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Showing posts with label Deep Sea Creatures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Deep Sea Creatures. Show all posts
This video clip from NHK's "Planet Earth" shows the scene at dinner time on the deep ocean floor. The footage, which appears to have been shot by the Japanese submarine Shinkai 6500 in Okinawan waters at a depth of over 1500 meters (5,000 feet), shows sea-floor scavengers fighting for their piece of a fish carcass that has drifted down to the bottom. Crabs, eels and giant isopods (Bathynomus giganteus), which look like 30 centimeter (1 foot) long wood lice, join in the feeding frenzy that lasts several hours. Here it is time-lapsed to about 20 seconds for maximum impact.
Of course, the marine-life depicted in this movie are not Alien Fish, even though they might appear so, to many of us. Simply, things are "alien" until they are identified and named, then it becomes almost ordinary. Many of the deep-sea fish seen are called Viperfish, Lizardfish, Whalefish and Dragonfish, though they have more technical names of course and are found at the oceans depths. Some create their own light, as seen, and all can survive at unbelievable water pressures.
The giant carcasses that resemble a loch ness monster are anyone's guess...Often the so-called experts claim that they're just regular (whales for example) that appear this strange way after they decompose though I highly doubt that. Yet once again, until they can find a live specimen, then name it, that strange aquatic organism will not exist to most people. I guess they cannot get their minds around it, while the unknown frightens most. Second, Cthulhu, the giant, squid-faced and winged sea monster was written about by H.P Lovecraft in a series of stories known as the Cthulhu mythos. Cthulhu. It is an ancient, demonic, aquatic beast worshipped by a secret cult, and "trapped" inside a tomb in an ancient rock city, now underwater. The city is described in length as not have been built by or for humans because the steps are too vast and the architecture too strange. This brings us to the photographs taken of the underwater ruins, found off the coast of Japan, I believe, which are also immense and eerily similar to the underwater, rock city described by Lovecraft in The Call of Cthulhu, etc.
Since we, as people, are only familiar with the smallest percentage of the world (being the surface) we are therefore "in the dark" about a vast amount of the world we live in. As proven, life can live in the harshest of environments, and new species of organisms are found all the time. Scientists will even admit that we are not even close to identifying all the species on the planet, not to mention inside the planet.
Take a journey with Dr. Lisa Levin to cold, dark realms characterized by methane seeps, low oxygen, and the pervasive smell of rotten eggs! ... all » Discover the strange and wonderful creatures that make high-stress, muddy environments their home. Series: "Perspectives on Ocean Science"
Most Amazing Documentary by David Attenborough about live in the deep oceans. Filmed in 2003. NOTE: This is NOT Deep Blue Sea or Blue Planet, but the original documentary/movie. It took years to film all this, and it's definitely worth watching!
New technology allows photographers to capture odd-looking sea life never seen by human eyes.
Ice-covered and isolated, the Arctic Ocean has been stingier with its deepest secrets than any other of Earth's oceans. It might as well be on another planet. Now, armed with a unique set of robotic tools, an international team of scientists is heading there to hunt for life along a little-explored gash in the ocean floor known as the Gakkel Ridge. A decade ago, the project would have seemed quixotic. But since then, scientists have uncovered evidence suggesting that spots along this oddball ridge might be capable of supplying the heat and nutrients to support colonies of creatures that thrive in the pitch-black water thousands of feet below the surface. Once that evidence emerged, the search for basic life in one of the world's most inaccessible places became a must, say several of the scientists involved. The voyage begins July 1.
The expedition also has caught the eye of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Techniques for operating autonomous robotic vehicles under ice would be key to exploring below the icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa.
The voyage is as dicey as any robotic mission NASA has launched to explore the solar system. "This is a very risky venture," says Hanumant Singh, a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who developed the unmanned undersea vehicles that will negotiate the Gakkel Ridge's icy environs. "I'm prepared to lose a vehicle.... But when you do a risk-versus-benefit analysis, it's absolutely worth it."
A successful voyage hinges on a lot of "ifs and buts," he says. For instance, no one has yet detected evidence of biological activity along the ridge. Yet the deepest parts of the Arctic Ocean -- including the 1,100-mile ridge -- have been isolated from the rest of the world's ocean floors for up to 65 million years. If organisms exist around Arctic hydrothermal vents, "then the very basis of life there has been evolving independently for tens of millions of years," he says.
Interest in sampling the bottom of the ocean at the top of the world has been building since the end of the cold war, when US and Soviet nuclear submarines stalked each other under the ice. In 1995, the US Navy allowed marine scientists to charter Arctic-capable nuclear attack submarines for research in a five-year program called Scicex. Among its achievements, Scicex developed the most detailed maps of the Arctic Ocean floor yet available. During the program's final cruise in 1999, scientists aboard the USS Hawkbill were mapping the Gakkel Ridge when they picked up evidence of a recent volcanic eruption.
Two years later, scientists returned to the ridge aboard USCGC Healy, a Coast Guard icebreaker dedicated to polar research, and the German icebreaker Polarstern. The main objective was to dredge for rocks along the ridge to better understand its geology. But the team also was interested in spotting any hydrothermal activity along the ridge. So scientists fastened sensor packages to the dredge cables and added hydrothermal-vent specialist Henrietta Edmonds to the team to interpret the data the sensors captured.
Mid-oceanic ridges supply the planet with new crust, which spreads outward from the line of volcanoes and rift valleys they form. Gakkel has the slowest spreading rate of them all. Based on studies of spreading rates and hydrothermal activity, researchers suspected Gakkel was too cool to host much hydrothermal activity.
"I'm probably not going to find anything," Dr. Edmonds recalls thinking at the time. Among the primary targets for the 2001 cruise: the region the Hawkbill mapped as a likely eruption location. There, Edmonds and her colleagues hit pay dirt. "We found this monster hydrothermal plume about 1,000 meters off the bottom and 1,000 meters thick." The plume, more than half a mile thick, had all of the telltale chemical traits of major eruptive plumes along other mid-oceanic ridges. Meanwhile, colleagues aboard the Polarstern were detecting sound waves from what they interpreted as a series of eruptions. Instead of plume leftovers from 1999, the team probably was sampling a plume being generated on the spot, says Edmonds, a marine chemist at the University of Texas at Austin and a lead scientist on this year's cruise.
In 2003, Edmonds and her colleagues published the results of the Healy/Polarstern cruise, showing that the Gakkel Ridge hosted far more hydrothermal activity than expected. She estimates that the ridge hosts perhaps 10 areas of hydrothermal activity that dot roughly 600 miles of the ridge -- a modest number. But the 2001 cruise observed hydrothermal plumes more frequently over Gakkel than over three other major -- and faster spreading -- ridges.
This year's expedition, which carries a price tag of at least $3 million, will run 50 days from the time the Swedish icebreaker Oden weighs anchor July 1 to the time it returns to its port. Two autonomous vehicles, Jaguar and Puma, will map the floor and analyze water samples. A tethered vehicle, dubbed the Camper, can take images as well as snag samples of clams or shrimp from the sea floor. The ability to bring sea-creature samples to the surface is critical, Dr. Singh says. Photos are valuable, "but a clam is just a clam until you analyze its DNA."
The discovery of life at inhospitable hydrothermal vents 30 years ago forced many biologists to expand their thinking about the range of environments that could support life. "One of the things that's really exciting about this is that we are going somewhere that absolutely no one else has ever been," says Susan Humphris, a scientist at Woods Hole and expedition member
Bacteria found deep in the ocean in the volcanic regions of mid-ocean ridges suggest a possible scenario for the beginning of life on earth.
Ocean water seeps into cracks created by sea-floor spreading at the mid-ocean ridges and is heated by magma from inside the earth. Water in these hydrothermal vents reaches temperatures of 375 degrees C and higher and is rich in dissolved minerals. The hot water rises from the vents in geysers and meets cold ocean water, causing minerals to precipitate out of solution as the water cools. In some places compounds of iron and sulfides form "chimneys" on top of the vents. Such an extreme environment seemed unlikely to support life given the conditions of temperature, pressure, and absence of light for photosynthesis.
Life on the edge of a frozen sea is tough. Pack ice at both poles is constantly on the move, and in winter freezes solid with air temperatures 70 degrees Celsius below freezing. Only in spring, with the retreating ice and light reaching the water, does life begin again. Plankton blooms and feeds vast hordes of migrating fish, birds, whales, seals and polar bears. Walruses rake the seabed for clams. Minke and humpback whales gorge themselves on gigantic swarms of krill. But it is a brief indulgence, for the ice soon returns and pushes life back into the ocean
Life goes to extraordinary lengths to survive this immense realm. A 30 tonne whale shark gorges on a school of fish and the unique overhead heli-gimbal camera reveals common dolphins rocketing at more than 30km an hour. Descending into the abyss, deep sea octopus fly with wings and vampire squid use bioluminescence to create an extraordinary colour display. The first ever time-lapse footage taken from 2,000m down captures eels, crabs and giant isopods eating a carcass, completely consuming it within three hours
The deep sea habitats of the northern gulf of mexico are extraordinarily diverse. From the incredible variety of deep sea corals teeming with invertebrates such as brittle stars and squat lobsters, to flower garden pinnacles swarming with fishes, to fields of sea anemones filter feeding in a veritable STORM of marine snow in an otherwise barren seascape, the images captured on this exciting expedition demonstrate habitat variety and biological diversity akin to combining a tropical rainforest with a desert in bloom. Three discrete teams of scientists from NOAA's FGBNMS, the Univ of Alabama, and Marine Conservation Biology Institute, worked collaboratively utilizing Innovator a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), that was equipped with cameras and sampling gear to explore this mysterious undersea realm. Video courtesy of Peter Etnoyer, NOAA-OE, the Sonsub Inc., and the Gulf of Mexico 2003 Expedition Science Party.
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