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CORVALLIS - The 2002 Condon Lecture at Oregon State University will discuss new methods being used to shed light on the world's oceans, of which 95 percent is unknown and unexplored, even though they represent the largest habitable environment on Earth.

Marcia McNutt, president and chief executive officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, will speak on "Exploring the Ocean" at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 30, in the LaSells Stewart Center on the OSU campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Technological innovations have now made it possible for researchers to use remotely

operated vehicles that function as eyes, ears, noses, and hands in the deep ocean. The discoveries being made with these new tools range from new pathways for energy flow through the marine food web to processes responsible for carving canyons on the floor of the sea.

McNutt received her doctorate from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and was previously the Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the immediate past president of the American Geophysical Union and has led more than 20 oceanographic expeditions.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute is a research laboratory funded by the Packard Foundation. It just received a $7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to hard wire a set of long-term instruments on the floor of California's Monterey Bay.

The Condon Lecture Series, named for Oregon's first professor of geology, Thomas Condon, is devoted to bringing the results of recent scientific research to general audiences.