When I was younger, kids would play a game that involved a globe. You’d put your finger on the globe, close your eyes, and spin it, letting your finger run across its surface until it stopped. The place your finger landed was where you’d live when you grew up.
Of course, if you weren’t careful, you’d end up with plans to live in the middle of the ocean, which wasn’t as fun as speculating about how life would be in Russia or Brazil or Canada. The trick was to feel for the texture, using your finger to stop the globe on a bumpy part, where you knew there was land.
But in reality, the blue parts of a globe should be bumpy, too. There’s a persistent myth that the seafloor is a flat, sandy desert. Yet the deep sea is actually full of dramatic formations, like canyons and mountains. The world’s longest mountain range is the mid-ocean ridge, too big to have a proper name, wending its way through Earth’s seas all across the planet.
The existence of underwater mountains is exciting enough. But even better is the fact that each seamount’s ecosystem is a world of life that can be totally different from neighboring seamounts in the same range. Seamounts tend to have a lot of marine endemism. When a species is endemic, that means it lives in just one place: on a single island, or hydrothermal vent, or seamount.
A couple months ago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists found over 100 likely new-to-science species on seamounts off the coast of Chile. Scientists recently concluded a follow-up to that expedition. This time, they visited a ridge of seamounts that reaches near Chile’s Rapa Nui (or Easter Island).
The scientists on this expedition noticed that the individual seamounts had their own unique ecosystems: coral reefs on one, glass sponge gardens on another. So it’s not too surprising that they found 50 more species that appear to be new to science. Some of them may not live anywhere else in the world.
But the more-familiar species the researchers saw were exciting, too. For example, they spotted a wrinkle coral, the deepest-living known animal that uses photosynthesis, at a record-breaking depth.
The ridge they explored is being considered for a marine protected area, which would prevent industrial activity from being done there, including deep sea mining. Mining mineral crusts from seamounts would be really hard, so few deep sea miners are currently focusing on it. But it is being considered in some places.
Science has made great strides in exploring the ocean’s bumpy parts recently. Still, the work is really just beginning: as deep sea scientists often say, there’s so much left to do. Our own planet remains filled with mysteries. To solve them, we have to make sure we don’t first destroy the places they occur.
I love globes and maps, especially the really old ones where we got it all wrong. I love them not for their ability to accurately tell me where things are, but for their record of our faltering attempts to understand the shape of the world. Even today, we’re far from figuring it all out.
Were I to play the globe game now, I might let my finger land on a deceptively-smooth blue section of ocean, and spend my time imagining life there instead.