Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. NERC Smartex project, SAMS, the Abyssline project, iAtlantic Sampling the seafloor Sweetman first made the unexpected observation that “dark” oxygen was being produced on the seafloor while assessing marine biodiversity in an area that’s earmarked for mining potato-size polymetallic nodules. NHMDeepSea Group/Natural History Museum, UK The pristine ecosystem, 16,400 feet below the …
Westport Headlands, north of Fort Bragg in Mendocino County. Scientists exploring the Northern California Coast have, for the first time, uncovered a treasure trove of carbon compacted on the seafloor — a discovery that may help unravel the ocean’s power to combat climate change. A reserve spanning 6,000 square miles of sanctuary from Point Arena in Mendocino County south to …
Ice sheets can retreat up to 600 meters a day during periods of climate warming, 20 times faster than the highest rate of retreat previously measured. An international team of researchers used high-resolution imagery of the seafloor to reveal just how quickly a former ice sheet that extended from Norway retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, about …
When the research vessel Sally Ride set sail for Santa Catalina Island to map an underwater graveyard of DDT waste barrels, its crew had high hopes of documenting for the first time just how many corroded containers littered the seafloor off the coast of Los Angeles. “I was pretty shocked that it just kept extending as far as it did,” …
