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    Ocean life: expeditions and essays exploring the abyss: Ocean Life, #1
    Ocean life: expeditions and essays exploring the abyss: Ocean Life, #1
    Ocean life: expeditions and essays exploring the abyss: Ocean Life, #1
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Ocean life: expeditions and essays exploring the abyss: Ocean Life, #1

    By Jon Copley

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    About this ebook

    Follow recent scientific expeditions exploring volcanic vents on the ocean floor, where hot mineral-rich water nourishes lush colonies of deep-sea creatures, with articles about the search for new species of marine life in previously unseen parts of our planet.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJon Copley
    Release dateFeb 5, 2012
    ISBN9781465721532
    Ocean life: expeditions and essays exploring the abyss: Ocean Life, #1
    Author

    Jon Copley

    Marine biologist at the University of Southampton, UK, whose research explores the patterns of life at deep-sea volcanic vents around the world. First British person to dive more than 5 km (3.1 miles) deep in the ocean. Previously a reporter and assistant news editor at New Scientist magazine. Also author of 'Ask An Ocean Explorer' (Hodder & Staughton, 2019) and 'Deep Sea: 10 Things You Should Know' (Orion Books, 2023).

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      Book preview

      Ocean life - Jon Copley

      Ocean life: expeditions and essays exploring the abyss

      Jon Copley

      Published by Jon Copley at Smashwords

      Copyright 2012 Jon Copley

      Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

      Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. Thank you for your support.

      ~~~

      Preface

      People have been crossing the ocean for at least 40 000 years, if we consider events such as the first human colonisation of Australia. But for almost all of human history, what lies beneath the waves has remained largely unknown. Until just a couple of centuries ago, we had little notion about the depth of most of the ocean. And the landscape of the ocean floor was a blank on maps: the white space in which cartographers doodled here be dragons.

      We now know that more than half our world is covered by water more than two miles deep. We also know that the landscape of the ocean floor harbours one of our planet's greatest geographical features: a chain of undersea volcanoes that stretches for ~40 000 miles around the globe, formed where the titanic plates of the Earth's crust are moving slowly apart. That chain of volcanoes, which we call the mid-ocean ridge, is our planet's longest mountain range, and we didn't even know it existed until the 1950s. Even today, we still don't actually have an accurate map of two-thirds of our own planet, and have seen much less of it directly with our eyes.

      Dotted along the mid-ocean ridge are yet more surprises, not seen until the late 1970s: volcanic vents, nicknamed black smokers, that gush mineral-rich hot water into the ocean above. Lush colonies of deep-sea creatures thrive around these vents, and biologists have found more than 400 new species of animals at vents seen so far. Many of these new creatures have amazed us with their adaptations to such unlikely havens in the abyss, and their very existence has expanded our perspectives of the limits of life. Studying their colonies around the world is also helping to reveal the web of life in the ocean depths, which we need to understand urgently: we are fishing in deeper waters, extracting oil and gas from deeper waters, and even starting to mine minerals on the ocean floor, but our exploration of the patterns of life in our planet's largest realm has only just begun.

      I've spent most of my scientific career so far exploring the marine life at deep-sea volcanic vents, in the Atlantic, Pacific, Antarctic, and Indian Ocean. I hope that this collection of personal logs from recent expeditions, interspersed with some earlier articles about deep-sea vents, may share some of the wonder that we experience in our continuing exploration, and also give a glimpse of what it's like to do science at sea.

      It has only been 80 years since people first ventured into the deep ocean and saw its inhabitants with their own eyes. The first pioneers were William Beebe and Otis Barton, who dived half-mile down in their bathysphere in the 1930s. Beebe is one of my heroes; he was a great writer as well as a naturalist, and he once wrote that There are two kinds of thrill in science: one is the result of long, patient intellectual study… But the other thrill lies in a completely unexpected discovery (The Arcturus Adventure, 1926). We are now able to dive deeper, stay longer, and visit the deep ocean more often than ever before--but there are still plenty of surprises waiting for us out there.

      Jon Copley

      January 2012

      ~~~

      Glossary

      We love our acronyms in marine science, but occasionally our accounts can look like alphabet soup as a result. So here are some of the acronyms used in the expedition logs, in approximate order of appearance:

      CTD: stands for Conductivity-Temperature-Depth, and describes a probe that we lower from the ship to measure the temperature and salinity of water at different depths beneath us. Our CTD is also equipped with other sensors that can detect the smoky plumes of water and chemical signals from deep-sea vents, and is therefore the main tool that we use to detect deep-sea vents in unexplored areas.

      SHRIMP: stands for Seabed High Resolution IMaging Platform. SHRIMP is essentially an underwater camera system, which we lower beneath the ship on a wire and tow slowly across the seafloor to see what's down there. It can't manoeuvre other than by us moving the ship to swing it around on its wire, but it provides a useful tool in initial reconnaissance, before we send in more sophisticated vehicles.

      BRIDGET: a bespoke device for detecting deep-sea vents, towed on a wire a few hundred metres above the seafloor behind a ship. BRIDGET was created by the BRIDGE (British Mid-Ocean Ridge Initiative) research programme in the 1990s, from which she derives her name.

      ROV: remotely operated vehicle; the state-of-the-art for seeing and sampling the ocean depths. ROVs are unmanned deep-diving vehicles that carry cameras and lights, and have robotic arms for collecting samples--they become our eyes and hands for working on the ocean floor. Deep-water ROVs are typically the size of a family car, and are connected to the ship by a tether

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