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Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat, builds an early submarine called The Nautilus.
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Charles Wyville Thomson finds sea life at 4,389 meters shattering previous theories that the sea was lifeless below 549 meters.
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Reginald Fessenden uses an oscillator to bounce a signal simultaneously off an iceberg and the seafloor.
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Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan modify a demand breathing regulator to engineer the Aqua-Lung, forever changing the course of human interaction with the sea.
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The deepest ocean dive takes place during this year and ocean laboratories evolve.
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The Deep Sea Drilling Program, a cooperative project involving universities and other research institutions, begins to sample the earth's crust beneath the sea.
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Hydrothermal vents are discovered, along with an ecosystem that survives without the energy of the sun, by a team led by Robert Ballard.
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The Coastal Zone Color Scanner launched and showed biological oceanographers the patterns, variability, complexity, and coherence of ocean biology for the first time.
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National Geographic Explorer James Cameron successfully travels to the bottom of the deepest known point in the ocean.
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An international scientific team announces a plan that aims to map the entire floor of the Earth's oceans by 2030.
