“This ocean heating is partly responsible for driving sea-level rise, as the water expands as it gets warmer.”įurther, Kalmus says, there’s extinction of marine life occurring under the ocean waters, and a mass migration of creatures toward the poles to adjust for heating waters, as well as a monumental change in ocean composition due to plastic. Increasing ocean heat is probably the single most important Earth system metric for understanding human-caused global heating, but almost no one is aware of it,” says Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboartory, speaking on his own behalf. “In addition, the ocean is heating up in its depths. Rising carbon-dioxide levels in these natural carbon sinks are altering gender balances and bleaching coral reefs. The pressing question is: How deep has the impact of the climate crisis gone? Changing temperatures are altering chemical compositions, life-cycles and ecosystems. Temperatures hover between 1 and 3 degrees Celsius.įor ecologists, there’s an urgency to deep-ocean exploration. Here, the pressure is a crushing 1,000 times that on the surface. That last one was sighted at 10,000 metres below the surface (that’s nearly 1,200 metres deeper than Everest is tall). (In 2012, filmmaker James Cameron famously made a solo dive and sampled the bottom of the Mariana Trench.)Īs a result, just since 2020, new records have been set for deepest-dwelling squid, octopus and possibly jellyfish. In the 1870s, Britain’s Challenger expedition conducted a landmark ocean survey that collected thousands of samples, discovered more than 4,000 new species, and explored the underwater world across 1.3 lakh km in four oceans (Atlantic, Southern, Indian and Pacific).Ī century later, the US navy submersible Trieste descended to nearly 11,000 metres below the surface, into the Mariana Trench, in 1960.ĭeep-sea submersibles are much sleeker and more manoeuvrable now, and a variety of them are being used to explore the deep seas. The first attempts by humans to explore the deeps were made more than 150 years ago. Until this sighting, the little creature had been thought of as a native of Hawaii, more than 6,800km away. On an expedition to the unexplored depths of the Coral Sea Marine Park in Australia, researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute found a species of spikefish lurking. (Schmidt Ocean Institute)Įverywhere one looks, species with new kinds of tentacles, light organs, lures, lipless mouths and sightless eyes are being found. A variety of life, including crinoids, sponges and corals found perched on near coral skeletons in the depths of the Coral Sea Marine Park, Australia. But as manned submersibles and remotely operated vehicles improve, we are seeing more of the worlds that they contain. It’s futile attempting to pile Eiffel towers or Everests one on the other to offer a sense of their scale. Their depths are so vast, they’re impossible to simplify. It’s possible we’ve seen more of the moon and of Mars than we have of the oceans on Earth.
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