Accelerating deep-sea research through accessible technologies

The deep sea is a vast, biodiverse realm that plays a vital role in sustaining life on Earth. After over a century of exploration, however, knowledge of deep-sea processes, lifeforms, and tipping points remains alarmingly shallow. This ‘Perspective’ proposes that maintaining the paradigm of high-cost approaches in deep-sea science, to the exclusion of lower-cost methods, is creating barriers to access and, therefore, progress. Meanwhile, rapid advances in low-cost, open-source hardware, software, and artificial intelligence present an immense opportunity to enable more scalable, inclusive research. Given the ocean’s mounting threats from climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource exploitation, failure to seize this opportunity places our future at risk.