Far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, three quarters of a mile deep, lies the peak of an underwater mountain.  Rising 1.4 miles off the abyssal plains, Davidson Seamount, nearly 26 miles long and 8 miles wide, is one of the largest known seamounts in U.S. waters. Davidson contains an abundance of life including massive groves of large bubblegum corals and reefs of glass sponges.  Life is so abundant at the seamount, we proposed nearly a decade ago that Davidson Seamount with its dense aggregations of invertebrates may serve as source of many species to nearby canyons and rocky outcrops off the California coast.  Davidson may be a perfect habitat for many species allowing their populations to explode.  This Davidson Seamount cradle then may serve as source of migrating individuals into other less perfect habitats nearby.  This idea of Davidson as a biodiversity source was instrumental in getting Davidson added to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS) in 2009.

A recent expedition by NOAA, MBNMS, and Nautilus, returned to Davidson Seamount.  And is typical of Davidson delivered with a spectacular display of life.   Over 1,000 individuals of the small sized octopus Muusoctopus robustus were caught on video hugging the rocks in a brooding position.  It is unclear why these octopuses are using the seamount as a nursery.  Higher currents around seamounts may bring more oxygenated waters.  The dense aggregations of other animals may provide abundant prey.  The crevasse, cracks, and rocky rubble of this old volcano may provide shelter from predators.

The post An Octopus Nursery Discovered on a Deep Underwater Mountain first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Wait, how did the largest volcano on our planet go undetected?  First the summit of Tamu Massif is located well below the ocean’s surface.  Second, it was unclear whether the many lava flows of Tamu Massif represented several individual volcanoes with independent flows or lava of single origin.

As quoted at NPR

The volcano is part of a larger underwater feature known as the Shatsky Rise, but only in the past few years has Sager’s team been able to determine that it’s a single volcano. “We knew it was a big mountain, some sort of volcanic mountain, but oceanic plateaus are very large features hidden beneath the ocean and it’s very hard to study them,” Sager says.

“The main thing was the imaging we were able to do a few years ago, but without sort of the ground truth provided by samples that we drilled out of this thing, we wouldn’t have had nearly as compelling a result,” he tells NPR.

Sager says before the discovery that Tamu Massif is a single volcano, scientists had expected that “something this big must be made up of a large number of volcanoes, two, three, four dozen, you just don’t know.”

So where did the name originate?  The researchers are Aggies (Texas A&M University or TAMU for short).  A massif refers to a group of mountains formed by a part of the crust being displaced as whole.

So what do we do know that the largest volcano is discovered on Earth? Drink in celebration!

Volcano

3/4 oz raspberry liqueur

3/4 oz Blue Curacao liqueur

Champagne

To make a TAMU Massif Volcano multiply all ingredients by 1000 and make in a swimming pool.

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The post Largest Volcano on Earth! I’ll Drink to That! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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Via New large squid found in southern Indian Ocean and additional pictures from the Seamounts2009 Expedition.

The post New squid found in Indian Ocean first appeared on Deep Sea News.

SARDI scientists have discovered an extinct volcano (800m across and 200m high) 2km below the surface and 100 nautical miles offshore in a protected area of the Great Australian Bight. They were mapping a strip of seabed in the middle of the Benthic Protection Zone and tripped over the feature, now named “Anna’s Pimple”.

via Survey stumbles upon rare volcano | Adelaide Now.

The post Say Hello to Anna’s Pimple first appeared on Deep Sea News.

via YouTube – Ghostly critters of the deep sea; Cirrate octopus.

The post Ghostly critters of the deep sea: Cirrate octopus first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The join Indonesia – U.S. exploration of the deep ocean north of Sulawesi, Indonesia mapped the large undersea volcano Kawio Barat.  From base to summet Kawio Barat measures 10,000 feet but its summit still remains 8,000 feet below the surface. The expedition also utilizing telepresence to connect researchers on land to the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer.  Researchers at the Exploration Command Centers in Jakarta and Seattle can interact with shipboard personnel to guide the expedition via live satellite and high-speed internet. You can catch the expedition at oceanexplorer.noaa.gov in both English and Bahasa Indonesia. The site includes logs from scientists at sea and ashore, images from the expedition, and expedition education lesson plans.

The post Update on NOAA Expedition in the Indian Ocean first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Peter Etnoyer

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The Largest Habitats on Earth by Peter J. Etnoyer, PhD

One of the most important moments for the environmental movement was a 70’s era photograph of Earth from space. My generation grew up with this image on the cover of Life, as a bedroom poster, even on television. We called it the Big Blue Marble, and ever since that time, many of us dedicated our lives to preserving this Ocean planet.

One of the ongoing challenges since that time has been to connect our human behavior to that Big Blue Marble, to understand the impact of global fisheries, or CO2 emissions, and to weigh these impacts against Earth’s natural biogeochemical cycles. The hardest part about this, for me, has been simply to wrap my head around the idea of the true size and extent of Earth. It’s huge! The planet seems too big to comprehend.

One way ecologists have gone about the task of knowing our planet is to subset the Earth into its constituent habitats, forests, deserts, tundra, and coral reefs, in order to understand the contribution of each to global diversity and biogeochemistry. Earth’s ‘biomes’ are major life zones characterized by similar biotic and physical characteristics (Woodward, 2003).

So, did you ever wonder, “what is the largest habitat on Earth?” Terrestrial biogeographers have had this pretty well figured out since Udvardy, 1975. According to that UNEP report, warm deserts (24.2 x 10⁶ sq. km.) and tundra (22.0 x 10⁶ sq. km.) are the two predominant terrestrial ecosystems on the planet. It’s ironic, because deserts and tundra are probably among the most neglected habitats on the planet and they represent extreme conditions.

Ocean lovers among us will quickly recognize that the largest habitats on Earth are inevitably marine, because Oceans cover nearly 70% of Earth’s surface. Udvardy’s (1975) UNEP report had tallied less than one-third of the planet. Ocean lovers will also recognize that ocean is not one large homogenous volume of seawater, either. The ocean has zones, like photic and aphotic zones, upwelling and downwelling zones, and different types of features, like estuaries and mid-ocean ridges. The funny thing is, there was no easy list of marine biomes for us to rank these by until Oceanography published a recent volume on seamounts called Mountains in the Sea.

I had the pleasure of assembling this list, and it turns out, much to my surprise, that the “seamount biome” is among the largest habitats on Earth, second only to the abyssal plain. Taken together, seamounts occupy an area on Earth roughly equivalent to the continent of Africa (Etnoyer et al 2010). This is surprising because the prevailing conception, even among those of us who study seamounts, is that seamounts are remote, isolated features.

Similar to terrestrial biomes, the most prevalent habitats in the Ocean are among the most neglected and extreme. Deserts, tundra, abyssal plains, and seamounts- it’s like the ‘new normal’. We, the people, are living in and studying relatively rare habitat types, like wetlands and beaches, while surrounded by mysterious and abundant seamounts most of us will never see.

The Oceanography volume is remarkable for others reasons, too. The term “seamount” has been redefined as a feature 100 m or more that may or may not penetrate the sea surface (Staudigel et al 2010). By this definition, Hawaiian islands are seamounts that break the surface. The latest census of seamount features estimates over 45,000 large (> 1000 m) submerged seamounts worldwide (Wessel et al 2010). Seamounts are now recognized as altering flows in the upper mantle and interrupting the movement tectonic plates.

Given this new information, we must not forget that less than 200 seamounts have ever been sampled biologically, and very few seamounts are mapped at any useful resolution. We cannot protect or use what we do not know or understand. So, if we do not know and understand the seamounts and the abyss we cannot really know and understand the oceans, or the planet.

Think about that next time you see a rocket blasting off to explore outer space. If we’re looking for alien life forms, or new places to explore, we’ll find them right here, in the unknown oceans.

References:

Etnoyer, Peter J., Wood, J., & Shirley, T.C. (2010). How large is the Seamount Biome? Oceanography, 23 (1), 206-209 Download pdf here!

Staudigel, H., Koppers, A.A.P., Lavelle, J.W., Pitcher, T.J., & Shank, T.M. (2010). Defining the word ‘Seamount’ Oceanography, 23 (1), 20-21 Download pdf here!

Udvardy, MDF. 1975. A classification of the biogeographic provinces of the world. International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Occasional Paper No. 18. Morges, Switzerland. 48 pp.

Wessel, P., Sandwell, D.T., & Kim, S.-S. (2010). The global seamount census Oceanography, 23 (1), 24-33 Download pdf here!

Woodward, S. (2003). Biomes of Earth, Terrestrial, Aquatic and Human-Dominated. Greenwood Publishing Group, 165 pp

The article above is a personal view, and does not necessarily reflect the opinion or policies of NOAA.

The post Guest Post: The Largest Habitats on Earth first appeared on Deep Sea News.

You might have noticed that my posting frequency is down recently.  Why?

1. Kevin Z convinced me to start Tweeting.  There seems to be an inverse relationship to my writing for DSN and posting Tweets.  Previous attempts to integrate our Twitter content into DSN were rocky at best and met with many complaints.  Suggestions on how to integrate the two meaningfully are welcomed. You can follow me at DrCraigMc

2. I am working on a review of this book for American Scientist.

3. I am also writing a feature article for American Scientist following on the theme of my talk last year at Sigma Xi.

4. Isopocaplyse 2010 consumed a bit of my time.  If you didn’t catch it already check out GlassBox Design and National Geographic’s coverage.  I am delightfully snarky!

5. I worked with the spectacularly talented Robin Smith to put together a press release and video for my recent paper in Ecology.  That was met with a fair amount of cricket chirping.  O’ well Bora, Science360, and I think its cool.

6. Multiple scientific papers in the works right now on deep-sea biogeography, source-sink dynamics in the deep sea, the evolution of body size in deep-sea bivalves, what drives the evolution of size on islands, describing the new species above, changes in energy consumption of snails through geologic time, changes in seamount diversity with increasing depth, and how microhabitat diversity in the deep sea drives biodiversity.  Whew!

7.  My day job.

8.  The fact there is only 24 hours in a day.

So what would I like to blog on but haven’t found time?

1. The discovery of the world’s deepest hydrothermal vent. It’s really hot and deep!

2. What will likely be the coolest discovery of the year and decade…anaerobic multicellular organisms in the deep sea.  This one is so cool I just decided to stay up late to write about it.  While I grab another Ardbeg and you wait for the next couple hours, check out Susan Milius’s spectacular write up.

3. Larvae from afar colonize deep-sea hydrothermal vents after a catastrophic eruption

Any other papers or news I should add to this list?

The post What’s New With the Dr. M and the Oceans? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The project is completed by 2010, a little less than a month away. In the last ten years, The Sloan Foundation funded well over 100 million dollars for the CoML project. With a cadre of biologist, a huge budget, 14 field projects, and 210 expeditions, 17,650 new species were found and described. “The abyssal fauna is so rich in species diversity and so poorly described that collecting a known species is an anomaly,” says Dr. Billett. “Describing for the first time all the different species in any coffee cup-sized sample of deep-sea sediment is a daunting challenge.”

Five of the Census’ 14 field projects focus on the habitats below 200m – the continental margins (COMARGE: Continental Margins Ecosystems), the mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR-ECO: Mid-Atlantic Ridge Ecosystem Project), the submerged mountains (CenSeam: Global Census of Marine Life on Seamounts), the muddy abyssal plains (CeDAMar: Census of Diversity of Abyssal Marine Life), and and chemically-driven ecosystems (ChEss:Biogeography of Deep-Water Chemosynthetic Systems).  I’m involved with and received funding (yeah!) both under CenSeam and CeDAMar.  As part of CeDAMar, I worked with a group developing a synthesis of abyssal diversity.

“There is both a great lack of information about the ‘abyss’ and substantial misinformation,” says Dr. Carney. “Many species live there. However, the abyss has long been viewed as a desert. Worse, it was viewed as a wasteland where few to no environmental impacts could be of any concern. ‘Mine it, drill it, dispose into it, or fish it – what could possibly be impacted? And, if there is an impact, the abyss is vast and best yet, hidden from sight.’ “Census of Marine Life deep realm scientists see and are concerned.

The post Cataloging Life On the Deep-Sea Floor first appeared on Deep Sea News.

And it only gets worse if our nation’s children, those that will grow up to be future policy-makers and voters when we are all in depends or 6 feet underground, don’t have an appreciation for the ocean and its myriad of issues! Donate NOW to Oceans in the Classrooms! Reject a future of barren seafloor and empty seas for our children and their children!

Thanks to Eric Heupel for producing this PSA.

The post This is Your Seamounts… On Fishing first appeared on Deep Sea News.