of the Mexican Gulf.

After the Second World War, the number of missions escalated worldwide as one can read in the Newsletters of Cooperative Investigations of the Mediterranean from Monaco.

For the exploration of deep-sea circulation and strong sea currents, sixty research ships out of forty nations were deployed.

In cooperation of the research ships Crawford, Atlantis, Discovery II, Chain and the Argentine sounding vessel Capitan Canepa, fifteen profiles at intervals of eight latitudes between 48° N and 48° S were taken.

Denmark appointed the Dana and the Jens Christian Svabo, Iceland the Bjarni Sæmundson, Canada the Hudson, Norway the Helland Hansen, USSR the Boris Davydov and the Professor Zubov, Great Britain the Challenger, the Shackleton and the Explorer, West Germany the Meteor, the Walther Herwig, and the Meerkatze II.

More than fifty ships worked in the equatorial areas around the globe and collected oceanographic and meteorological measured data for an "inventory of the world weather".

Operationally, however, known autonomous vehicles were initially limited to rivers, lakes, and bays due to navigation and collision-avoidance issues.