Whales and squid are attracted to the glowing underside of the cookie-cutter shark, which grabs a bite out of the animals once they are close. The deep-sea anglerfish lures prey straight to its mouth with a dangling Deep Sea bioluminescent barbel, lit by glowing bacteria. A canyon acts like a funnel in the ocean, congregating decaying matter that originates from land down to the ocean depths.
The whale’s roundness symbolises the idea of the globe as something to be conquered, mapped, and controlled, while its elusiveness reflects the unattainable nature of these desires when driven by capitalist and colonial imperatives. The abyss is also the space of ‘the Drexciyan myth’, developed by Drexciya—an electronic music duo from Detroit, composed of James Stinson and Gerald Donald. They reimagine the transatlantic voyage of slaves (‘the Middle Passage’) as the origin of an underwater nation, born from the unborn children of enslaved African pregnant women thrown overboard during the transatlantic crossing. Such Afrofuturist mythology—expressed through music, visual art, comic books and novellas—show that our understandings of the deep sea are deeply historically informed, often harking back to times of slavery and colonialism.
Bubblegum coral
If an animal needs to blend in, bioluminescence can be used to help in camouflage with the use of counterillumination, a display of light that helps them blend into the background. But in fact, producing light in the deep is the norm rather than the exception. Some creatures produce their own light to snag a meal or find a mate in a process called bioluminescence. The Red Sea is part of the sea roads between Europe, the Persian Gulf and East Asia, and as such has heavy shipping traffic. The construction of the canal during Darius’s reign is evidenced by ancient records, including inscriptions. Darius commemorated the completion of the canal by creating stelae (stone monuments) with inscriptions in several languages, describing the construction and its benefits.
Water Column
Several canals were built in ancient times from the Nile to the Red Sea along or near the line of the present Sweet Water Canal, but none lasted for long. During the first half of the 20th century, the Red Sea slave trade attracted substantial international condemnation. A previous version of this story incorrectly said that copper, cobalt and nickel are rare earth elements. The metals that companies are targeting are used in many green technologies like electric cars and wind turbines – but mining them is destructive to the environment.
In the name of science and for the ‘love of facts’—and because environmental assessments are essential for regulating the future of deep-sea mining—scientific research can sometimes become entangled in extractive logics. For instance, whether or not to extract a sample from an active hydrothermal vent can become a point of contention among scientists. For example, in an effort to protect coral reefs, scientists could deploy killer robots programmed to inject a lethal substance into crown-of-thorns starfish which feed on coral (Braverman 2020).
From individual cells of dead plankton to clumps of algae, to whole whale cadavers – which do not count as marine snow but are instead referred to as “large foodfalls” – there are meals of all shapes and sizes. Even zooplankton excrement contains enough nutrients for other organisms to get by on. Those species that gather near hot or cold springs pursue a different strategy. There you’ll find specially adapted microorganisms capable of extracting energy from the chemical compounds that the springs pump out into the water. In turn, many other organisms directly or indirectly live off of these bacteria, while others live in symbiosis with them. For example, in the central Arctic Ocean, a research team including AWI staff was surprised to discover lush gardens of sponges growing on dormant underwater volcanoes.
Barreleye fish
- The conclusion invites reflection on the deep sea as an ethnographic field, encouraging a rethinking of how fieldwork is conducted in unconventional or hard-to-access environments.
- But unlike most life on earth that uses light from the sun as a source of energy, these bacteria produce energy through a chemical reaction that uses minerals from the vents.
- These worms house bacteria within their “roots” that take advantage of the sulfur in the bones to make energy in a process called chemosynthesis.
- In turn, many other organisms directly or indirectly live off of these bacteria, while others live in symbiosis with them.
- Deep sea mining for rare earth elements and other critical minerals could start as early as 2026, even as 38 countries have called for a moratorium on it.
- The salt difference is so definitive that sitting above the brine lake, you can visibly see the lake’s surface—even waves when the lake is disturbed.
- The deep sea oscillates between visibility and invisibility depending on the stakes involved.
Salt is naturally lighter than soil and as it became squeezed by the soil above, it began to rise. Near the earth’s surface it began to mix with the seawater that was able to percolate into the sediment. For the first month or so that a whale carcass is on the seafloor it is a buffet for scavengers from afar. Within hours of falling, sleeper sharks, rattail fish, and black hagfish flock to the carcass like moths to a flame.
China’s Energy Motivations
Discoveries about life here are providing new routes for medicine and clues about the beginnings of life on Earth. The test being used to diagnose COVID-19 was developed using an enzyme isolated from a microbe found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. As in the oil and gas sector, environmental risk legislation in the DSM sector is tightly linked to the setting of ecological thresholds.
- While commercial deep-sea mining has not yet started, some companies are looking to launch operations in the near future.
- The further we dive down from the surface, the less new food is available, making the fight to survive that much more challenging.
- Minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements are essential ingredients in everything from wind turbines and electric vehicles to cell phones, medical technologies and military infrastructure.
- The International Seabed Authority (ISA) has historically regulated global involvement in deep-sea activities.
- Any waste, such as sediments and other organic materials, would be pumped back into the water column.
These organisms have evolved remarkable adaptations to survive in this challenging environment, from bioluminescence to extreme pressure tolerance. Members of Deep-Seafas recently contributed to the CCAMLR (Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources) Ecosystem Monitoring and Management working group. Deep-sea ecosystems are amongst the least well understood owing to the combined challenges of remoteness, vastness, and the difficulties of exploring its depths. The ‘deep-sea’ is a catch-all term that encompasses a wide range of habitats from the twilight open ocean, through globe-spanning ocean ridges, the vast rolling hills of the abyssal plains, all the way to 11km down in the deepest trenches. The average depth of the oceans is around 3.8km, and it is estimated that around 80-90% of the species in the deep-sea have yet to be described. A 60,000 km underwater mountain range stretches around our planet, formed as the plates that make up the Earth’s crust move against, or apart from, each other.
China is increasingly motivated to lead the energy transition for key strategic reasons. China’s investment in a future without fossil fuels can be explained by China’s desire to both decrease its dependence on foreign energy imports and increase global dependence on Chinese green technology. Circularity is an important pathway to meet the demand for minerals while reducing dependency on new mining. IEA estimates that significantly scaling up recycling could reduce the need for newly mined minerals by 40% for copper and nickel and 25% for lithium and cobalt by 2050.
The deep ocean is a massive carbon sink, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and helping mitigate the effects of climate change. Additionally, the deep-sea currents transport nutrients to surface waters, supporting life in other parts of the ocean. Without these critical processes, our climate and food webs would be vastly different—and far less hospitable for life as we know it.
Notably, this period included the first global deep-sea exploration, conducted by the HMS Challenger expedition (1873–76), which carried out meteorological and biological observations, as well as soundings to identify potential submarine cable routes. They are often eaten by fish or marine mammals during their slow fall, just to be digested and pooped out elsewhere in the ocean to begin the cycle all over again. 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.
How could deep-sea mining impact Chondrichthyans?
Whale falls occur when a whale dies in surface waters and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. The sudden arrival of food prompts creatures from afar to congregate and feast on the fleshy carcass. Once the flesh has been stripped and consumed by predators, bone eaters arrive so that not even the skeleton will remain.
