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We know more about the cosmos than we do about our oceans and ocean beds

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
5 Mar 2025
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The OceanXplorer’s journey and China’s deep-sea ‘space station’ in the South China Sea may help explain some of the origins of life on Earth while contributing to exciting new knowledge about the planet’s ocean floor and everything it has to offer.

There is rarely anything new in the world that gets me really excited – not in a good way, anyway.

Kristin Engel’s report in Daily Maverick on the docking of the OceanXplorer in Cape Town last week was one of the brightest lights in a very dark week so far – the week that may, in a couple of decades, be remembered as the period when the West, which had dominated the world for five centuries, (finally) lost itself.

This decline and probable dissolution of “the West” is something that has kept me occupied for most of the past five years or so. (See here, here, here, here and here for a flavour of what I have written on the topic).

The story of the OceanXplorer’s work in Engel’s report comes in the wake of China’s recent launch of its “deep-sea space station”, a facility intended to sit about 1,800m below the surface of the South China Sea, the region where I currently find myself studying geo-strategic/political economic matters, the plight of refugees, and the current work of Asean (the Association of South East Asian Nations), among others.

I will, in April, rejoin my comrades and compatriots in carrying the combined weight of load shedding, “fruitless expenditure” and the scourges of crime, gender-based violence, home invasions and banditry on our national roads.

There really is much more to the world than what happens in the West. Adding to that, I am not scared that South Africa would “lose the West” or that we are approaching “near pariah status” with Washington.

I should probably declare, at this point, that I am not funded by any government, I do not have any government or embassy on speed dial, and do not share ideological solidarities or pangs of loyalty to former colonial metropoles.

China’s deep-sea station is expected to be completed by 2030, and will have capacity for six scientists to stay on board for up to a month at a time. At the launch of the project, the Chinese specified that its prime objective was to “deepen humanity’s understanding of deep-sea science by studying cold seep systems in the South China Sea”.

The parts of the launch that piqued my interest were the focus on research and development and exploration on the origins of life; the green development of deep-sea resources such as combustible ice; and the search for neutrinos – the tiny, elusive subatomic particles from deep space. Read more comprehensive reports (not state sources) on China’s initiative here and here.

Back to the science of the seafloor via the cosmos


The “search for neutrinos” – or “the ghost particle” as it has been described – is thrilling. If you have time, and courage (or there is something wrong with you) read this recent paper on the search for elusive neutrinos.

For the rest of us mere mortals, it may suffice to start from the knowledge that neutrinos are very small, high-energy particles that are considered to be extremely volatile, and so powerful that they travel from the farthest reaches of our universe across the most extreme environments, and can pass through anything (and anyone, for that matter) without changing their structure.

That, I’m afraid, is as much as I dare myself to declare, dear reader, but if you have the time and courage, also read this paper. And yes, as if I don’t have anything better to do, I read some of this stuff.

Anyway, the bigger issue, at least as far as I’m concerned (I just know that there is a troll somewhere who would disagree) is that we know more about outer space, how many moons Jupiter has, how toxic the atmosphere of Venus is, and that it’s made up of 96% carbon dioxide, 3.5% nitrogen and clouds of sulphur dioxide. Some scholars think Venus is hospitable, others disagree, but they would probably agree that we (humans) would not survive for longer than five minutes or so.

We know that Uranus has a relatively small rocky centre surrounded by methane, water and ammonia fluids, and, like Jupiter or Saturn, its atmosphere is made of hydrogen and helium. It is the presence of methane that makes Uranus blue.

All of this knowledge is simply to point out that we know more about the cosmos than we do about our oceans and ocean beds.

A quick note on global political economy, because that’s what I do. So far states have used the oceans for maritime trade (one of the things I am studying at the moment is the almost 2,000-year history of boat-building in the Nusantara, and the Indian Ocean Maritime Spice Route from South East Asia to Seychelles, Madagascar and around the Cape to west Africa) and have stopped short of claiming vast bodies of water beyond their exclusive economic zones as their own.

If they could, states would, to be sure, parcel off oceans for permanent settlement or for the sole purpose of extraction of resources for the benefit of the metropoles…

Post-post-Renaissance European exploration is rising


What makes the objectives of the Chinese (and OceanXplorer) significant is that the knowledge of our universe, of our solar system in particular, has relied quite heavily on post-Renaissance Europe, and the Copernican Revolution. That’s fine.

Believe it or not, but I write only about things of which I am confident. The heliocentric-geocentric debate lies way outside the scope of my knowledge base. And anyway, Copernicus could not possibly be held responsible for Nazi use of his (and Galileo’s) work and ideas.

Nevertheless, having led exploration and research into “outer space”, the West has done comparatively little exploration and knowledge production about the deep seas and the seafloor. The earliest knowledge of the deep seas I gained – and I am not a representative example – was in the context of global political economic relations and institutions.

The first transatlantic telegraphic cable was laid in 1858. The International Telegraph Union was founded in 1865, and the “birth” of international cooperation, of global governance and the multilateral system, can be pegged to 1858/65.

Today, of course, cables criss-cross the ocean to bring us the internet. Still, we have used the oceans mainly to make material life on land easier.

A critical mass of scientific knowledge is building around marine biology, oceanography and physical geography, together with international law, global institutions/governance and environmental sustainability. But there remains relatively little knowledge of the seafloor and what it can tell us about ourselves.

A personal curiosity is whether we may find, in our deepest oceans, answers to the question about the transition from geochemistry (the chemical processes that created the Earth) to biochemistry (the chemical processes that explain living creatures on Earth). I have almost no knowledge of any of this, notwithstanding years of auditing physics lectures.

Eight years ago, a special edition of Elements: An International Magazine of Mineralogy, Geochemistry and Petrology, put together a set of essays to address much of what is most befuddling (to me) about the transition from geochemistry to biochemistry. The magazine introduced its special edition in the following way:

“How did life arise from inorganic molecules? Did it develop in an early Earth primordial soup or was there an extraterrestrial source? Although the answer to the origin of sentient life has yet to be discovered by scientists, the origins of the genetic blueprints for life [ribonucleic acid] the workhorses of life [proteins], and the protective membranes for life [lipids] are rapidly being uncovered.

“But, making the basic building blocks is only the first step. The next steps involve converting those molecules into viable cells. Believe it or not, geoscientists are needed to help uncover the answers to these questions because abiogenesis requires chemical, biological and geological considerations. We hope the articles in this issue help introduce you to this exciting field of research.”

Deeper knowledge of, say, alkaline hydrothermal vents may get us closer to the actual or likely origins of life on Earth than the transition from geochemistry to biochemistry, about which I know so little but that keeps me awake at night. See this insightful essay on hydrothermal vents and the origins of life published almost eight years ago… I said all of this was exciting, and did not say I knew anything at all.

What I do know is that the largest geographic body on Earth is the ocean, which covers about 70% of the globe’s surface. We give oceans different names only to make ourselves more comfortable, so to speak. Here’s a little exercise. Imagine the outcry if, say, Bangladesh decided to rename the Bay of Bengal the Bay of Bangladesh – just because it could?

From the cosmos back down to the seafloor


Why, then, has it been so “easy” to go out into the universe and not into our oceans? I think it’s the physics. In some ways it is easier – we can, somehow, manage the pressures of space flight, but the intense pressures of the deep ocean are much more treacherous.

The pressure on the human body at sea level is about 103,421 pascals (15 pounds per square inch). When you travel into space this pressure decreases significantly. However, if you dive into the Mariana Trench which is about 11km deep (the Trench is up the road from where I currently find myself – kinda) you would experience more than 1,000 times greater pressure on the human body than you would while standing on the beach.

The ocean seems to be a greater mystery than the universe. Physicists and astrophysicists, cosmologists and astronomers are pretty sure that the cosmic microwave background is the oldest light in the universe, and that it lit up about 400,000 years after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Imagine that.

Now ask why we have yet to provide definitive answers about ghost particles on the seabed (I use that for effect because it sounds like a neat title for a song), or hydrothermal vents, or when, exactly, we moved from geochemistry to biochemistry.

To conclude: While there are probably Western efforts to study the seabed, the Copernican paradigm is not likely to be shifted any time soon – if ever at all – but knowledge production must, necessarily, emerge from around the world. Which makes the Chinese initiative in the South China Sea, and the OceanXplorer’s journey, all the more exciting.

I may not know much about much, but I certainly look forward to explanations and more evidence about the methane gas that is percolating through the seafloor, bubbling into water columns, collecting in pockets and settling in sediments on the seabed. Or the deep mysteries in the cold, pressurised depths of the ocean. Life is truly thriving deep beneath the seafloor.

The one fear that remains is the extent to which whatever is found at the bottom of the oceans would be exploited by private corporations under (national) flags of convenience to “spread freedom”, “fight terrorists”, or to fulfil biblical promises… DM

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