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The deep sea seems almost to belong to another planet. Bizarre, little understood creatures live there in perpetual darkness and under mountainous pressures — vampire squids, sawtooth eels, sea spiders. They and many others have largely eluded science or appear for a tantalizing moment before the headlamps of submersibles only to vanish again.
Despite decades of exploration, less than a tenth of the deep ocean realm has been explored, despite it being the largest habitat for life on Earth. There are a lot of sea monsters yet to be discovered.
The deep sea is invisible to anyone on a ship, of course. It's just the open ocean. But there are subtle signs even on the surface that great depths lie below. Creatures like great whales, albatrosses, tuna and sharks may be seen. But no sea gulls, harbor seals or otters are found in these expanses. To live in this part of the ocean, an animal has to swim all the time. There is no place to rest or hide from natural enemies.
The Abyss
Technically speaking, the deep sea is any place away from coasts and beyond the continental shelves where the seafloor drops away to extreme depths — miles deep. These vast regions were once considered lifeless or perhaps inhabited by monstrous squids and little else.
Explorers using remotely operated submersible vehicles have begun to penetrate these dark depths, and they have discovered bizarre gardens rife with life around smoking hydrothermal vents. The gardens host entire communities of life that never see the sun and have no need of it. Giant tube worms, clams and shrimp live all around these "black smoker" vents, surviving off the exotic primitive "archaea," bacteria-like organisms that extract a living from the chemicals dissolved in the hot mineral-rich waters spewing from the seafloor.
The minerals that come out of the smoker vents are not only of interest to sea life. Humans are preparing to mine the thick crusts created by the vents for their gold, silver and copper. Some geologists suspect that all the major copper deposits now found on land are actually the fossilized remains of deep sea smoker vents. Already mineral rights have been granted to a company to look for metal-rich lodes over 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers) of the Bismarck Sea, north of New Guinea, according to a report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
But even far from these extraordinary gardens, also under more than 10,000 feet of water, the muddy expanses of the seafloor can still harbor animals — like sea urchins and shrimp that live off the debris that slowly descends from the more productive waters high above. There have even been discoveries of deep-sea corals growing on ledges of rock 650 to 5,000 feet deep off the Atlantic coast of Canada in cold waters — a far cry from what most people think of when they hear the words "coral reef."
