#Deep sea creatures documentary archive#

You can learn more about the explorer using the link here. For this reason, SuBastian is also loaded up with lighting equipment, which as you can see from the video, is a huge help. At such depths, sunlight is probably not going to be any help whatsoever. This explorer can go to depths as deep as 4,500 m, at which point the pressure would be far beyond anything anyone could handle. The remotely operated vehicle, or ROV for short, used to capture the footage is named SuBastian. Even if this video didn't have the kind of quality it offers, the content itself is, as quoted in the video description, 'just stunning.' My favorite part of the video is seeing the sea cucumber, because at a distance, it seems it's covered in hair however, as the video zooms in, you notice that it's not hair and instead, it's a huge number of Hydroids. I know that this isn't always important, but it really does help a great deal, especially when you want to see lots and lots of detail. 'Above all, we owe it to humanity to at least try to document and understand our diverse deep-sea wilderness areas before we change them.First of all, the quality of the video is simply fantastic. 'We'll be able to better predict the impact of warmer seas, ocean acidification and increased plastic in the marine food chain. 'Understanding what is living underwater, in both shallow seas and deep-ocean vents, will enable us to manage the oceans more sustainably. We need to establish a baseline of biodiversity before you can measure any change. Glover explains, 'Currently, industry is starting to explore environments we have never sampled before. The team are joining deep-sea research expeditions in the Pacific Ocean, where they are discovering new, undocumented species. Worms and molluscs become food for larger animals, which vast swathes of humanity rely on. These smaller creatures might seem insignificant - but if they were to disappear from the ocean, we'd notice. Glover and other researchers are collecting genetic data about these worms and other deep-sea animals, including molluscs, starfish, sea urchins, fish, crustaceans and sponges. 'Half of this planet is deep sea, and the deep sea is the least studied part of the ocean.' We have to understand these areas to be able to assess the risks and provide sustainable conservation strategies. Glover says, 'Human activity is reaching into new areas of our oceans.

Some of his work delves into the deepest parts of the oceans, studying worms and other invertebrates that live on the muddy sediments and hydrothermal vents of the sea floor.

#Deep sea creatures documentary archive#

They are a frozen, untapped archive that we are working on as well as preserving for future generations of scientists to learn from.' Discovery on the ocean floorĭr Adrian Glover, a deep-sea biologist and researcher at the Museum, is mapping biodiversity in areas that are poorly known but are now new frontiers for deep-sea industry. There is key information about past periods of climate change locked away in the fossils. 'The Museum's collections are such a valuable resource. We are trying to understand how good the current predictions are and how serious the situation is. Twitchett says, 'The more data we have, the easier it will be to make accurate predictions about the future. They show us how distributions of species have changed in response to stress, such as human activity.īy matching knowledge about living animals to data about the past, scientists hope to inform decisions about which areas of the oceans are most critical to save. Historic collections tell us exactly where different animals and plants lived before plastics, pollution, overfishing and the major rise in carbon dioxide. These are the parts of the ocean where there is too little oxygen to support large animals.įossils are also a key to establishing baseline data. Warm water holds less oxygen, and this combined with increased pollution could see the size of the ocean's dead zones expanding. In past periods of warmer ocean temperatures, it has been common for oxygen levels in the water to drop.

With this data, scientists can try to develop a clearer vision of what might happen to animals living in the sea when conditions change dramatically. It suggests those changes could happen again.' Life in the hot tub 'When you spot those patterns, the data becomes incredibly powerful. 'But the benefit of history is that we can study these events alongside each other, and we can see certain things repeatedly happening to the animals in the water, like changes in body size. 'None of the historic warming events are direct parallels to the present, because everything's different now: the species, position of the continents, carbon cycle, starting conditions and starting temperatures.