Exploring the Deep Sea

To reduce potential impacts, the authors recommend discharging plumes below 2,000 m (about 6,600 ft), or even directly at the seafloor. Still, they caution that these midwater plumes are likely to expand considerably over many square kilometers, regardless of their depth, with largely unknown impacts on midwater communities. Moreover, the cumulative effect of releasing such plumes throughout a mine’s decades-long lifespan remains uncertain. Covering over 70% of the planet, the ocean is Earth’s largest life-support system, and it has already shielded us from the worst impacts of the climate crisis. It has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat generated by burning fossil fuels, and about 30% of human-generated carbon dioxide emissions since the 1980s. Without this massive buffer, global temperatures would already be far higher than they are today.But the story doesn’t end at the surface.
About three-fourths of the area covered by ocean is deep, permanently dark, and cold. Chondrichthyes, the class of cartilaginous fish that includes sharks, rays and chimaeras, are among the most threatened vertebrates on Earth, with more than 37% of species at risk of extinction due to overfishing and habitat loss, the study notes. Now, scientists warn that these animals could face new threats if deep-sea mining kicks off in international waters.

Interesting fish gallery

Despite the growing anthropological literature on the ocean, the deep Deep Sea sea itself remains relatively understudied in anthropology, especially when compared to the growing attention it has received in other social sciences. The mystery evoked by the deep sea—its darkness, remoteness, and inaccessibility—has long captivated the public imagination. Iconic works of science fiction as well as pioneering documentaries reflect a fascination with unveiling the unknown; this spirit of discovery, of bringing light into the depths, remains alive today and has arguably even intensified. Scientists race to study its fragile and little-understood ecosystems before commercial deep-sea mining gains momentum, aiming to fill urgent knowledge gaps. In this high-stakes environment, anthropologically ‘being (down) there’ is no longer solely about exploring the abyss itself.
The deep ocean plays an especially critical role in climate regulation, carbon storage, heat transport, and many ways in which scientists are only beginning to fully understand. There is also a range of research efforts underway to obtain the necessary minerals without mining virgin land, including recovery from coal waste or hard rock mine tailings. Meanwhile, opinion remains deeply divided on whether deep-sea mining should be allowed at all. Given the insufficiency of information on how it could affect marine environments, countries such as Germany and Canada, as well as the European Parliament, have called for national and regional moratoria on deep-sea mining. Portugal passed a law banning the practice in its national waters for the next 25 years.

• The size of the whale, the depth of the seafloor, and the location all contribute to the types of animals that colonize the area and determine how long it takes for the skeleton to disappear.
• This is done e.g. to attract potential mates, lure in prey, or to illuminate their surroundings with organic “searchlights”.
• Darius commemorated the completion of the canal by creating stelae (stone monuments) with inscriptions in several languages, describing the construction and its benefits.
• Curator Karen Osborn wants to know how and why animals adapt in order to survive in a cold, dark, and pressurized environment.
• The mystery evoked by the deep sea—its darkness, remoteness, and inaccessibility—has long captivated the public imagination.
• Under the ISA, countries are free to mine within their domestic waters and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), which extend a country’s control over natural resource exploitation to 200 nautical miles (230 miles) from its coastline.
• As a result, the offshore oil industry often remains hidden until a disaster makes its precariousness undeniable, drawing attention to the risks inherent in its operations and the ethical dilemmas that arise when the deep sea is treated as an invisible resource frontier.

Yet even in this hostile environment, there are survivors that use special strategies to cope. Like on land, deep canyons can stretch for hundreds of miles across the seafloor. The walls, ledges, and bottoms of canyons create a diverse variety of habitats—many of which are steep, and scoured by currents rich in tiny food particles—that enable an array of sea creatures to live there. The rocky ledges are a perfect place for deep sea corals to attach, and the muddy bottom is a soft home for worms and mollusks to burrow.

Rapidly adapting sea creatures found in Japan’s deepest ‘Ring of Fire’ trenches

• This mineral-rich region already hosts exploration contracts for 17 deep-sea mining contractors, with their combined exploration areas covering approximately 1 million square kilometers (about the same area as Egypt).
• Cut off from the rest of the world’s oceans, the sea slowly evaporated, leaving behind a layer of salt up to 5 miles deep in some locations.
• About 80 commercial species live on seamounts, and many are only found near this habitat.
• About 90 percent of the world’s fish (by weight) live in the mesopelagic—about 10 billion tons of fish.
• Because many of these “underwater islands” are located in remote surroundings, studies are continually finding previously unknown and endemic species.
• There you’ll find specially adapted microorganisms capable of extracting energy from the chemical compounds that the springs pump out into the water.

This entry highlights anthropology’s shy yet critical approach to the deep sea as an ethnographic site—one imbued with meanings that shift depending on who encounters it, with what tools, and through which mediations. It does so through interdisciplinary insights from the social sciences and reflections that are profoundly anthropological in theory. The first section explores the deep sea’s otherness or strangeness, a space that challenges terrestrial frameworks and poses questions about the nature of knowledge. The second examines how the deep sea is socially constructed through politics of (in)visibility and the deep sea’s representation as a chaotic and messy space. The third highlights how relationships between human and non-human life in the deep sea can be reimagined in non-extractive and porous ways. The fourth presents another approach, viewing the deep sea as a privileged site from which to interrogate the past, critique the present, and envision Afrofuturistic futures.
At first inspection, it seems unlikely that anything could live in such an environment—spewing from cracks in the earth’s crust is scalding water that has been heated to temperatures up to 752 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius), a temperature hot enough to melt lead. These vents are also so deep that they never see a glimmer of light from the sun. Despite these obstacles, clams, mussels, shrimp, and gigantic worms thrive in these habitats.

List of fauna species found in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba

The canal not only facilitated trade but also solidified Darius’s control over Egypt and enhanced the Achaemenid Empire’s economic and political power in the region. The Red Sea is one of four seas named in English after common colours – the others being the Black Sea, the White Sea and the Yellow Sea. The direct rendition of the Greek Erythra thalassa in Latin as Mare Erythraeum refers to the north-western part of the Indian Ocean, and also to a region on Mars. The Red Sea is a sea inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Asia. Its connection to the ocean is in the south, through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden.

Armored sea cucumber

The reefs form platforms and sometimes lagoons along the coast and occasionally other features such as cylinders (such as the Blue Hole (Red Sea) at Dahab). With mining for polymetallic nodules on the horizon, Judah emphasized the need for more research to fully understand the effects on sharks, rays and chimeras. TMC did not respond to Mongabay’s questions about the study’s suggestion to discharge below, rather than right at, 2,000 m, or whether the company would adjust its mining plans based on these findings.

Landmark conviction exposes Sri Lanka’s deep-rooted illegal elephant trade

The black smoke of hydrothermal vents, by contrast, is highlighted to depict the environment as legible and manageable (Childs 2019). However, this otherworldly perception of the deep sea should not alienate us from recognising the real and tangible consequences of climate change, ocean acidification, mining, industrial fishing, and pollution. The fact that abyssal zones differ from shallow waters does not imply a lack of interconnection between them. Oceanographers, for example, remind us that benthic creatures (organisms that live on or near the bottom of marine ecosystems such as sponges, worms, sea stars, etc.) rely on phenomena like whale falls, in which whale carcasses sink to the deep-sea floor.
However, statements from the US government in April 2025 resurfaced this issue of deep-sea mining regulation. While there has been an avalanche of research and voices speaking out about the impacts DSM may have on the marine environment and natural heritage, less attention has been paid to the potential cultural heritage impacts. A range of human activities and climate change are putting species and ecosystems at risk before we fully understand, or even discover, them. This could potentially alter the timeline for commercial deep-sea mining by circumventing the ISA’s permitting process altogether. Depending on the outcome of The Mining Company’s application, other companies may follow this route, undermining international efforts to secure shared standards.
You can support our work by making a gift today or exploring other ways to give. While exploratory mining to test equipment has occurred at a small scale, deep-sea mining has not yet been undertaken commercially. But some national governments and mining companies plan to begin as soon as possible. The Marine Science blog showcases the latest developments and research in the marine and freshwater sectors across all government departments.

This not only makes great depths very difficult to reach without mechanical aids, but also provides a significant difficulty when attempting to study any organisms that may live in these areas as their cell chemistry will be adapted to such vast pressures. Today, more than ever, anthropology must engage with this seascape, which—as this entry shows—is increasingly seen as a sociopolitical space. In recent decades, anthropology has expanded its focus beyond coastal fishing communities to engage with the ocean more broadly (Helmreich 2009, 2015, 2023; Aswani 2020; Leivestad 2022; Dua 2024a, 2024b). This growing attention to the ocean is part of a broader shift in the social sciences and humanities—variously termed the ‘oceanic turn’ (Deloughrey 2016), the ‘blue turn’ (Braverman and Johnson 2020), or ‘blue humanities’ (Mentz 2023). These movements have contributed significantly to challenging ‘terra-centric’ perspectives on the sea (Steinberg and Peters 2015), advocating for approaches that think in and through the ocean as a form of radically situated knowledge (Jue 2020). More recently, hydrofeminist perspectives, which emphasise a reciprocal relationship with water—learning from it while also giving back by embracing shared responsibility—have further deepened these discussions (Shefer, Bozalek and Romano 2024).