Credit: DAVID VALENTINE, UC SANTA BARBARA / AUV SENTRYĪ dumpsite off the Los Angeles coast, littered with barrels of waste, had been mostly hidden from the public eye for over half a century. A rare whalefish sightingĪ waste barrel dumped off the Los Angeles coast. You can see more expedition images in this Mashable story. The expedition captured never-before-seen footage of the Ashmore Reef's seabed, and also collected 500 specimens to study, the institute said. "But experiences like the Australian Mesophotic Coral Expedition are humbling and make me realize just how much more there is still to learn about our oceans." "Having studied corals from the Great Barrier Reef to Antarctica, it is easy to think I have seen it all," the expedition's lead scientist, Karen Miller of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, wrote in a blog (Opens in a new tab) post. The Schmidt Ocean Institute (Opens in a new tab), a non-profit ocean research organization, called the trip the "Australian Mesophotic Coral Expedition." (Mesophotic means dark zones with low light.) At some 165 to 500 feet down, it observed otherworldly corals, sea snakes, and a diversity of ocean creatures. Credit: Schmidt Ocean Instituteĭuring an 18-day expedition in the protected Ashmore Reef Marine Park (off of Australia), scientists aboard a Schmidt Ocean Institute exploration vessel dropped an underwater robot into deep, low-light depths. Stunning images of deep-sea life captured by an aquatic robotĪ sea snake swimming in the dark depths. "The ice makes it like an enormous cave," Huw Griffiths, a marine biogeographer at the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the research, told Mashable in February. Never before had anyone observed such life isolated so far under an ice shelf, a finding the researchers reported in February (Opens in a new tab) in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. They lowered a camera and reached the seafloor, glimpsing a freezing, lightless world, hundreds of miles from any typical sources of food.īeneath the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf - part of an enormous ice sheet that floats over the ocean - researchers unexpectedly spotted eerie sponges on stalks and other still unidentified invertebrates clinging to a boulder. Scientists drilled through over half a mile of ancient, coastal Antarctic ice in 2016. Sponges and other creatures spotted beneath an Antarctic ice shelf. Unexpected life discovered in a deep, dark Antarctic world It's clear, owing to different minerals and sediments coming from inside Earth.Īs the images in Mashable's story show, sometimes the hot fluid comes out and flows upward like a reverse waterfall, which ultimately builds majestic spires and mounds above the vents. That's why they're called "black smokers." But in this deep Mexican realm, the water is starkly different. Deep sea vents, discovered only relatively recently in 1977 (Opens in a new tab), often emit dark, chemical-rich fluid into the water. The hot vents in this region, called hydrothermal vents, are especially unique. The trip, aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's (Opens in a new tab) research vessel Falkor, used a sturdy underwater robot to find intriguing life and potentially new-to-science creatures dwelling at these dark depths. Credit: Schmidt Ocean Instituteĭuring a fall 2021 deep sea expedition in Mexico's Gulf of California, scientists observed wondrous vents spouting superheated fluid over two miles beneath the ocean surface. "What are all the things in the ocean that see us coming and stay away?" mused Matsumoto.Ī hydrothermal vent with majestic calcite spires. With big, bulky exploration machines (Opens in a new tab), scientists often capture footage of creatures that are too slow to get away, are too big to care, or are too small or translucent to spot on camera. When you see the recent sightings below, it's important to remember that what we glimpse in the deep sea is still inherently limited. "What are all the things in the ocean that see us coming and stay away?" Biologists emphasize humanity must better understand and protect this unique life, particularly as the prospects for mining rare metals in the deeps with tractor-like industrial equipment (Opens in a new tab) loom increasingly large. Ocean expeditions in 2021 added to a growing catalog of wild deep sea sightings and newly discovered species. "The ocean provides 98 percent of living space on Earth. "There's so much left to explore and find in the ocean," said George Matsumoto, a deep sea scientist who works as a senior education and research specialist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (Opens in a new tab). Giant, phantasmagorical creatures dwell in the dark water.Īnd when marine researchers lower robots into these depths, they're almost always spotting something rare or previously unknown to science.
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