Deep sea mining opponents suffer major setback
Opponents of deep sea mining suffered a serious setback Friday when they failed to take a first step toward an international moratorium on the controversial practice.
Opponents of deep sea mining suffered a serious setback Friday when they failed to take a first step toward an international moratorium on the controversial practice.
Environment
Aug 3, 2024
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A new study has revealed that changes in the ocean floor impact currents, giving new insight into the deep-sea pathways of nutrients and pollutants.
Earth Sciences
Jul 31, 2024
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The Southern Ocean is wild and dynamic. It experiences Earth's strongest winds and largest waves. It is home to city-sized icebergs and the biggest ocean current on the globe, as well as tiny turbulent flows that fit inside ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 31, 2024
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A surprising technique has helped scientists observe how Earth's oceans are changing, and it's not using specialized robots or artificial intelligence. It's tagging seals.
Ecology
Jul 25, 2024
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As climate change advances, the ocean's overturning circulation is predicted to weaken substantially. With such a slowdown, scientists estimate the ocean will pull down less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Earth Sciences
Jul 8, 2024
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For the first time, researchers from UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography led an international team that directly measured cold, deep water upwelling via turbulent mixing along the slope of a submarine canyon ...
Earth Sciences
Jun 26, 2024
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Colossal undersea mountains, towering up to thousands of meters high, stir up deep sea currents: impacting how our ocean stores heat and carbon.
Earth Sciences
Jun 26, 2024
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When it comes to the ocean's response to global warming, we're not in entirely uncharted waters. A UC Riverside study shows that episodes of extreme heat in Earth's past caused the exchange of waters from the surface to the ...
Earth Sciences
Jun 13, 2024
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A new study offers first-time insights into three emerging climate innovations to safeguard or increase the carbon naturally captured by ocean and coastal ecosystems: rapid interventions to save the Great Barrier Reef, satellite-tracked ...
Environment
Jun 4, 2024
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Deep in the ocean lies the world's largest active carbon reservoir, which plays a pivotal role in buffering our planet's climate. Of the roughly 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide we emit each year, about 3 billion ...
Earth Sciences
May 28, 2024
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The deep sea, or deep layer, is the lowest layer in the ocean, existing below the thermocline, at a depth of 1000 fathoms (1828 m) or more. Little or no light penetrates this area of the ocean, and most of its organisms rely on falling organic matter produced in the photic zone for subsistence. For this reason scientists assumed life would be sparse in the deep ocean, but virtually every probe has revealed that, on the contrary, life is abundant in the deep ocean.
From the time of Pliny until the expedition in the ship Challenger between 1872 and 1876 to prove Pliny wrong; its deep-sea dredges and trawls brought up living things from all depths that could be reached. Perhaps one day man will be more like aqua man, and roam the ocean depths with the fish creatures alike. Yet even in the twentieth century scientists continued to imagine that life at great depth was insubstantial, or somehow inconsequential. The eternal dark, the almost inconceivable pressure, and the extreme cold that exist below one thousand meters were, they thought, so forbidding as to have all but extinguished life. The reverse is in fact true....(Below 200 meters) lies the largest habitat on earth.
In 1960 the Bathyscaphe Trieste descended to the bottom of the Marianas Trench near Guam, at 35,798 feet (10,911 meters), the deepest spot on earth. If Mount Everest were submerged there, its peak would be more than a mile beneath the surface. At this great depth a small flounder-like fish was seen moving away from the bathyscaphe's spotlight. The Japanese research submersible Kaiko was the only vessel capable of reaching this depth, and it was lost in 2003.
We know more about the moon than the deepest parts of the ocean. Until the late 1970s little was known about the possibility of life on the deep ocean floor but the the discovery of thriving colonies of shrimp and other organisms around hydrothermal vents changed that. Before the discovery of the undersea vents, all life was thought to be driven by the sun. But these organisms get their nutrients from the earth's mineral deposits directly. These organisms thrive in completely lightless and anaerobic environments, in highly saline water that may reach 300 °F (149 °C), drawing their sustainance from hydrogen sulfide, which is highly toxic to all terrestrial life. The revolutionary discovery that life can exist without oxygen or light significantly increases the chance of there being life elsewhere in the universe. Scientists now speculate that Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, may have conditions that could support life beneath its surface which is speculated to be a liquid ocean beneath the icy crust.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA