Ocean Watch | A Tale of Deep Sea Exploration

The

ocean

is the largest desert on planet Earth, a layer of infinite blue offers no hint of the wonders it contains, but underneath this world is far from uniform from the high seas to the shallows, from the surface to the depths, Hidden beneath the waves is a symphony of life. and Mystery One that links remote ecosystems through currents and systems that extend for tens of thousands of kilometers where changes at one end of the

ocean

affect processes in another of the ocean's many domains, the Depth stands as one of the latest frontiers of

exploration

and may hold the key to understanding the past, present and future of our planet.

It is a world of Perpetual Darkness that harbors obscurities, drifting in an endless void or clinging to alien oases where internal processes, inhabitants and environments remain poorly understood to this day. lesser-known areas of our planet, but this is beginning to change In 2009, the Schmid Ocean Institute, a non-profit philanthropic organization, was established with the mission of advancing ocean sciences through the use of cutting-edge technology and exchange open knowledge to foster a

deep

er understanding of the world beneath the waves over 11 years at sea, scientists aboard their first ship, falor, discovered wonders never seen before in the entire global ocean, but the ambitions of the Institute have surpassed falkor's capabilities, so in 2023 the Institute set sail on its new ship for its boldest year of discovery yet, this is falor 2, its newly refitted 110m global-class research vessel, built specifically to expand the frontiers of

deep

ocean

exploration

once and for all.

The ship is designed around its instruments, equipped with two lunar pools and a 150-ton crane. More than 200 square meters of laboratory space, high-resolution sonars for ocean mapping and a hangar from which the Institute's remotely operated vehicle is deployed. ROV Sebastian, a robot capable of diving 4,500 m below the ocean surface, where previously only the riddles of the depths could be solved. Through trolls and weighted lines, a set of sensors and a 4k camera now open a window into this realm for all to see. Manipulator arms allow teams to collect samples and an umbilical cable tethers the ROV to the spacecraft, supplying power and transmitting data and images. the surface where it is broadcast around the world in real time inspiring a generation to look into the depths throughout 2023 through nine expeditions spanning wildly different environments.

The teams on board falor 2 have implemented new systems and technological approaches to map the seafloor and discover new frontiers of biodiversity in the most extreme habitats of the Deep In just the first year of falor 2 The Vessel has already enabled scientists to do groundbreaking discoveries that are redefining our understanding of life in the Deep living cities at depths of 2 km or more never before seen by human eyes active nurseries where little-known species gather in great abundance to breed and spawn elsewhere new species that survive in darkness and a whole new ecosystem where a sanctuary of life thrives in an underworld Beneath the sea Flower Hello and welcome aboard falor two, our dynamic, inclusive and interdisciplinary ocean research and exploration vessel the mission of this vessel is to foster the discoveries necessary to understand our ocean, sustain life and ensure the health of our planet as you boldly explore our unknown ocean these are the stories of falor 2 and its first chapter in a life of Falor 2's first exploration story is one of Discovery , it's March and the ship is headed to the Mid-Atlantic mountain range, a site where 23 years earlier scientists discovered a hydrothermal vent system unlike anything seen before the vent system was named Lost City and Falor's team . 2 were looking for more similar things by tracking views of possible vents by combining several high-tech strategies.

The first step is to map with the ship so that we have a base map that also tells you where Ridge Crest might be. or seam mounds or fault zones, things that create paths for hot water to travel from deep in the crust to the seafloor, which allowed us to design two auv survey missions that would cover the parts of the Volcano Summit that They were of interest to us. I had to put the AVS in the water to get the 1M resolution data and then these mounds that are quite wide but not that tall showed up in the data from Sebastian's first dive from Falor 2 in a previously unexplored portion of the Pu def fall seamount where the sea Flor's cartographic data had indicated the existence of vents a set of cut-out structures emerged from the shadowy chimneys spewing thick columns of dark smoke formed by the precipitation of sulfides these are black smoke vents that had never been seen before and hosting vibrant hordes of life of swarms of shrimp and hairy white Yeti craps cultivating bacterial colonies on their shells coexisting among mineral chimneys and Bassel cathedrals every time we go down we find not just one but multiple high temperature smoking events, this place is obviously quite remote, that's oceanography, you are here seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but below us, the seas combine with activity, combine with life and features, you have the mid-ocean ridges and they are big , they are huge, they are like some of the largest mountain ranges on the face of the earth, when we came on board, we felt that as far as the ship was concerned, we could perform any operation at any time of the day or night and we did one of those dives we got. map Dave Gris looked at it and says right there, put the ROV down, we spent 15 minutes and there we were, so yeah, no, that's not cool.

The chemical composition found in the fence is believed to closely resemble the conditions that facilitated the dawn of life on Earth. Its secrets could provide a way to understand the possibility of life on other planets or moons, water worlds that may host vents of their own, as these form as the breakup of tectonic plates allows hot magma from The depths of the Earth rise closer to the seafloor where seawater superheats and absorbs minerals from surrounding rocks. This mineral-rich fluid returns to the ocean at extremely high speeds and temperatures exceeding 400°C, mixing with cold seawater and precipitating dissolved minerals as smoke, as if chemicals were rising here.

Initiate a process that mirrors photosynthesis where chemical energy rather than energy from the Sun allows for primary production through chemosynthesis because this life not only survives here, but thrives in the depths. The vents stand as otherworldly oases. ESPs offer insight into the resilience and adaptability of life on Earth in even the most extreme environments in three entirely new vent fields discovered during the inaugural falor 2 expedition, these may not be the type of vents they were looking for , but when it comes to exploring a place as bewildering as the depths of the ocean, you may not always find what you're looking for, but you're bound to discover something.

Such notable hydrothermal vents have been known to science since 1977, but a number of mysteries remain around the origins of their communities on geologic timescales. They are ephemeral and linked to the destructive influence of eruptions and earthquakes, so how is it that no matter where they form, a diverse biological hotspot almost always forms? Dr. Monica Brigh of the University of Vienna hypothesized that the answer lies beneath the sea floor, where the existence of a proposed subterranean ecosystem lurks. from the view could allow the animal lari to pass between the vent fields and colonize these mystifying worlds that we now travel from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to the Eastern Pacific Ridge, where in August Monica and her team set out in Falor 2 to test this hypothesis and search for the proposed underworld. of hydrothermal vents, if any, this is the site of the Tikka vent, one of the most studied in the world, in 2005 it was destroyed by a volcanic eruption, but in the years that followed expeditions began to investigate the recovery and primary succession of animal communities on Tika, after such a large-scale ecosystem reset, recovery had been rapid, the tubeworm muscles stalking the barnacles and more had already recolonized and established themselves among the mineral needles now, the The team leading Mission 2023 with the Schmid Ocean Institute hoped to discover how life had returned after the The devastation vents on Tika are home to a species that embodies everything that is weird and wonderful about these alien habitats: giant tube worms of the genus riftia that measure up to 3 m in height and have a bright red gill tuft that channels chemicals from the vent fluid to colonies of bacteria that inhabit their tube or trophosome.

The bacteria in turn convert these chemicals into food that sustains the worms, a perfect symbiotic partnership, while muscle ivy and barnacles had been found in the seawater around the vents, riftia ivy had never been sampled, pointing to a different, heretofore undiscovered method of dispersal. Over the course of the Expedition Monica and her team dug deep to uncover the mystery of the underwater floor around Tika and what they found redefined our understanding of life and succession in Deep Sea hotspots that, uh, we don't know about. We really fully understand how the animals that live there actually find this place and can come to this place.

We searched underground for the first time in life. Animals can live below the height of M and this is. I think my mind is flowing now that we know that. For example, pipe bombs can colonize vents by traveling through the subsurface. This is the first discovery. We know that these two BS can live in this cave system. That is the second finding and the third finding is that also the mobile founder of the mobile vent can live. In these subsurface areas, this dispersal method is completely new to science and challenges the idea that most Lavi rely on open ocean currents to disperse their young, but what the team discovered was beyond what was expected for everyone's beauty.

This is also that the experiment itself wasn't even working that well that we needed to get creative and, you know, basically apply a new method. Going around the Rocks opened our view to the underworld at the height of the ment. What we discovered was that even found animals that live below the surface, this expedition marked the discovery of a completely new dynamic habitat for science that exists in delicate unison with the vents above, if there is anything that the depths of the ocean have taught us. What has been taught in the relatively short time since the scientific community first plumbed its depths for life is that frontiers of biodiversity exist even in the least expected places.

Our oceans are home to countless species on divergent worlds, yet much of their biodiversity is unknown. This knowledge gap prevents us from fully understanding the amazing power of life. Life on Earth or the extent of human impact in June Falor 2 arrived in Costa Rica in red to investigate the biodiversity of an unprotected seamount where an unusual discovery had been made in 2013. An estimated 100 female octopuses gathered on a small outcrop to incubate their eggs. became known as an octopus garden and hinted at the potentially rare and life-supporting role of seamounts like this one, where low-temperature ventilation could provide the perfect conditions for regs to develop, but so far it has not been They had found viable embryos, leading scientists to question whether the site really supported octopus development.

If this phenomenon could be verified, it would make this nursery a feature worth protecting. Costa Rica is about 90% deep water and most of it has never been explored, so this expedition has been really critical on a local and regional level. levels and at global levels, Costa Rica will actually be hosting the United Nations ocean conference in 2025, with Costa Rica in that leadership role, this cruise provides a brilliant opportunity that will really allow us to bring science to decision makers in that forum and really put the spotlight on the deep sea and for us this cruise has simply been a successAmazing from day one, we verified some of our hypotheses and then a few more a few days later, which I can't tell you how rare that is in deep sea exploration. the eggs were viable which was amazing, we found things we didn't expect like a skate nursery, we discovered a new low temperature hydrothermal curve, it also has octopuses raising their eggs there.

She was so excited that Beth was like Rachel, she went outside and screamed. She was bouncing off the walls meditating like this. In this way, it is a labor of love for the females, it can take up to 5 years and during this time they do not seem to feed much, if at all, it is believed to be their last mission to protect their eggs until the end of their life. , but it is not in vain that seeing babies born in real time confirmed to scientific teams that the Dorado outcrop is indeed an active nursery. I just hatched and we are seeing an amazing new baby octopus. happy birthday happy birthday oh look we have an octopus shadow this could be the only time in the life of octopods that they receive a shadow their findings at the site revealed a deeper understanding of the life history of these octopuses and ecological importance of seamount technological innovation can unlock new ways of understanding the human effect since their creation.

The Schmid Ocean Institute has offered its facilities and resources to the international scientific community free of charge to test new technologies and conduct innovative research. In April, scientists aboard Falor 2 set out to study the human effect. impact of climate change on deep sea corals using a new technology called Solaris these reefs are cities of life in the depths that host a biodiversity similar to that FL flourishes near the surface although hidden in the Twilight Zone of the ocean in these ethereal Secret Gardens where sunlight diminishes to a mere gleam, a series of corals and sponges build a complex home where other animals can take shelter and find food.

Squat lobsters cling to the coiled corals next to the fragile stars, making the most of these branching structures to reach the flow of the current where it moves fastest. The waters bring a feast of plankton and organic debris towards them, so we are faced with to the coast of Puerto Rico right now and we are going to explore mopic and deep water corals along the western and southwestern part of Puerto Rico and there AR. cover R AR fully submerged my group studies a group of chemicals called reactive oxygen species, we call them r or Ross and R are oxygen intermediates, so you can think of them as a really reactive form of oxygen, which we've seen in shallow reef environments is that coral species that tend to be more resistant to thermal stress and pathogen infection have much higher concentrations of superoxide, so we think this serves as a kind of armor, if these chemicals from They actually protect corals, then we can help.

Corals protect themselves from stress by better understanding the controls that promote their formation. We have very few measurements of these chemicals in the ocean because they have a very short lifespan, so we don't really know why these corals produce them, when they produce them. these reactive oxygen species at what concentrations are they toxic at what concentrations are they beneficial and we have this wonderful team of chemists, biologists and engineers working together to try to understand this process that we know nothing about within the ocean, so with funding from Schmid Marain Technology Partners Colleen Hansel's lab has been developing the first type of in situ sensor array of reactive oxygen species that can be used in aquatic environments.

The way we're monitoring the health of these corals is by using a sensor called a uh it disk. measures these reactive compounds that these corals produce in order to get to those deep sea corals we need to develop a completely different type of instrument we couldn't take the disco to the bottom of the ocean it doesn't have the right pressure tolerance no It didn't have the right type of body robust to be strapped to a submersible and, as a result, Solaris was born. This has been a really excellent deployment of Solaris and highlights its capabilities of being able to encompass deep ocean research in deep ocean environments in ecosystems.

And I think what's really exciting is that this will take us to a whole new area of ​​understanding the biogeochemistry of corals. It has been a really successful cruise. We have collected, I believe, about 300 specimens of corals and associated animals. I actually collected six of the seven families of the black world, probably somewhere in the realm of 15 to 20 species and some of which will be absolutely new to science, I think we haven't seen one like this yet, some of the things really interesting. What we discovered that comes to mind is a super high density of corals so we had this spectacular discovery of uh corals and stony corals that was super full of corals and it's totally unexpected we probably have multiple new species to describe . as well as information that could be very useful to propose new marine protected areas of the numerous cold water reef sites known to science, there are some that stand out both for their complexity and for the challenges they pose for research in the Galapagos: and the seafloor Horizontally, a multidisciplinary team led by chief scientist Kathleen Rober took Falor 2 to overcome these challenges and map the deep Galapagos vertical oases: deep-water vertical coral reefs are areas where corals essentially live on the side of an underwater cliff.

You were walking in a forest and suddenly the whole forest turned on its side, so everything that was in that forest and the lives in those trees were still there, but they were completely turned on its side and that's pretty much how corals are organized along some of these underwater cliffs. and then, if you could imagine that in that forest there was a wind that always blew, it is like the current that we have under water and that current is what brings food and sustains the animals and corals that live in those vertical reefs. New advanced laser.

The scanning technology allowed the team to produce highly detailed three-dimensional maps of the reefs with a resolution of 2 mm, capable of identifying animals that live in association with the coral. What we sometimes don't realize is that underwater we have this incredible topography. You have valleys, hills and mountains, ravines, rifts, you have places where the continental plates rub against each other and that creates a whole new space, so it's a great three-dimensional connection. Ed. It amazes me that every time we put instruments in the water and have the opportunity to go deeper than we have been we always find something new in the Galapagos: from the cliff reefs to the deep sea vents creating maps of high-resolution images documenting its current condition over a period of time in October.

Teams at Falor 2 tested a different approach to mapping Flor's interferometric synthetic aperture sonar, for short, a technology that uses sound to create images of Flor's features in much more detailed resolutions than typical approaches to creating bimetric maps. Normally, you are often lost and blind. at the bottom of the ocean because we had the maps and because we had the synthetic aperture sonar we were able to drive with millimeter precision to all the places we wanted to go when you drive up to a vent with the ROV you know everything is dark but as you get closer , things slowly start to light up and the first thing you always see when you approach a hydral event are the bacterial mats and I think that's how we found seven or eight active ventilation complexes.

Towers 10 12 15 M high, the highest temperature was over 250° and the tube worms and all the animals and for me, Val really validated our approach. We can now see if a vent is active or inactive simply from the SAS data by knowing the texture of the sea. Flower, that will give you information about what types of animals can live there, so this could really change our understanding of the distributions of different animals or how ecosystems work, that kind of thing. I've been in business for 30 years and I've been exploring the ocean floor for precisely these types of environments for 30 years and in the early days we spent weeks after weeks hoping to find just one site and what the interior has done for us. and also the M3 multibeam mapping has allowed us to identify targets before even entering the water now that we know we can do this there is no turning back we would have discovered the value of the uh incess and uh the M3 high resolution mapping whether there was hydrothermal vents or not, it's just that we have The double benefit of having this technology in the right place at the right time to be able to discover the hydrothermal activity that we did by creating such detailed maps of regions as the dormant fence allows us to better understand the biodiversity of emerging deepwater target sites.

The marine mining industry, which aims to extract valuable rare earth metals from these sites, science and ecology have the opportunity to lead the way in which most of the ocean has been mapped with technologies such as satellite systems using radar , but these provide very coarse resolution data that we can then To improve that, we can use a ship-mounted multibeam that gives us better data, but it's still relatively coarse, so we've been improving that, by putting systems on board the ROV, we can begin to understand the morphology of the seafloor and the sac, in an order. magnitude more than that, so this is a really high resolution, it's getting to the point where we can see some of the geological features that are directly in the images, then we can overlay photo mosaics on top of that and that will give us a resolution millimeter so that we can start to develop a nested approach in terms of our scale and resolution, from satellite bimetry to very detailed information about specific ecosystems.

Insas applications, from understanding deep biodiversity to monitoring fine-scale human impacts, make it a revolutionary tool for understanding the deep seafloor. but there is still a long way to go, it is a common misconception that exploring the ocean is a much simpler endeavor than space exploration, but this couldn't be further from the truth, we cannot point a telescope at the waves and see what's underneath. The water hides from view canyons and mountain ranges that rival anything seen on land. We have to go into the depths to unlock its mysteries, as the ocean does not reveal its secrets easily when you explore the depths, where the lights of an underwater robot can turn on.

On a stretch of seabed just a few dozen meters away you can never be sure what new discoveries lurk. Beyond the wall of darkness there are sometimes clues, although it takes a keen eye and intimate knowledge of the depths to spot them. In August Chief Scientist Dr. Roxan Binart and her team were on a mission to uncover the mysteries of unexplored vents at the western Galapagos hydrothermal vents in 1977. Scientists hoped to characterize the unique communities on the western side and search for more undetected vents. after hours of searching in a seemingly arid sea. On the floor, it was the appearance of a trail of squat locusts hinting at the presence of a new vent, finally just before I went to bed.

We started to see a lot of squat lobsters and started to notice a lot of cracks and flaws. I feel like the locusts are guiding us like breadcrumbs like we are Handel and we crawl towards the actual vent site that looks good now on platform when we were looking for vents from the surface; It's the equivalent of being on Mount Olympus and looking for a Football Post. The first thing we saw was a large group of riftia that appeared on the screen, which is undoubtedly a hydrothermal field. He was standing right next to Rockan, so we both smiled and looked at each other and figured out that it's there, you know, they're unique. ecosystems that are unlike anything on Earth and we are still trying to understand what shapes them.

The trail took them to a vent field that was new to science at around 2,000 800 M, one of many discovered on Falo 2 since March. We have successfully sampled multiple disciplines at sites ranging from chemistry to geology and biology. We have collected the first samples of high temperature water. We have been able to build the most complete data set ever created for this location. 80% of the living beings on our planet. Space is the deep sea and that means that 80% of our planet's living space never experiences sunlight and isamazing to think that the other 20% has everything else, every rainforest, every desert, Paris, Los Angeles, you name it, everything is in the other 20% and it gives you an idea of ​​how much of our planet is deep sea.

The deep ocean may be far away and out of sight, but it is not separate from our world; In fact, it is in many ways the most important component of our planet's biosphere. Their processes shape the conditions of our climatic ecosystems hidden in a world of darkness and mystery They play their role in defining the ecology of entire oceans We know more about most of the planets in our solar system than about the depths of the ocean, but the reason is not because we haven't been curious, the reason is because we haven't had the tools to go down and look and we have them now and the truth is that every incremental step we take to learn more about the depths of the ocean helps us understand more about the entire planet what is the factor that makes us see in some way that there is something about going to another world that is really stimulating it is a world to which we do not belong and yet you realize how connected you are to it .

We need to care about every part, from the top to the bottom, from what's happening in the atmosphere, what we're doing on land, how we affect the deep ocean and how the deep ocean affects us, what it does, keeping those connections safe is what we need to do. will keep us alive. On this planet in just 10 months, Falor 2 traveled more than 39,000 km, allowing scientists to discover new ecosystems of species and discoveries in locations spanning the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Scientific teams mapped 190,000 square km of seafloor, including cold-water reefs, seamounts and five new hydrothermal vent fields in this wonderland once considered barren and devoid of life.

Schmidt Ocean Institute and Falor 2 have pressed on in 2023 to unlock its mysteries and bring to light the wondrous complexity of the deep, but they won't stop there in the coming years. Beacon of Discovery will continue to lead a new chapter in the history of deep-sea exploration.