OceanXplorer: "A Floating Research Institution"
If a submarine takes a scoop of dirt and there's no one there to analyze it, is it exploration? Hard philosophical question we don't have to worry about, since our Swiss-army knife of sampling the depths, the OceanXplorer, is also a "floating research institution." When samples come back to the surface they're usually mobbed like a KPop band (by scientists though) then carted off to one of the not one, not two, but THREE science labs on board, all geared towards wringing as much data as possible from every grain of dirt (sorry—*sediment), fragment of coral, and drop of water. We've watched our science team spend the better part of the last eighteen months fitting them out with everything from tanks that pump fresh seawater over live samples to an oven (for drying samples, like seagrass, not baking) and hey, if you watched our Story recently you know one even has a commercial grade microwave. Not for heating late-night burritos (although... you could?) but for melting the components for the gel required to sequence DNA. You can look at DNA and not only figure out "who" you're looking at, but also figure out which parts are telling the animals to do the cool things they do, like, develop tissues that can withstand living at depths of several thousand feet, or grow a skin 15 cm (6 in) thick as in the case of whale sharks. You know. Normal science stuff. All happening on board right now.
