When a camera is lowered four kilometers into complete darkness and begins returning images that no one recognizes, a certain kind of silence descends upon a ship’s control room. This year, that occurred multiple times on multiple oceans. Actually, it’s starting to resemble a pattern: if you send a robot far enough, the planet will begin to reveal things that it has been keeping hidden for a very long time.
A team headed by Smithsonian scientist Karen Osborn spent two weeks drifting through what is known as the midwater—the large, dark layer of ocean between the sunlit surface and the seafloor—off the coast of Brazil on a research ship named Falkor (too). According to most estimates, it is both the largest and least understood habitat on Earth. The crew returned with 31 species that no one had previously recorded, including comb jellies, gossamer worms, jellyfish, and a rhizarian that most people have never heard of and probably never will. It’s difficult to ignore how casually scientists talk about discovering completely new forms of life, as if it were commonplace. It is, more and more, for them.
This expedition was unique not only because of what they discovered but also because of how. Many of these midwater creatures are gelatinous, meaning they have soft bodies, are almost transparent, and resemble water rather than flesh. Researchers have historically caught them in nets and pickled them in jars, which usually results in a once-luminous creature that resembles a deflated balloon. It might take decades to identify a species in that manner. This time, scientists were able to examine the internal structure of these animals without ever removing them from the water thanks to the installation of laser-scanning devices by engineers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute on a remotely operated vehicle called SuBastian. Apparently, it took days instead of years.
A different team was working through similar darkness with similar astonishment thousands of miles away, in the waters off the Caribbean territories of Britain. For six weeks, researchers on board the RRS James Cook operated cameras nonstop while descending as far as 6,000 meters. They were partially guided by nautical charts that were decades old and, as it turned out, did not include entire underwater mountains. By chance, they discovered one such mountain, a hitherto unexplored ridge close to Little Cayman that rose from almost 2,500 meters to just 20 meters below the surface. Its slopes were covered in coral that glowed gold and orange in the lights, seemingly unaffected by the bleaching crisis that was pounding reefs elsewhere. It remains to be seen if that protection endures.
The comparison that scientists keep making is almost embarrassing: we are more familiar with the Moon’s surface than our own seafloor. Another planet can be mapped by satellites in a matter of weeks. Acoustic instruments are still towed behind a ship, inch by inch, in the hopes of avoiding running aground on something the chart neglected to mention, in order to map the ocean bottom.
A different kind of urgency was being photographed in the Pacific by a 45-day expedition known as SMARTEX. Deep-sea mining companies are now likely to target the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a section of seafloor dotted with potato-sized mineral nodules useful for solar panels and batteries. Researchers found sea cucumbers, glass sponges, and microscopic bryozoans clinging to the very nodules that industry seeks to extract before that occurs, and it’s becoming more and more of a question of when rather than if. It’s possible that some of these animals will live for centuries. What would happen to them if the nodules were removed is still unknown, and this uncertainty is currently doing a lot of the political heavy lifting.
Looking at all three expeditions, you are struck by more than just the bizarre sight of a barreleye fish or a four-meter octopus consuming a jellyfish in real time. The timing is the issue. At the same time that industries are arriving with the means to disrupt this world, scientists are at last developing the means to see it clearly. To be honest, the question of whether documentation surpasses extraction remains unanswered, and these photographs, despite their remarkable qualities, cannot provide an answer on their own.
