Like a Virgin: Secrets They Won't Teach You at Business School

SCIENCE: THE LAST FRONTIER

As a kid I read Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and was enraptured by its sense of adventure and mystery. Since then I have spent a lot of time with oceans – floating over them (and occasionally crashing into them) in balloons, and speeding over them – but little time actually under them.

More than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, and yet humankind has hardly explored the vast expanse of saltwater that surrounds us. The wonders of space have been charted in far greater detail.

Countries such as the United States have invested trillions of dollars in searching out faraway planets and solar systems. We can land on the moon and circle the world in a space station, but we still lack the capability to reach the deepest parts of the ocean or withstand the immense pressure that such a dive would entail. There is no sign that things will change any time soon as governments remain relatively uninterested in deep-sea exploration..

The deepest a modern submarine can go is 22,000 feet below the surface, and yet there are trenches in the Pacific that are more than 37,000 feet deep. To make such a journey – going deeper than the height of Mount Everest – we need significant technological breakthroughs in materials and design. The filmmaker James Cameron set a new world record in March 2012 diving 5.1 miles beneath the ocean waves in his submarine Deepsea Challenger.

Only two private companies are seriously researching these futuristic submarines – ourselves and James Cameron. James’ craft is very heavy and can go up and down to capture samples. Ours has much greater manoeuvrability and will be able to explore for miles. The two crafts compliment each other perfectly and we are discussing embarking on adventures together. It is a classic Virgin venture, full of adventure, fun and the desire to establish a new market.

Every great adventure begins with that first step and ours has taken the form of the Necker Nymph, a new three-man sub based at my Necker Island home in the British Virgin Islands. The Nymph has been designed especially for us, and it will ‘fly’ to about 130 feet below the ocean’s surface – performing twists and turns. Submarines like the Nymph will allow a passenger to track and view the wonders of the ocean without having to be a trained diver.

Much of the best ocean viewing is 100 feet down. The amazing Nymph can dive and loop like a plane and will allow our passengers to keep up with turtles, dolphins, whales and giant spotted eagle rays – like the one I saw recently while swimming off the beach on Necker.

Granted, 130 feet is just a little shy of 36,000 feet but it’s a start, giving mere mortals, not Navy Seals or scientists, a first chance to begin exploring the underwater world. In time the Nymph will be followed by new generations of subs able to get w-a-a-y down, further than we’ve ever been before.

In conversations with many of our Virgin Galactic customers, who are planning to go into space, I have found another common interest: exploring the oceans’ uncharted waters. Most are as intrigued as I am by the dark depths.

I believe we can learn a lot from these voyages. We will find new species and better understand the make-up of the deep-level waters. We will also be able to monitor and track more accurately man’s destruction of certain areas. To organise an effective campaign to preserve our planet, we must learn how our actions affect the oceans and how quickly we are destroying them.

The oceans were rich with life when I was a child but, sadly, are much less so today. We need to treat them with respect and nurture the life there. Good farmers understand the land and the need to leave certain fields fallow so that they can be replenished. The same goes for oceans and sea life. I have been told that the pirates off the coast of Somalia have had an interesting impact on the waters they call home. I am not advocating piracy as a solution, but these ‘rubber-boat-buccaneers’ have scared off the deep-sea fishermen, allowing the surrounding waters to be replenished with a wide variety of sea life. It will be interesting to see if the impact of overfishing can be detected by our fleet of new submarines in deeper parts of the ocean.

Why start our voyages from Necker, my Caribbean island? Apart from being a beautiful location from which to explore local sea life and coral, the island is just a few miles from the Atlantic’s deepest trench, the Puerto Rican Trench. This stretch of water has never been explored, and I hope within a year to have travelled to the darkest depths of this great sea valley farther down than Everest is high.

For me, there are echoes of the great explorers from the era of Sir Francis Drake – the men who first discovered the Virgin Islands. I am keen for our submarines to emulate the feats of Drake and chart the deep local waters acre by acre, trench by trench, valley by valley.

As an added bonus, we may even find treasure. The Caribbean is littered with shipwrecks, many laden with bounty from South and Central America. Some say there may be more treasure and gold below the sea than above. I have a map showing more than two hundred shipwrecks within twenty miles of Necker. Some may be lurking in relatively shallow waters, hidden by the years; others may be much further down. We will be looking for them, especially now we have developed our submarines to go all the way down.

As I look over the ocean from my hammock on Necker, I am incredibly excited by the future opportunity to look under it. Besides discovering new species, (they sat 80 per cent are undiscovered) charting the trenches and finding treasure, we may even find the lost city of Atlantis…you just never know!

PS In Jules Verne’s book, the ‘twenty thousand leagues’ refers to the distance travelled, not the depth. Just as well when you consider that 20,000 leagues is more than six times the diameter of the Earth!