The currently known deposits are mostly located in the immediate vicinity of continental fringes and thus cause the nation to dream of a cheap, ever-lasting source of energy. The scientific results of the three ‘science hotspots‘ lead to ground-breaking realisations regarding the community of the deep sea and the ecological processes there. They are located close to Europe and in the future they will be important regions for fundamental research.

Diving into the World of Black Corals: A Q&A with Deep-Sea Scientist Erika Gress

• The most important food source for deep-sea organisms is particulate organic matter, which drifts down from the surface to the seafloor and is also known as “marine snow”.
• The size of the whale, the depth of the seafloor, and the location all contribute to the types of animals that colonize the area and determine how long it takes for the skeleton to disappear.
• In the months and years after a whale fall the site will become the home and food source for millions of creatures.
• It also concluded that there would be indirect impacts from the formation of sediment plumes, the potential release of toxic substances and noise and light pollution (MIDAS, 2016).
• Many of the fish we eat – even those caught in shallow coastal waters – spend part of their lives in the deep sea and rely on its species and habitats for food, shelter, breeding and nursery grounds.
• Those that live at the hydrothermal vent make use of the oxidation of sulphur dioxide for the assimilation of carbon.

Once the trip is complete, this decomposing hodgepodge can be a welcome food source for animals in deep water and on the sea floor that don’t have reliable food in the sparse darkness. Some animals, such as the vampire squid and its special feeding filaments, have special adaptations to help them better catch and eat the falling particles. The snow is also important to small, growing animals, such as eel larvae, which rely on the snow for months during their development. Marine snow clumps are also swarming with microbes—tiny organisms ranging from algae to bacteria—that form communities around the sinking particles. All three species were first discovered in 2019 over two expeditions off the coast of Central California.

Seamounts and Canyons

The bathypelagic is between 3,300 and 13,100 feet (1,000 and 4,000 m) beneath the ocean surface. It is an area void of light (called aphotic) and at 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius), it is very cold. Creatures in this zone must live with minimal food, so many have slow metabolisms. The black hagfish, viperfish, anglerfish, and sleeper shark are common fish that call this zone home. While something like the gulper eel, with its massive expandable gullet, is a rare and amazing sight and could almost be mistaken for an alien. The inky waters beneath the ocean’s surface teem with life, including many species unknown to science.
In these areas, seawater seeps into cracks in the seafloor, heating up as it meets molten rock beneath the crust and then rising again to gush out of seafloor openings. The water that emerges from them can reach temperatures of 400 °C and is extremely rich in minerals. Cold seeps are similar to hydrothermal vents as they also occur in tectonically active locations, but they emit hydrocarbon-rich fluids. The deep sea is Earth’s largest and least explored ecosystem – a mysterious world of towering underwater mountains, vast plains, and life forms found nowhere else on the planet.
Researchers found between 350 and 500 different species of sea stars, sea cucumbers, sponges, anemones and crabs in a region off the coast of Peru at 4,100 m depth. With the ‘Ventana’, a dive-robot of the Monterey Bay Institute in California, scientists were able to capture and identify the fragile planktonic organisms of the meso- and bathypelagic region in the past few years. Indeed, on this expedition underwater mountain ridges, 4717 until then unknown species from depths of um to 5.5 km and living fossils such as stalked sea lilies are said to have been discovered on this expedition.

Finding Food

According to Jankowski & Zielke (1997) 2×104 m3 (approximately 5.4×104 t) deep sea sediment would be re-suspended through this every day. The formation and growth of manganese nodules is closely linked to the biological cycles in benthic waters and in the boundary layer between the water and the sea floor. According to a theory, minerals that are dissolved in water will, with time, collect around any form of nucleus. This may, for example, be a piece of rock, a skeleton fragment or a beer can that was thrown into the ocean.

The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition uses science to help protect and preserve the deep sea.

• Pockets of life thrive when food is available, and often these distinct deep sea communities rely on alternate sources of chemical energy that do not originate from the sun—they have figured a way to make do with what they get.
• Underwater earthquakes can lead to the loosening of stable ice-sands at the continental slopes and thus lead to immense landslides.
• And thanks to symbiotic bacteria, the sponges can still put these relics of the past to use.
• Often found resting on the seafloor, tripod fish can pump fluid into their elongated fins to make them like rigid stilts (or as their name implies, a tripod), sometimes a few feet high.
• Life and services provided by Deep Sea organisms depend very much on atmosphere and surface activity.

“MBARI seeks to make ocean exploration more accessible by sharing our data and technology with our peers in the science community. MBARI technology is helping researchers document deep-sea biodiversity, providing much-needed information to help guide decision-making about the ocean and protect marine life and communities from threats like climate change and mining. Recent science has confirmed the vulnerability of the deep ocean to climate change. The long-term effects of ocean warming have been detected to a depth of at least 700m (Gattuso et al., 2015). And there is growing evidence of the influence of climatic events on deep sea ecosystems (DOSI, n.d.).
Despite this species diversity and richness the deep sea is no unlimited resource. The orange roughy has a lifespan of 77 to 149 years, becomes sexually mature between 20 and 40 years of age. For many other exploited deep sea species these figures aren’t even known yet. The first rule in fisheries is, that only catch as much as needed until the population has replenished itself thus become a generation spanning problem.
Some animals can thrive by feeding on marine snow.2 In 1960, a bathyscaphe called Trieste went down to the bottom of the Deep Sea Mariana Trench, which is the deepest point on Earth. There aren’t any plants at all in these depths, so all fish in the deep are carnivores. And we’re finding new things all the time – from nearly 20,000 previously unknown mountains, to an “impossible” fish living at a record-breaking depth of 8,336 meters. By storing a large part of the CO2 produced by human activities and by absorbing the heat accumulated by greenhouse effect, the Deep Sea slows down the warming of surface waters and land. Thanks to this immense mass of water, climate change is still “bearable” for most species on Earth. Most scientists are certain, however, that the global seawater temperature increase will lead to the release of these gases into the atmosphere after a certain refractory period.

Whale Falls

The surfacing masses between the diverging continental plates forms a new seafloor and supports the theory of continental drift and informs about the formation of the ocean floor. Germany was not to be left without adventurous ship expeditions and thus the zoologist Carl Chun led the deep sea expedition from the 31st of July 1898 until the 1st of May 1889, with the blessing of the Emperor. On the remodelled passenger ship ‘Valdivia’ the crew successfully covered over 32,000 nautical miles into the depths of the Antarctic waters and managed the first depth measurements of the until then uncharted Indian Ocean. Along with temperature and salinity measurements the crew also specifically caught organisms at different depths, as they now carried nets that they could close at previously decided depths. The thus discovered anglerfish and many bioluminescent organisms then showed that throughout the water column and into depths of up to 5,500 metres, life could be found. However, now the oceanographic and biological results of the expedition for the first transatlantic cable indicated otherwise.

Marine Snow

It feeds the bacteria with raw materials that they need for their chemosynthesis in turn. Taken together, these assets have produced a valuable dataset that documents the long-term trends and changes in this Arctic ecosystem. It’s only with the help of long-term studies (time series) like this one that we can assess how climate change is impacting marine ecosystems in the Arctic. There are only a handful of comparable observatories worldwide, and HAUSGARTEN is the only one located in a polar region. Their carcass, pickled and preserved, serves as a warning of the toxic landscape below.
The three new species of snailfish were observed almost 11,000 feet underwater offshore of California. The team combined imaging, morphological, and genetic approaches to compare these snailfishes to other known fishes. MBARI researchers collected this individual—an adult female 9.2 centimeters (3.6 inches) long—for further study in the laboratory.