The voyage of the HMS Challenger in the 1870s was a sprawling 3-1/2-year expedition to explore the world’s oceans. The scientists aboard the vessel collected 100,000 specimens of sea creatures, discovered 5,000 new species, mapped the ocean floors and took hundreds of measurements of sea temperature and chemistry that formed the basis of the discipline of oceanography. The data collected by the Challenger provide a snapshot of the preindustrial oceans and a way of measuring how much they’ve changed.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign English professor Gillen D’Arcy Wood wrote about the expedition in his book “The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans’ Decline.” Wood is a historian of 19th-century environmental history and science and the director of the environmental writing program at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment.