Why unexploded ordnances pose physical, and environmental, risks
Two unexploded ordnance were fished out of the Charles River in Needham, Massachusetts, this week.
Two unexploded ordnance were fished out of the Charles River in Needham, Massachusetts, this week.
Environment
Mar 15, 2024
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Under certain conditions microbial communities can grow and thrive, even in places that are seemingly uninhabitable. This is the case at inactive hydrothermal vents on the sea floor. An international team that includes researchers ...
Ecology
Mar 15, 2024
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Scientists from the Universities of Sydney and Sorbonne University have used the geological record of the deep sea to discover a connection between the orbits of Earth and Mars, past global warming patterns and the speeding ...
Earth Sciences
Mar 12, 2024
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One in seven species of deepwater sharks and rays are threatened with extinction due to overfishing, according to a new eight-year study released today in the journal Science.
Plants & Animals
Mar 7, 2024
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Deep sea and sediments bring iron to Antarctic waters. The iron that fertilizes the waters around Antarctica mostly comes from the deep, upwelling waters and the sediments around the continent.
Earth Sciences
Mar 6, 2024
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Climate change is heating the oceans, altering currents and circulation patterns responsible for regulating climate on a global scale. If temperatures dropped, some of that damage could theoretically be undone.
Earth Sciences
Feb 29, 2024
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Anoxic marine basins may be among the most viable places to conduct large-scale carbon sequestration in the deep ocean, while minimizing negative impacts on marine life. So say UC Santa Barbara researchers in a paper published ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 19, 2024
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Hydrothermal vents and manganese nodule fields in the deep oceans contain more biodiversity than expected, according to the thesis that NIOZ-marine biologist Coral Diaz-Recio Lorenzo will defend at Utrecht University on January ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 25, 2024
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Climate change, warming temperatures and an increase in nutrient density in the world's oceans are causing a steady loss of oxygen in the marine environment and posing a serious threat to biodiversity.
Environment
Jan 22, 2024
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A team of scientists led by a Tulane University oceanographer has found that deposits deep under the ocean floor reveal a way to measure the ocean oxygen level and its connections with carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere ...
Earth Sciences
Jan 19, 2024
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The deep sea, or deep layer, is the lowest layer in the ocean, existing below the thermocline, at a depth of 1000 fathoms (1828 m) or more. Little or no light penetrates this area of the ocean, and most of its organisms rely on falling organic matter produced in the photic zone for subsistence. For this reason scientists assumed life would be sparse in the deep ocean, but virtually every probe has revealed that, on the contrary, life is abundant in the deep ocean.
From the time of Pliny until the expedition in the ship Challenger between 1872 and 1876 to prove Pliny wrong; its deep-sea dredges and trawls brought up living things from all depths that could be reached. Perhaps one day man will be more like aqua man, and roam the ocean depths with the fish creatures alike. Yet even in the twentieth century scientists continued to imagine that life at great depth was insubstantial, or somehow inconsequential. The eternal dark, the almost inconceivable pressure, and the extreme cold that exist below one thousand meters were, they thought, so forbidding as to have all but extinguished life. The reverse is in fact true....(Below 200 meters) lies the largest habitat on earth.
In 1960 the Bathyscaphe Trieste descended to the bottom of the Marianas Trench near Guam, at 35,798 feet (10,911 meters), the deepest spot on earth. If Mount Everest were submerged there, its peak would be more than a mile beneath the surface. At this great depth a small flounder-like fish was seen moving away from the bathyscaphe's spotlight. The Japanese research submersible Kaiko was the only vessel capable of reaching this depth, and it was lost in 2003.
We know more about the moon than the deepest parts of the ocean. Until the late 1970s little was known about the possibility of life on the deep ocean floor but the the discovery of thriving colonies of shrimp and other organisms around hydrothermal vents changed that. Before the discovery of the undersea vents, all life was thought to be driven by the sun. But these organisms get their nutrients from the earth's mineral deposits directly. These organisms thrive in completely lightless and anaerobic environments, in highly saline water that may reach 300 °F (149 °C), drawing their sustainance from hydrogen sulfide, which is highly toxic to all terrestrial life. The revolutionary discovery that life can exist without oxygen or light significantly increases the chance of there being life elsewhere in the universe. Scientists now speculate that Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, may have conditions that could support life beneath its surface which is speculated to be a liquid ocean beneath the icy crust.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA