Tag Archives: Submarines and Submersibles

The deep-sea environs of the Earth’s poles are home to mysterious ocean creatures: giant sea spiders, Antarctic sea pigs, phantom jellyfish. Finding and identifying these animals can be difficult, however; some are known only because researchers found their remains in fishing nets or in the bellies of seabirds. But on Christmas Day last year, the crew of the R/V Falkor …

Humans have visually documented about 1,470 square miles, or a mere 0.001 percent, of the deep seafloor, according to a new study. That’s a little larger than the size of Rhode Island. The report, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, arrives as nations debate whether to pursue industrial mining of the seabed for critical minerals. Some scientists argue that …

Andrew Wozniak, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Delaware, struggled to process what his eyes were taking in. Dr. Wozniak was parked on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean beneath nearly 1.6 miles of water in Alvin, a research submersible. As far as he could see lay a mostly barren expanse of jet-black rock. Just a day before, at …

In March, Kat Bolstad returned from an Antarctic expedition where she had used a new camera system specially built to search for the elusive colossal squid. No one had captured footage of one of these animals swimming in the deep sea. She didn’t spot one on this voyage either. On the day she left the ship, though, Dr. Bolstad, a …