Deep sea mining threatens the unknown

When the submarine plunged to about 10,000 meters below sea level, somewhere off the coast of Hawaii, ecologist Jeff Drazen asked the pilots to cut the strobe lights that had been guiding them through the pitch-black waters. For a moment, they continued falling to the sea floor in complete darkness.
Then, the creatures of the deep sea began dazzling the crew with a striking display of bioluminescent lights, emitting signals to one another as they encountered this new strange object in their habitat.
'It's like you are falling through the stars,' Drazen told Salon in a phone interview. 'There are twinkling lights everywhere.'
Thousands of feet below sea level, the creatures that live in the deep sea survive without direct sunlight, plants or the warmth of the sun. Much of the deep ocean is vacant, with extremely cold, lightless regions making it difficult for life as we know it to survive. Yet spectacular animals reside there, including the vampire squid, which has the largest eyes proportional to its body of any animal (though this cephalopod is neither a vampire or a squid); a pearly white octopus nicknamed 'Casper'; and, of course, the toothy Angler fish that became an internet sensation when one rose to the surface earlier this year.
Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order promoting deep sea mining, which is currently prohibited under international law. And on Tuesday, the Department of the Interior announced it is initiating the process to evaluate a potential mineral lease sale in the waters offshore American Samoa. As industry eyes nodules found on the ocean floor as a potential way to extract nickel, copper and cobalt for making things like electric car batteries, scientists warn that deep sea mining is likely to be detrimental to life that exists there.
'We don't know that much about the deep sea because we have explored so little,' said Jim Barry, a seafloor ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, 'We should make sure we know what is there before we do much to destroy things.'
The deep sea begins at about 200 meters below sea level, where light starts to diminish in a region called the twilight zone. The deepest part of the ocean lies in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, where the ocean floor lies almost 11,000 feet below sea level — a height that is taller than Mount Everest.
The ocean covers 71% of the Earth's surface, so classifying the deep sea as a single habitat is like classifying all land as one habitat. Just as on land there are deserts, grasslands, rainforests and the arctic, so too in the deep sea there are numerous different ecosystems that differ by geography, temperature and the animals that live there. Earlier this month, scientists witnessed the first volcanic eruption underwater for the first time.'Even if you're just looking at forests in the U.S., you wouldn't think that the forest on the East Coast is going to look the same as the forest on the West Coast,' Drazen said. 'The same is true on the sea floor, and we actually have data that shows this: The communities that you find in the east on nodules are not the same as the communities you find in the west on nodules.'
One study published in Science earlier this month found that with 44,000 deep-sea dives, just 0.001% of the deep seafloor has been visually observed — which is roughly the size of Yosemite National Park. The rest is a black box. The study authors also note 'Ninety-seven percent of all dives we compiled have been conducted by just five countries: the United States, Japan, New Zealand, France, and Germany. This small and biased sample is problematic when attempting to characterize, understand, and manage a global ocean.'
Another 2023 study estimated that scientists had identified fewer than 1,000 of up to 8,000 species in one region of the deep sea called the Clarion–Clipperton zone, which stretches the width of the continental United States and is a potential target for deep sea mining.
Scientists explore these regions in submarines like Drazen's, or they use remote-operated vehicles to collect samples and map the ocean floor. Depending on the depth of the seafloor being studied, it can take these vehicles hours to reach the bottom, Barry said.
Each time scientists go on a deep sea expedition, they encounter previously unknown species. In 2018, a team at MBARI discovered an 'Octopus Garden' of as many as 20,000 octopuses nested on the seafloor off the coast of California in the largest gathering of octopuses on the planet. In total, four of these gardens have been discovered around the world thus far.
In other expeditions, scientists have discovered creatures that evolved their enzymes to function better at high pressure, as the ocean pressure increases by about the same amount as it does on an airplane every 10 meters. Some invertebrates can live for thousands of years, and the oldest known sea sponges have been dated to be 18,000 years old, Levin said.
Overall, there are more new species being discovered than there are taxonomists to properly catalog them. The deep sea has been called Earth's last frontier as the only largely untouched place on the planet. For scientists on these trips, exploring the deep sea seems almost like they are exploring the moon or a distant planet.
'We're the first people that have ever seen some of the sites that we dive at,' Barry told Salon in a phone interview. 'In fact, almost any site you go to offshore, unless you've been there before, none of it's been viewed.'
Many species in the deep sea have developed adaptations like bioluminescence or large eyes that help them navigate the dark waters. Others living in regions called oxygen-minimum zones — also known as 'dead zones' or 'shadow zones' — have developed elaborate breathing structures that look like lungs outside of their bodies in order to maximize the surface area they use to absorb oxygen, said Lisa Levin, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
On the seafloor, you can find canyons, volcanoes and vast abyssal planes. In some regions called chemosynthetic ecosystems, creatures produce food using the energy from chemical reactions rather than sunlight.
'Deep water isn't uniform, it's kind of layered, and there are different water masses,' Levin told Salon in a video call. 'It's really a whole mosaic of ecosystems and habitats.'
As remote as it may seem, the deep sea is just one degree of separation from anyone who eats seafood, Drazen said. The deep sea provides food to many species in shallower waters, like the swordfish, which dives up to 1,200 meters to feed.
The ocean also produces half of the oxygen we breathe on land and is the largest carbon sink on Earth, absorbing about 30% of all carbon dioxide emissions from humans. With the deep sea covering so much of the ocean's volume, it plays a major role in reducing the effects of global heating. Unfortunately, as CO2 emissions increase, it acidifies the ocean, which can make it less hospitable for life. Some crustaceans, for example, have a hard time developing hard outer shells made of calcium carbonate if the water is too acidic.
Not only that, but the creatures of the deep sea could provide scientists with molecules or compounds that help them develop better medicines or lead to other breakthrough discoveries. In the early 1980s, for example, scientists synthesized ziconotide, a natural pain-killer 1,000 times stronger than morphine without the addictive side effects. The molecule came from the Conus magus, a sea snail found in the deep sea. Overall, more than 60% of our drugs come from analogs in nature.
'If you think about pharmaceuticals, there's a repository of genetic material down there with all these weird animals,' Barry said. 'People want to collect deep sea animals to see if they have important, novel chemicals that could have some use for us, whether it might be antibiotics or cancer treatments or something else.'
Scientists are also still uncovering exactly how sensitive the deep sea is to environmental changes and human impacts. However, compared to shallower waters, which are more easily subjected to changes in things like temperature, acidity or oxygen levels, these environmental changes take longer to reach the deep sea. As a result, creatures of the deep sea are likely to be more sensitive and vulnerable to changes that do occur in their environment.
'Animals that inhabit shallow waters have evolved to cope with variability in environmental conditions, but in the deep sea, there's very little change in oxygen or temperature or pH across the year,' Barry said. 'A similar change in pH or oxygen [that occurs at shallower levels], might be far less tolerable for animals in the deep sea.'
Additionally, deep sea creatures are impacted by changes that occur in regions closer to the surface because many rely on food that falls from those heights. About 90% of food sources are lost every 1,000 meters deeper you go in the ocean, so any disruptions to the food supply could be detrimental to sealife at these depths, Barry said.
'When the productivity of the surface water changes, that affects the amount of detritus, or dead material, that sinks to the deep sea floor that is the food supply for those organisms,' Drazen said. 'That is reducing the food supply to the deep sea.'
Many of the minerals involved in proposed deep sea mining operations are located on black, potato-shaped nodules that lie on the seafloor. Yet a community of animals lives on the nodules themselves, and they would be eradicated if they are mined, said Lauren Mullineaux, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Additionally, mining operations scrape up the seafloor, producing sediment plumes that can disrupt an area up to hundreds of kilometers away from the operating site, Mullineaux said. Even a fine dusting of this sediment might change the habitat enough to kill some of those species, she explained.
'It can take many decades for the habitat to look like it did before it was mined,' Mullineaux told Salon in a phone interview.
The ocean is a globally shared resource, and stewarding the deep sea may be society's last chance to protect the remaining virgin Earth. The majority of creatures living in the abysmal sea remain unknown to us, but in order to protect them, we must first know they exist. After all, these creatures surely have a lot to teach us about how to survive and evolve in an increasingly harsh environment.
'If we want to be sustainable stewards of the resources that we depend on, it would be nice to know what is there first,' Barry said.

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Yahoo

11-06-2025

• Yahoo

"Razor blade throat": The "Nimbus" COVID variant sparks concern of summer surge

Post-pandemic amnesia is a natural reaction, and it's common for misremembering to occur after a pandemic or collective traumatic event occurs. Yet the reality is that SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, is still finding ways to infect people by evolving new mutations, and a new variant has raised concern among virologists that continue to track the virus. Last month, the World Health Organization labeled the COVID variant NB.1.8.1 a 'variant under monitoring' because it has been surging across Asia and made up 10.7% of global sequences reported as of mid-May. Now, the variant has been detected in the United States, Europe and Canada as well, concerning virus trackers who — for the first time since the Pirola variant began circulating in August 2023 — bestowed upon it a nickname: Nimbus. Nimbus has recombined genetic material from other strains three times. Although the process of recombination is a natural process of viruses trying to evolve to survive among the population, recombination events are concerning because each time a virus does so, it has the potential to evolve into something that is more infectious or causes more severe disease. One of these mutations in Nimbus allows it to evade the immunity we have built against the virus from prior infections, so transmissibility might be slightly higher, said Dr. Rajendram Rajnarayanan, of the New York Institute of Technology campus in Jonesboro, Arkansas. A recent preprint study, not yet peer-reviewed, found that the way this variant binds to cells could make it infect them more efficiently than earlier strains and that it could be easier for this strain to be passed along to someone else. However, there has not been any evidence yet to suggest that Nimbus is linked to more severe illness. 'We haven't seen a big surge in emergency departments due to COVID-related conditions and respiratory things in this term yet,' Rajnarayanan told Salon in a video call. 'We have to wait and watch.' Recently, many people have been reporting a symptom called 'razor blade throat,' but it's unclear if this is a symptom of COVID or one of the many other viruses circulating. Overall, it is difficult to attribute certain symptoms to variants when there are more than a dozen circulating at a time and testing remains relatively low compared to earlier stages of the pandemic, said Dr. T. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary and genome biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada. 'That said, we learned from Omicron that high transmissibility can cause as much damage as high per infection virulence, and at this point it is not just acute severity that is of concern, but longer-term impacts of repeated infection,' Gregory told Salon in an email. Such impacts include conditions like "long COVID," in which the symptoms of COVID last for months or years, often disabling current data shows that most COVID infections in the U.S. are currently caused by the LP.8.1 variant, which descends from Pirola. Both of these strains are technically still in the WHO's Greek letter 'Omicron' family, which now contains thousands of offspring. If there's one thing viruses are good at, it's mutating into new forms that can evade our immunity, whether that's from vaccines or past infections. In 2023, the WHO decided to only name variants with this system if they were considered a 'variant of concern' and stated that certain action steps should be taken by countries if a variant fell under this classification. However, the agency has not labeled any variants like this since Omicron. Some argue that some variants have been different enough to warrant a new name, and that not naming variants makes it more difficult to distinguish between the complex alphabet soup of variants that are circulating at any given time. For example, Pirola, which included the BA.2.86 variant along with its descendants, was about as genetically different from the original Omicron strain as Omicron was from the original 'wild strain' virus from Wuhan, China. Nevertheless, in the past two years, 'it's largely been the Pirola show,' Gregory said. Current vaccines have been designed to protect against this strain. So far, Nimbus is not very common in the U.S., but it has been identified in California and has enough mutations in its spike protein that it has a potential to cause waves of illness in other regions — which is in part why it was designated a name. At-home tests should still work to detect this variant, but PCR tests that doctors can order are more accurate. 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It's important to protect against things like long COVID not only for the well-being of people today but also for our susceptibility to future viruses, Rajnarayanan said. 'In different parts of the world, I've seen funding for continuous surveillance gone down, and not just for surveillance, which is important, but also studying the disease itself,' Rajnarayanan said. 'This is not just about protecting [people] today but also protecting them from any other variant in the future.'

National Geographic

09-06-2025

• National Geographic

Jellyfish are finally giving up their secrets

Gelatinous zooplankton, colloquially known as jellies, are an evolutionary hodge-podge of squishy, translucent creatures composed mostly of water. While this group does include 'true jellyfish' with their iconic rounded bell and stinging tentacles, it is also host to a smattering of creatures such as worms, primitive chordates, and snails with wings. A California sheephead (Semicossyphus pulcher) takes a bite out of a twin-tailed salp (Thetys vagina.) Jellies are poorly suited to life near shore, so when they find themselves in a kelp forest, they can make easy prey. 'If being 95 percent water is what unites the group, that is where it ends,' says Grace Cawley, a PhD candidate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Some are passive grazers, others track down their prey. Some are the size of a thimble, others can grow longer than a blue whale. Some cruise along the air-sea interface, others live thousands of meters beneath the surface. Cawley joked that the common reaction with jellies was ''oh, it's gooey?' Throw it with the gelatinous zooplankton.' In failing to recognize their diversity, humankind has overlooked some of the most ancient creatures on our planet. But thanks to advances in technology, scientists are now racing to decipher how jellies will shape the future of Earth's oceans. The hard part about squishy bodies The study of gelatinous zooplankton began in the late 1800s by scooping specimens out of the water from docks and ships. 'A lot of [early inquiry] was really just, 'what is this thing'?' says Steven Haddock, a leader in zooplankton biology at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Typical methods for investigating evolutionary history simply didn't work. Jellies lack the bones and shells that make for good fossils—scientists struggled to keep them alive in the lab long enough to observe their life cycles—and attempts to preserve them resulted in jars of cloudy film that bore no resemblance to the original creature. The proliferation of larger, faster research vessels around the mid-1900s meant that it became possible to sample new and remote regions of the ocean. Scientists rushed to ask ''how many?' and 'how much?' before having answered 'who?' and 'how?'' wrote Haddock in an early paper . This 1 inch lemon jelly (Aegina citrea) may not seem intimidating, but it is a predator. Its prey are other gelatinous zooplankton like salps and ctenophores. Hula-skirt siphonophores (Physophora hydrostatica) normally live deeper than 700 meters, but strong currents will occasionally carry them to the surface. Many different groups have made the transition to life in the water column. This pelagic snail has evolved to be transparent, but it still retains its shell. These animals blur the line of what is considered a gelatinous zooplankton. In their case, it largely comes down to the context in which they are being studied. Many species of salp (colonial tunicates) have a complex life cycle that alternates between sexual and asexual reproduction. Once the individuals in the colony mature, they will break off to begin reproducing sexually. When Scripps Institution ecologist Elizabeth Hetherington began studying gelatinous zooplankton, she was shocked by how little was known about their lives. 'There were so many questions that seemed pretty simple, like basic questions about distribution and abundance … that I couldn't find answers to.' Since the early 2000s, advances in technology have revealed that they play a more vital role in the ocean's food web than scientists thought. One paper from 2022 suggested that pelagic tunicates—gelatinous sea creatures that float in the open ocean—could be responsible for transporting more than 10 percent of carbon that is eventually stored in the ocean floor. The discovery that this single group of jellies could play such an influential role in the carbon cycle surprised scientists. The significance of all the ocean's jellies combined is unclear; however, the role they play in helping store carbon is probably underestimated. New technology that allowed scientists to study tiny bits of DNA also yielded new insights into jellies themselves. One study published in 2023 found that ctenophores, the most fragile of the gelatinous zooplankton, may be the oldest animal species living on Earth. Not only did these new methods revolutionize the study of individual species, but they also transformed our understanding of the open ocean. Jellies were more prevalent than previously thought and enthusiastic participants in the food web , hunting and being hunted. Using DNA metabarcoding, a technique used to identify multiple species within a mixed sample, 'we [could] detect gelatinous zooplankton in the guts of predators' explains Hetherington. Though the remnants of jellies were rarely visible, their DNA has been found in stomach contents of a wide variety of birds, fish, and sea turtles, disproving the idea that they were just dead-ends in the food chain. As larvae, many fish species mimic the traits of gelatinous zooplankton to decrease their chances of being eaten. This larval cusk eel is nearly transparent which helps it hide in the open ocean. Scientists are still trying to answer major questions about how many species exist, in what numbers, and how those populations might be changing. 'In an oceanographic context, we're still a long way from having the big picture biogeochemistry stuff figured out' remarks Haddock. 'Questions like 'Are jellyfish increasing?', 'How much jellyfish biomass is there relative to fish biomass?', 'What is the true diversity of jellies?' … we're still struggling to answer those.' To answer these questions about jelly species, scientists must also learn more about how they fit in their ocean habitats. 'The ocean is not a stagnant place where nothing happens, the ocean is this dynamic, complicated system,' says Cawley. Jellies are no exception. Instead of maintaining a consistent, predictable population, many gelatinous zooplankton follow extreme boom and bust cycles that scientists are still trying to understand. One species of pelagic tunicate called a pyrosome can bloom with such intensity that it will make up 80 percent of the biomass in a given area. When blooms like this occur, they affect every aspect of an ecosystem from the food web to the chemistry of the water. With warming temperatures, overfishing, and pollution rapidly changing our oceans, answering these questions is becoming even more difficult. 'All of these ecosystems are impacted by warming and by pollution so it's important to get the baseline of where we are now,' but in a system as fluid as the ocean, a baseline is more complicated than a set of measurements, clarifies Hetherington. 'We should shift our thinking from baseline to baselines, that it's not this one thing, it's this dynamic range.' A baseline needs to capture the underlying patterns of our oceans. It's an intimidating challenge that begins with demystifying where these jellies are living and what they are doing. Still, in Haddock's eyes, it's an exciting time to study gelatinous zooplankton. 'There are new species within a stone's throw of New York City or Tokyo … if you just look in the right ways'

Yahoo

03-06-2025

• Yahoo

In space, no one can hear you scream — But it still gets incredibly noisy

You've probably heard astronauts talking to mission control while they perform operations in space. In these recordings, you can hear the back-and-forth chatter, along with the astronaut's breathing and the background noise of their spacesuit pumping oxygen into their helmet to keep them alive. Yet, if they removed that helmet and broke the barrier of the suit shielding them from outer space, that conversation would be cut — and all sound would go radio silent. As astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson once explained on the podcast StarTalk, astronauts would be able to hear things from within the body itself — like their own heartbeat. 'The sound of silence is the sound of things that were always making noise that you never noticed before,' he said on the podcast. Sound waves are a vibration carried through some sort of medium, like air or water or in the case of the heartbeat, the body. When those vibrations reach our ears, they send a vibration through our eardrums, which is recognized in the brain as sound. Because sound needs something to travel through, it can't make its way through the vast majority of space, which is a vacuum containing essentially no particles. Interplanetary space contains just a few dozen particles in each cubic centimeter — in comparison, the air we breathe has tens of quintillions of molecules per cubic centimeter. (For scale, 10 quintillion seconds is longer than the age of the universe.) 'In the universe, an absolute vacuum is rare, and most of the universe is very low-density high-temperature plasma,' said Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. 'In principle, sound could travel through that, but it would have very different properties to what we are used to.' Gas clouds, dust clouds and solar winds for example, could all have sound waves pass through them, even if they are relatively low-density, said Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs The Bad Astronomy blog. The structures of many gas clouds, for example, can be formed by sound waves, or shock waves in the case that the material moves faster than the speed of sound, he explained. 'We see the effects of sound in these objects all the time,' Plait told Salon in an email. This would be nothing like the sound we are used to on Earth and wouldn't be detectable by the human ear, which can only hear a very narrow range of frequencies. You may remember the black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster about 250 million light-years away, from which NASA detected emanating pressure waves in 2003. Although this was not a sound recording like you would hear from a microphone, NASA did convert these pressure waves into sound, albeit one that is far too low of a frequency for the human ear to detect. For what it's worth, though, they did find that the waves corresponded to the note of B-flat, about 57 octaves below the middle C note on a piano. Then, in 2022, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory sonified this wave data into a couple of sounds the human ear could hear at frequencies 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than the original. (To get a sense of just how astronomical this figure is, one study estimated that there are 20 quadrillion total ants on Earth.)"What's going on is that matter is surrounding the black hole, and when some stuff falls in it can create a powerful wind that compresses the material around it, making a sound wave,' Plait said. 'We don't detect the sound itself, but we can see the ripples in the gas and they can be converted into sound we hear.' There are entire projects dedicated to sonifying data from astronomical objects. In the Cassini mission, for example, NASA detected radio waves emitted from charged particles in magnetic fields, which were converted to sound. Still, these were plasma waves, and not sound waves. However, sound has been detected within our own solar system. During NASA's Perseverance mission on Mars in 2021, the rover's microphones detected the whir of the mission's helicopter and noises created by the rover. It also detected naturally occurring sounds on the planet itself — including Martian wind. Back in 1981, Russia also reported sounds on Venus during the Soviet Venera 13 mission, which sounds like waves hissing on a beach. Yet sounds on other planets sound different than they do on Earth because other planets have different atmospheres. On Earth, the unique combination of oxygen, nitrogen and other gases, combined with the effects of gravity and solar heating, create a certain density of molecules that carries sound as we know it. In contrast, the atmosphere on Mars is roughly 2% as dense as Earth's, and its composition is dominated by carbon dioxide. Overall, sounds would be quieter and slightly muffled, and it would also take longer to reach you than it would on Earth. Some higher pitched sounds would be inaudible entirely. Interestingly, if you played a church organ on Mars, the set of flue pipes that create sound in a way similar to a flute would go up in pitch, but the reed pipes, which produce sound in a way similar to a saxophone, would go down in pitch, said Tim Leighton, an acoustics professor at University of Southampton, who created models to predict sound on other planets. Saturn's moon, Titan, is probably acoustically the closest to Earth. However, the pressure and density are a bit higher at ground level, and the speed at which sound travels through the atmosphere is lower than Earth. As a result, many sounds such as voices, flutes and organ pipes would play at a lower pitch, Leighton said. On Venus, sounds that are caused by solid objects vibrating, like harmonicas or reed organ pipes, would be pitched down because the atmosphere is dense and soupy. However, sounds from things like flue organ pipes or flutes, which are propagated through air, would be pitched higher than Earth. That's because the extremely hot temperatures on Venus make sound travel faster than on Earth. Additionally, if we theoretically heard a sound like a vocalization on Venus, our perception of the size of the creature it was coming from would be a little distorted. That's because humans evolutionarily developed a way of hearing vocalizations in which sound travels to the top of the nose of the speaker and back again in a form of echo, which we subconsciously use to estimate how large a creature is based on the tone they emit, Leighton said. On Venus, "this pulse quickly travels up to the top of the nose and back again much sooner than it would on Earth,' Leighton told Salon in a video call. 'Your brain hears that and imagines the person is about three feet tall.' As we continue exploring more distant planets, recording sound could help scientists better understand them. For example, measuring the sounds of wind on Mars could provide clues on how the planet's surface forms, Leighton explained. 'It can tell us a lot about the atmosphere and how it changes as the sun goes up and down, and how that, in turn generates winds to shape the surface of Mars,' Leighton said. 'That indicates the power of these microphones.' Sound could also help us explore planets like Jupiter and Saturn, which likely have plenty of sound to hear but have thick clouds and inhospitable conditions that make it difficult to access visually, Impey said. 'In fact, since the atmosphere is sort of opaque and you can't really see through it, it might be a way to sense what's happening better and more efficiently than you could with any sort of a camera, which wouldn't really work very well at all,' he told Salon in a phone interview. When looking for sound in the universe, astronomers have also looked back in time. Back in the early years of the universe, it was a hot plasma soup that was far more dense. That plasma carried acoustic oscillations, although still not at an audible range. However, in one research project, astronomer Mark Whittle compressed the first million years of the universe into 10 seconds, shifted up by 50 octaves so that the human ear could hear. It sounds like "a descending scream, a deep roar and a final growing hiss," he reported. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, sound waves called Baryon acoustic oscillations rippled through the cosmos to influence how galaxies were distributed. As such, one could say that life on Earth as we know it in some way originated from a sound wave. It's not called the Big Bang for nothing, after all. 'Within that sea of brilliance, the seeds for all that we now know were already present, latent, waiting to unfold,' Whittle wrote in his report. 'Most remarkable of all, perhaps, these seeds were sounds – pressure waves coursing through the fluid.'