The deep sea is cold, dark and under immense pressure. Yet life has found a way to prevail there, in the form of some of Earth's strangest creatures.

We opened a window into our country’s biodiversity only to find there are so many more windows left to be opened.” ...

Chinese researchers have uncovered a vibrant ecosystem10 kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean, shattering long-held assumptions about life in extreme depths. What they found was far from the barren, ...

Beds of Bathymodiolus mussels provide important habitat for other deep-sea critters, including sea stars, scaleworms and limpets. NOAA Ocean Exploration. The deep sea is the large ...

You are taught early in science that oxygen on Earth comes from sunlight. Plants, algae, and cyanobacteria use light to split water and release oxygen, shaping the atmosphere and making complex life ...

For much of the twentieth century, a prevailing view in marine biology held that most major marine groups originated in sunlit, shallow waters and later colonized the deep sea. This perspective ...

Invisible clouds of sediment created by underwater mining spread for miles, putting ocean floor ecosystems at risk.

The marine biologists of the Schmidt Ocean Institute are a busy bunch. Over the last few years, scientists aboard the ...

A deep-sea mining test shows ecosystem damage can begin immediately, with more than one-third of seafloor animals lost in a single pass.

Deep-sea mining is the extraction of minerals from the seabed in the deep ocean. Most of the interest is in what are known as polymetallic nodules, which are potato-sized mineral deposits that have ...

Scientists have explored deep into the ocean to find a new species of crustacean in the Atacama Trench. that shows how important deep-sea research is.