![]() ![]() Steed has a background as a broadcast journalist with a bent for exploration in remote places, as well as a gift for quotable phrasing - that “beating heart of our planet” line is popular with reporters who write about the work - and for telling the mission’s story in self-produced video (see links at end). “Discoveries like these on Argus Seamount are evidence of how little we know and how important it is to document this unknown frontier to ensure that its future is protected before it is too late.” And yet, he told New Scientist recently, “we have better maps of Mars and the moon than we do of our own seabed.” “The deep ocean is the beating heart of our planet and our most critically important ecosystem,” says Oliver Steed, mission director and co-founder of its nonprofit parent. ![]() More than 28 percent of global fish stocks are unsustainably fished and, on the current trajectory, many of the world’s marine species may be on the brink of extinction by 2100. Ocean acidity has increased by about 30 per cent since the beginning of the industrial revolution and the occurrence of dead zones (hypoxic, low oxygen areas) has doubled in frequency every 10 years since the 1960s. Some of the pressures listed on the Nekton site: Still farther down were gardens of twisted wire corals, hydrocorals and moray eels.Įstablishing a documented baseline of ocean health and degradation pressures is the Nekton Mission’s key objective, and that’s what attracted significant financial support from an Irish-based global insurance company called XL Catlin, which reasons that it’s hard to insure against risks you don’t understand. Navy’s Don Walsh rode the bathyscaphe Trieste into the Mariana Trench.)īelow the upper-level algal forest, the Nekton team reports, the slopes were found to hold gardens of black coral, communities of sea urchins, hermit crabs and other animals. (The first was in 1960’s Nekton Project, from which the current endeavor takes its name France’s Jacques Picard and the U.S. ![]() Where few have gone beforeĪmazingly, Nekton can claim to be only the third mission to carry human observers so far down. ![]() It has long been said that we know less about Earth’s ocean depths than about the surface of its moon but nowadays, thanks to advances in space exploration, the comparison is more likely to be with the face of Mars. This creates an abundance of healthy mesophotic corals which could provide a refugia for shallower reefs closer to Bermuda, helping to repopulate those areas damaged by bleaching and acidification and rebuilding the resilience of the surrounding ocean. This nutrient-rich algae is crucial as it feeds the deep sea just like a deep ocean ‘pasture’. We have discovered a new mesophotic algal forest with almost total coverage of dense growth. A rich array of plants and animals live here, some dependent on sunlight and some not, but all increasingly tested by various pressures of degradation, which adds to the zone’s scientific interest.Īlex Rogers, a marine zoologist at Oxford University who is serving as Nekton’s chief scientist, describes the key find so far in this way: The Argus’ upper reaches are in the so-called mesophotic zone, a lateral band between the lightless depths and the bright subsurface waters. There are perhaps 100,000 of these features throughout the global ocean, Nekton scientists say, but fewer than 40 have undergone any sampling of their living communities. Using a pair of $2.2 million Triton submersibles that can carry a two-person crew to a depth of 1,000 meters - and a remote-controlled robot camera than can dive twice as far - the team spent much of last week exploring the slopes of the Argus Seamount.Ī seamount is a sort of mountain that rises high above the seafloor, but not high enough to become an island. Anyone with an interest in deep-ocean exploration or seagoing adventure will likely find something to admire in this week’s first reports from the Nekton Mission’s work off Bermuda. ![]()
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