Undersea explorer Robert Ballard to speak at Oklahoma State University Research Week

Much like Lewis and Clark's expedition, the trust's ship isn't a research vessel, he said — it isn't intended so much to take measurements and gather data, as it is to go out and see what it finds. Many of the areas the ship explores haven't been mapped even as well as the surface of Mars, he said.

When the ship is at sea, the crew works around the clock, he said. When the explorers find something noteworthy, they contact the University of Rhode Island's Inner Space Center. An on-call expert at the university then contacts a team of other researchers around the country, who then go to work analyzing the discovery.

The crew's discoveries are varied, Ballard said — they could be geological formations, new life-forms or shipwrecks. So the ship's crew and the staff at the Inner Space Center need to be ready to respond to a wide range of scenarios, he said.

“We're running the ship basically like the emergency room of a hospital,” Ballard said.

Mysterious ocean

The ocean floor largely remains a mystery to science for a number of reasons, Ballard said. But he suspects one of the main reasons is that people tend to be afraid of the idea of going into the bowels of the earth — even more so than leaving the Earth to explore other planets.

Today, he said, remote technology allows scientists to explore regions of the ocean previous generations of researchers couldn't reach. When a researcher can see the ocean floor from the relative safety of a ship on the surface of the water, it can make the proposition easier to stomach.

“I think we're terrified of the dark. I think we're terrified of going down,” he said. “The key is to assure the human they're safe.”