UK Engineering at it’s finest, and also just down the road from where I live, Southampton University have developed a submarine to explore the undersea world automatically.

Capable of diving to depths of 6km, and a range of 1000km, the AutoSub6000 will be primarily exploring undersea volcanoes. It amazes me how these boffins can set up an undersea vehicle, program it like an expensive BigTrak, and send it on it’s way to do it’s job - completely without human intervention. For a full list of specs, for the terminally geeky, download the pdf.