The deep-sea environs of the Earth’s poles are home to mysterious ocean creatures: giant sea spiders, Antarctic sea pigs, phantom jellyfish. Finding and identifying these animals can be difficult, however; some are known only because researchers found their remains in fishing nets or in the bellies of seabirds. But on Christmas Day last year, the…
Humans have visually documented about 1,470 square miles, or a mere 0.001 percent, of the deep seafloor, according to a new study. That’s a little larger than the size of Rhode Island. The report, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, arrives as nations debate whether to pursue industrial mining of the seabed for critical…
Andrew Wozniak, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Delaware, struggled to process what his eyes were taking in. Dr. Wozniak was parked on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean beneath nearly 1.6 miles of water in Alvin, a research submersible. As far as he could see lay a mostly barren expanse of jet-black rock….
Less than a week after President Trump signed an executive order to accelerate seabed mining, the U.S. government received its first permit application from the Metals Company, one of the most ardent proponents of the as yet unproven practice. On Tuesday, the company’s chief executive, Gerard Barron, was also on hand in Washington, D.C., for…
Life at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is slow, dark and quiet. Strange creatures glitter and glow. Oxygen seeps mysteriously from lumpy, metallic rocks. There is little to disturb these deep-ocean denizens. “There’s weird life down here,” said Bethany Orcutt, a geomicrobiologist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. Research in the deep sea is…
President Trump has ordered the U.S. government to take a major step toward mining vast tracts of the ocean floor, a move that nearly every other nation in the world considers off limits to this kind of industrial activity. The executive order, signed Thursday, would circumvent a decades-old international treaty that every major coastal nation…
President Trump on Thursday said he was allowing commercial fishing in one of the world’s largest ocean reserves, introducing industrial operations for the first time in more than a decade to a vast area of the Pacific dotted with coral atolls and populated by endangered sea turtles and whales. Mr. Trump issued an executive order…
In March, Kat Bolstad returned from an Antarctic expedition where she had used a new camera system specially built to search for the elusive colossal squid. No one had captured footage of one of these animals swimming in the deep sea. She didn’t spot one on this voyage either. On the day she left the…
Libertarians have long looked at ocean living as the next frontier. Some wealthy men are testing the waters. Source link
Xavier Le Pichon, a French geophysicist whose pioneering model of the earth’s tectonic plates helped revolutionize how scientists understand movements of the earth’s crust, died on March 22 at his home in Sisteron, in the south of France. He was 87. His death was announced in a statement by the Collège de France, France’s highest…