Fifty years ago, with the purchase and refit of a 200' pleasure yacht renamed the Vema, Maurice Ewing inaugurated Lamont's exploration of the largely unknown terrain beneath the world's oceans. Today, members of the Marine Geology and Geophysics (MG&G) Division remain explorers at heart, motivated by curiosity to understand these remote and forbidding parts of our planet. Over the years, the tools of exploration have improved from simple echosounders and towed seismic source-and-receiver instruments, to MultiChannel Seismic (MCS) Reflection techniques which allow us to probe more deeply into the Earth, and multibeam bathymetric and side-looking sonar imagers for mapping large areas of the seafloor in ever greater detail.  > more