The polymetallic nodules that mining companies hope to harvest from the deep sea floor could provide a source of oxygen for the animals, plants and bacteria that live there, researchers say. The discovery of this “dark oxygen” could shake up negotiations taking place this month in Jamaica, where a global regulatory body, the International Seabed … Read more
“Core on deck!” For two months, whenever I heard that cry, I would run to the deck of the JOIDES Resolution to watch the crew pull up a 10-meter-long cylindrical tube filled with layered, multi-colored rocks and sediments they had drilled from the seabed beneath our ship. The crew drilled more than 780 cores from … Read more
“Core on deck!” For two months, whenever I heard that cry, I would run to the deck of the JOIDES Resolution to watch the crew pull up a 10-meter-long cylindrical tube filled with layered, multi-colored rocks and sediments they had drilled from the seabed beneath our ship. The crew drilled more than 780 cores from … Read more
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific developments and more. A mysterious phenomenon first observed in 2013 aboard a ship in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean seemed so absurd that ocean scientist Andrew Sweetman was convinced his measuring equipment was faulty. Sensor readings … Read more
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific developments and more. A mysterious phenomenon first observed in 2013 aboard a ship in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean seemed so absurd that ocean scientist Andrew Sweetman was convinced his measuring equipment was faulty. Sensor readings … Read more
One question has been key for several years to understanding how much we should worry about the hundreds of tons of DDT dumped off the coast of Los Angeles: How exactly did this decades-old pesticide—a toxic chemical that spreads across the seafloor 3,000 feet underwater—reenter the food web? Now, in a long-awaited study, researchers have … Read more
Sea angel. Yiming Chen/Getty Images Far below the ocean’s surface, in the dark depths of the deep seafloor ecosystem (about 3,000 feet or 1,000 meters deep), exists an entire world of deep sea creatures that people rarely get a glimpse of. It is one of the largest ecosystems in the world, but is still relatively … Read more