Deep-Sea Wonderland Found Thriving Where Humans Have Never Been

A deep-sea expedition to one of Earth's most remote island chains has surfaced stunning pictures of the vibrant ecosystems surrounding hydrothermal vents that scientists didn't even know were there.
The 35-day journey aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute's Falkor (too) research vessel was part of the Ocean Census's race to document marine life before it is lost to threats like climate change and deep sea mining.
This expedition took an international team of scientists to the South Sandwich Islands, in the South Atlantic near Antarctica, which boasts the Southern Ocean's deepest trench.
Despite facing subsea earthquakes, hurricane-force winds, towering waves, and icebergs, the crew was rewarded with a trove of incredible new discoveries.
You might have already watched the expedition's world-first footage of a live colossal squid, but some of their other finds deserve a moment in the spotlight.
Like this vermillion coral garden thriving on Humpback Seamount, near the region's shallowest hydrothermal vents at around 700 meters deep (nearly 2,300 feet).
The tallest vent chimney stood four meters (13 feet) tall, proudly sporting an array of life, including barnacles and sea snails. Like drones in a New Year's Eve sky, a fleet of shrimp whizzed round these submarine skyscrapers.
These hydrothermal vents, on the northeast side of Quest Caldera, are the only South Sandwich Island vents explored via remotely operated vehicle (ROV) thus far; we can't wait to see what future expeditions uncover.
"Discovering these hydrothermal vents was a magical moment, as they have never been seen here before," says hydrographer Jenny Gales from the University of Plymouth in the UK.
But certain specimens deserve a close-up: like this exquisite nudibranch, unspecified, which blackwater photographer Jialing Cai snapped at 268 meters deep in the near-freezing waters east of Montagu Island.
Nearby, a slightly more upsetting moment was captured: a grenadier fish with parasitic copepods – likely Lophoura szidati – tucked into its gills like horrid pigtails.
And this stout little sea cucumber, recorded 650 metres below the sea surface at Saunders East, with a gob full of what we will informally dub a deep-sea puffball.
Now, brace yourself for the first ever image of Akarotaxis aff. gouldae, a species of dragonfish that has evaded our cameras for two years since its discovery.
Something else that nobody's seen before? Snailfish eggs on a black coral. Not even marine biologists knew this was a thing, until now.
"This expedition has given us a glimpse into one of the most remote and biologically rich parts of our ocean," says marine biologist Michelle Taylor, the Ocean Census project's head of science.
"This is exactly why the Ocean Census exists – to accelerate our understanding of ocean life before it's too late. The 35 days at sea were an exciting rollercoaster of scientific discovery, the implications of which will be felt for many years to come as discoveries filter into management action."
Look behind-the-scenes aboard the Falkor (too) research vessel here.
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CNN

an hour ago

• CNN

A hunt for ghostly particles found strange signals coming from Antarctic ice. Scientists are still trying to explain them

Scientists are trying to solve a decade-long mystery by determining the identity of anomalous signals detected from below ice in Antarctica. The strange radio waves emerged during a search for another unusual phenomenon: high-energy cosmic particles known as neutrinos. Arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos, neutrinos are often called 'ghostly' because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, and can go through any kind of matter without changing. Over the past decade, researchers have conducted multiple experiments using vast expanses of water and ice that are designed to search for neutrinos, which could shed light on mysterious cosmic rays, the most highly energetic particles in the universe. One of these projects was NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, experiment, which flew balloons carrying instruments above Antarctica between 2006 and 2016. It was during this hunt that ANITA picked up anomalous radio waves that didn't seem to be neutrinos. The signals came from below the horizon, suggesting they had passed through thousands of miles of rock before reaching the detector. But the radio waves should have been absorbed by the rock. The ANITA team believed these anomalous signals could not be explained by the current understanding of particle physics. Follow-up observations and analyses with other instruments, including one recently conducted by the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, have not been able to find the same signals. The results of the Pierre Auger Collaboration were published in the journal Physical Review Letters in March. The origin of the anomalous signals remains unclear, said study coauthor Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University. 'Our new study indicates that such (signals) have not been seen by an experiment … like the Pierre Auger Observatory,' Wissel said. 'So, it does not indicate that there is new physics, but rather more information to add to the story.' Larger, more sensitive detectors may be able to solve the mystery, or ultimately prove whether the anomalous signals were a fluke, while continuing the search for enigmatic neutrinos and their sources, scientists say. Detecting neutrinos on Earth allows researchers to trace them back to their sources, which scientists believe are primarily cosmic rays that strike our planet's atmosphere. The most highly energetic particles in the universe, cosmic rays are made up mostly of protons or atomic nuclei, and they are unleashed across the universe because whatever produces them is such a powerful particle accelerator that it dwarfs the capabilities of the Large Hadron Collider. Neutrinos could help astronomers better understand cosmic rays and what launches them across the cosmos. But neutrinos are difficult to find because they have almost no mass and can pass through the most extreme environments, like stars and entire galaxies, unchanged. They do, however, interact with water and ice. ANITA was designed to search for the highest energy neutrinos in the universe, at higher energies than have yet been detected, said Justin Vandenbroucke, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The experiment's radio antennae search for a short pulse of radio waves produced when a neutrino collides with an atom in the Antarctic ice, leading to a shower of lower-energy particles, he said. During its flights, ANITA found high-energy fountains of particles coming from the ice, a kind of upside-down shower of cosmic rays. The detector is also sensitive to ultrahigh energy cosmic rays that rain down on Earth and create a radio burst that acts like a flashlight beam of radio waves. When ANITA watches a cosmic ray, the flashlight beam is really a burst of radio waves one-billionth of a second long that can be mapped like a wave to show how it reflects off the ice. Twice in their data from ANITA flights, the experiment's original team spotted signals coming up through the ice at a much sharper angle than ever predicted by any models, making it impossible to trace the signals to their original sources. 'The radio waves that we detected nearly a decade ago were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,' Wissel said. Neutrinos can travel through a lot of matter, but not all the way through the Earth, Vandenbroucke said. 'They are expected to arrive from slightly below the horizon, where there is not much Earth for them to be absorbed,' he wrote in an email. 'The ANITA anomalous events are intriguing because they appear to come from well below the horizon, so the neutrinos would have to travel through much of the Earth. This is not possible according to the Standard Model of particle physics.' The Pierre Auger Collaboration, which includes hundreds of scientists around the world, analyzed more than a decade's worth of data to try to understand the anomalous signals detected by ANITA. The team also used their observatory to try to find the same signals. The Auger Observatory is a hybrid detector that uses two methods to find and study cosmic rays. One method relies on finding high-energy particles as they interact with water in tanks on Earth's surface, and the other tracks potential interactions with ultraviolet light high in our planet's atmosphere. 'The Auger Observatory uses a very different technique to observe ultrahigh energy cosmic ray air showers, using the secondary glow of charged particles as they traverse the atmosphere to determine the direction of the cosmic ray that initiated it,' said Peter Gorham, a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. 'By using computer simulations of what such a shower of particles would look like if it had behaved like the ANITA anomalous events, they are able to generate a kind of template for similar events and then search their data to see if anything like that appears.' Gorham, who was not involved with the new research, designed the ANITA experiment and has conducted other research to understand more about the anomalous signals. While the Auger Observatory was designed to measure downward-going particle showers produced in the atmosphere by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, the team redesigned their data analysis to search for upward-going air showers, Vandenbroucke said. Vandenbroucke did not work on the new study, but he peer-reviewed it prior to publication. 'Auger has an enormous collecting area for such events, larger than ANITA,' he said. 'If the ANITA anomalous events are produced by any particle traveling through the Earth and then producing upward-going showers, then Auger should have detected many of them, and it did not.' A separate follow-up study using the IceCube Experiment, which has sensors embedded deep in the Antarctic ice, also searched for the anomalous signals. 'Because IceCube is very sensitive, if the ANITA anomalous events were neutrinos then we would have detected them,' wrote Vandenbroucke, who served as colead of the IceCube Neutrino Sources working group between 2019 and 2022. 'It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos,' Wissel said. Oddly enough, a different kind of neutrino, called a tau neutrino, is one hypothesis that some scientists have put forth as the cause of the anomalous signals. Tau neutrinos can regenerate. When they decay at high energies, they produce another tau neutrino, as well as a particle called a tau lepton — similar to an electron, but much heavier. But what makes the tau neutrino scenario very unlikely is the steepness of the angle connected to the signal, Wissel said. 'You expect all these tau neutrinos to be very, very close to the horizon, like maybe one to five degrees below the horizon,' Wissel said. 'These are 30 degrees below the horizon. There's just too much material. They really would actually lose quite a bit of energy and not be detectable.' At the end of the day, Gorham and the other scientists have no idea what the origin of the anomalous ANITA events are. So far, no interpretations match up with the signals, which is what keeps drawing scientists back to try to solve the mystery. The answer may be in sight, however. Wissel is also working on a new detector, the Payload for Ultra-High Energy Observations or PUEO, that will fly over Antarctica for a month beginning in December. Larger and 10 times more sensitive than ANITA, PUEO could reveal more information on what is causing the anomalous signals detected by ANITA, Wissel said. 'Right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries,' Wissel said. 'I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should be able to better understand these anomalies which will go a long way to understanding our backgrounds and ultimately detecting neutrinos in the future.' Gorham said that PUEO, an acronym that references the Hawaiian owl, should have the sensitivity to capture many anomalous signals and help scientists find an answer. 'Sometimes you just have to go back to the drawing board and really figure out what these things are,' Wissel said. 'The most likely scenario is that it's some mundane physics that can be explained, but we're sort of knocking on all the doors to try to figure out what those are.'

Fast Company

2 hours ago

• Fast Company

Thanks to bans and fees, there are fewer plastic bags littering beaches

It turns out eliminating the 'paper or plastic' question through plastic bag regulation is effectively reducing the number of bags found in shoreline litter across the United States. A new analysis of shoreline cleanup data finds that areas with plastic bag bans or consumer fees have fewer bags turning up in their litter. The research offers some of the strongest evidence yet that regulating plastic bag use makes a difference in reducing the amount of plastic waste in marine ecosystems. A heightened threat to marine wildlife 'We find, largely, that all the regulations do show a decrease in plastic bag litter as a share of total litter on these shores,' says Kimberly Oremus, co-author of the research paper and an assistant professor of marine science and policy at the University of Delaware. The total reduction ranged between 25% and 47%, the study found. About 20 metric tons of plastic end up in the environment each year, estimates the International Union for Conservation of Nature—that amounts to over 2.4 kilograms of plastic for each person on Earth. Plastic bags are particularly prevalent in marine ecosystems. They are very difficult to recycle and, because they are lightweight and have a large surface area for wind to catch, they blow out of the trash and into the environment at higher rates than other plastic items, says Erin Murphy, the ocean plastics science and research manager at the environmental advocacy nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, who was not involved in the research. She added that in 2024 alone, the conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup volunteers gathered up more than a million plastic bags. In addition to getting into the environment at high rates, plastic bags also pose a heightened threat to marine wildlife. Wildlife can become entangled in or smothered by these bags or can mistake them for food, like jellyfish, a favorite among many species. These interactions with plastic can lead to the deaths of endangered and common animals alike and can even contribute to broader population declines. Counting the plastic bags 'One big challenge in studying the effects and regulations of plastics is actually measuring this pollutant in the environment,' says Anna Papp, co-author of the research paper. To overcome this challenge, the study used crowd-funded data from beach cleanups. The data was collected by the Ocean Conservancy as part of their Trash Information and Data for Education and Solutions (TIDES) project. Nearly 19 million people have participated in the data collection worldwide. The study also examined plastic bag policies at various geographical scales between 2017 and 2023. The earliest plastic bag policies in the U.S. were implemented around 2007, researchers say, but an uptick in the mid-2010s more directly led to the policies analyzed in the study. While the data provides insight into how the share of plastic bags found among shoreline litter has changed due to policy measures, an important caveat remains: Plastic litter has been increasing overall. Plastic production doubled from 234 million to 460 million tons between 2000 and 2019—and without mitigation, it is only expected to rise, according to a recent report from the French-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Some regulations are better than others Still, the researchers noted that not all regulations worked equally well. Total bans and consumer fees resulted in greater decreases than partial bans, which still allow businesses to use thicker, potentially reusable plastic bags. The researchers also found that regulation was most effective in places that had a high baseline of plastic bag litter before the bans or fees went into place. The study data seems to indicate that consumer fees were the most effective option for mitigating plastic bag litter, though the paper's authors say more research is needed to confirm this finding. 'These policies are effective, but they're not a panacea for all plastic litter,' Oremus said. 'Anyone who's looking at regulations for plastic broadly needs to think beyond just the consumption side of plastic.'

Yahoo

3 hours ago

• Yahoo

3 new sea spiders discovered on ocean floor are first known species to feast on methane

Even thousands of feet below the water's surface, no arachnophobe is truly safe from spiders. And, thanks to a recent discovery by a team of scientists, three more species have been added to the list of sea-dwelling arthropods — with the special distinction of being what researchers called "methane-powered." Three new types of spiders were recently found in deep-sea habitats, far beyond the reach of sunlight, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Shana Goffredi, the study's lead author and chair of biology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, told USA TODAY that researchers found the first new species in July 2023 off the coast of Del Mar, California, a beach town about 20 miles north of San Diego. Scientists then discovered the other new species off the coasts of California and Alaska, Goffredi said, adding they live between 600 and 1,200 meters below the surface. Some are as large as a grain of rice, according to the professor. Others, much larger. "They belong to an interesting group of sea spiders that have only ever been found at very specialized habitats on the seafloor called methane seeps," Goffredi said. Some species also live at hydrothermal vents, or geothermally heated mineral-rich springs on the sea bottom. "Because they are localized to these specialized habitats, we had a suspicion that they were tied to the high-energy compounds that emanate from the seafloor in those locations," Goffredi continued. "By conducting shipboard experiments, we were able to show definitively that they use methane, through bacterial epibionts that live on their exoskeleton. By farming them, and then consuming them, they take advantage of a nutritional resource that is not common in the animal kingdom." As of Friday, June 20, scientists said they continued to study the spiders' complete role in the ecosystem. "We don't yet know their full role in their ecosystem just yet. It's pretty hard to do behavioral observations in the deep sea," Goffredi said. "But no doubt they are a prey source for other organisms and they probably help distribute organic carbon to other areas of the seafloor." By growing what researchers called "a crop of methane-oxidizing bacteria" that consume methane molecules on their exoskeleton, the spiders help the planet's larger ecosystem by acting as a biological filter to prevent methane from escaping from the deep sea. Natalie Neysa Alund is a senior reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@ and follow her on X @nataliealund. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Scientists discover new sea spider species that eats methane