Want to see the bottom of the ocean? Katy Croff Bell has a tool for that.

We know almost nothing about the deep seafloor. After decades of exploration, it is still the least understood habitat on Earth. This blind spot has long vexed National Geographic Explorer Katy Croff Bell, who has led dozens of ocean expeditions around the world. After all, the deep sea encompasses some two-thirds of the globe and plays a key role in sequestering carbon and regulating the climate. So Bell and a few other researchers recently set out to quantify the gaps in our knowledge.

The results were even worse than they thought: A mere .001 percent of the deep seafloor has been visually observed. They found that though there have been some 44,000 deep-sea dives since the 1950s, many surveyed the same sites, resulting in only about 12,000 unique locations explored. Their findings also revealed that just five high-income countries have been responsible for nearly all the dives. The cost of deep-sea research is partly to blame for this monopoly. The price of an advanced tool like a deep-submergence vehicle ranges from tens of thousands to millions of dollars.

For almost a decade, Bell has been working to make the deep sea more accessible. Her pace picked up in 2018, when she convened nearly 250 researchers at the MIT Media Lab to discuss ways to increase our knowledge of the seafloor, from cheaper sensors and machine learning to community engagement and robotics. By the event’s close, Bell had a realization: Why couldn’t one piece of technology be cheap to make, easy to operate, and suited for a wide variety of vessels? That could transform the field, Bell recalls thinking, “and really accelerate our understanding of the deep ocean.” The veteran ocean researcher decided to make it a reality.

(Why this deep-sea explorer thinks diversity is so important for science)

Fast-forward seven years, and Bell is on the cusp of debuting a revolutionary deep-submergence vehicle that has many features of the multimillion-dollar devices—but at a cost of less than $10,000. “It will be a total game changer,” Bell says. Not much bigger than a scuba tank, the tool is being built to withstand the immense pressure that exists 20,000 feet below the water’s surface, allowing it to reach 98 percent of the ocean floor. Bell and her colleagues at the Ocean Discovery League (ODL), a nonprofit she founded in 2021, named it the Deep Ocean Research and Imaging System, or DORIS.

The finished product will be equipped with sensors to detect temperature, depth, and salinity, but its primary goal is to capture footage with its 4K still and video cameras, which will help scientists better understand the measurements and samples taken from the seafloor. And the development process has the attention of major players: ODL is creating the prototype in partnership with tech company Blue Robotics and receiving funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among others.

Future upgrades will include the ability to collect samples and audio. Bell’s team is also collaborating with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to create machine learning models that can rapidly analyze all the data that the tool retrieves.

Bell and her ODL colleagues have identified thousands of locations that would greatly diversify and increase the number of surveyed sites, including spots in the Southern Ocean and the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Exploring these points would “effectively double the number of unique locations around the world that we’ve seen,” Bell says.

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DORIS will help with that. Because of its small size and ease of deployment, the new device will be launched from vessels not typically used for deep-sea research. One example is the Hōkūle‘a, a double-hulled canoe used by the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS), an organization working to expand knowledge of traditional navigation techniques. Bell collaborated with PVS as she tested early low-cost instruments, and the Hawaii-based organization is planning to use a DORIS prototype on an upcoming journey across the Pacific. She also will be working with other Explorers to deploy the new tech on research trips as part of a multiyear project supported by National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions, which is dispatching a number of scientists to study the world’s five oceans.

Bell has never been more excited about the potential for discovery: “What’s left in the 99.999 percent that we haven’t seen yet?”