Charles Wyville Thomson

Charles Wyville Thomson was a Scottish naturalist and professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh who served as chief scientist and expedition leader of the HMS Challenger expedition of 1872 to 1876, a four year global survey widely regarded as the founding voyage of modern oceanography. The expedition sounded ocean depths, dredged the sea floor, and recorded temperature and biological samples across the Atlantic, Pac, and Southern Oceans, discovering thousands of new species and establishing that life exists even in the deep sea, then widely doubted. Thomson was knighted in 1876 for this work and oversaw the early volumes of the Challenger Report before his health failed.