Its professional orange colour offers high visibility above and beneath the waves – a sporty style statement with historical kudos, and a tool watch whose functionality is sought-after by scuba divers the world over.
Thousands of people have summited Mount Everest, a few have even gone to the moon. The explorers in our species – Cook, Columbus, Darwin, Livingstone and others – changed the course of our entire history thanks to their curiosity about what lay beyond the horizon.
But while we can say with reasonable confidence that the lands around us are – to a greater or lesser degree – mapped and chartered, take a sharp ‘downwards’ at the nearest horizon and it’s true to say that the oceans remain one of Earth’s last unknown frontiers.
Seventy percent of our planet lies beneath the water, a vast, obstinate mystery that resists being entirely solved, despite humanity’s formidable arsenal of technology.
Many questions have been answered, but the ocean refuses to give up all her secrets. So obviously, human beings want to solve this puzzle. There is something about the idea of exploring the unknown that is incredibly compelling to anyone who has ever looked at a horizon and wondered what might be beyond – or beneath – it.
