If you?ve ever wanted to cross the Atlantic Ocean but suffer from sea sickness the Bermuda Institute for Ocean Sciences (BIOS) has the perfect way to travel ? on foot (sort of).

Renowned British oceanographer Paul Tyler will be giving a lecture at BIOS today that will take participants from the bottom of the ocean off the southwest of England all the way to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

?In many ways we know more about space than we do about the deep sea,? Dr. Tyler told the Royal Gazette. He works at the National Oceanography Centre, part of the University of Southampton in England. ?There are an enormous number of species down there that haven?t been discovered. There are some estimates that there are at least another billion species to be described.?

Dr. Tyler said the ocean covers about two thirds of the planet, and we have probably only explored an area the size of six football fields.

?That is how little we know,? he said. ?One of the aspects we will be looking at in the talk is whether the deep ocean is biodiverse.?

?The general outline of my talk is a walk from the southwest of England across and I end up in the Gulf of Mexico. I walk down the slope and come out onto the Abyssal Plains of the Atlantic. In doing so I show pictures of the scenery around us. I look in detail at different processes. I look at the two different scales ? the difference between walking up a hill and and looking around to see other hills, and then looking down to see a plant and a bird.

?I will talk about some of the work I have been doing in the ocean. Then I will walk around the tip of Florida up into the Gulf and talk about cold seep communities. This is where hydrocarbons particularly methanes, seep to the surface and you get distinct communities on the seabed.?

He also plans to discuss a phenomenon called benthic storms.

?These are peculiar storms that occur in the deep sea,? he said. ?The easier analogy would be a blizzard in the Antarctica.?

Dr. Tyler has explored different parts of the ocean in submersibles and with Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs).

?In the Atlantic I have used the Russian submersible the MIR,? he said. ?I have used Harbour Branch?s Johnson-Sea-Link submersible, among others.?

The submersible exploration seems a far cry from deep sea exploration beginnings when, in the 1920s, scientist William Beebe lowered himself into the deep ocean in a metal sphere secured only by a single cable.

He broke a world record by going as much as half a mile down in the crude contraption.

Now, of course, oceanographers go much deeper into the ocean.

?Deep sea exploration is much safer now,? said Dr. Tyler. ?We use more sophisticated equipment such as remote operated vehicles (ROVs). There is an evolution from Beebe through submersibles. He put a manned sphere into the ocean on the end of a wire. The next stage was to put a submersible in the ocean that wasn?t tethered to the surface that also had people in it. The next phase was two forms of technology, the ROV which is tethered to the surface but unmanned and the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which is untethered.?

The AUV is pre-programmed to map a particular area. It does it all by navigation on its own, but the downside is that scientists do not get real time data.

Dr. Tyler has written and edited a number of books. He co-authored the text book ?Deep Sea Biology? in 1991, and more recently edited ?Ecosystems of the World, Vol. 28 Ecosystems of the Deep Sea? in 2003.