All posts tagged: deepocean

Deep-ocean cameras capture first-ever images of live Goblin shark

Deep-ocean cameras capture first-ever images of live Goblin shark

Published by Jenni Sidey

Goblin sharks have spent years in public imagination as something half-seen, half-legendary, a pale, long-snouted predator usually known from carcasses, fishing lines, and brief encounters near death. Now they have finally been seen alive where they actually live, deep in the ocean. As a result, that changes more than a shark checklist. A University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa-led team has reported the first published live observations of goblin sharks, Mitsukurina owstoni, in their natural deep-sea habitat. The paper, published in the Journal of Fish Biology, describes two separate sightings. One was near Jarvis Island in 2019, and another was on the slope of the Tonga Trench in 2024. For a species often called a “living fossil,” the footage fills in a major blank. Goblin sharks are the only living members of their family, a shark lineage dating back nearly 125 million years. Lead author Aaron Judah, a doctoral candidate in the Deep-Sea Fish Ecology Lab and the Deep-Sea Animal Research Center in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, said the …

Millions of fossil whale bones found in deep-ocean ‘necropolis’

Millions of fossil whale bones found in deep-ocean ‘necropolis’

Published by skeptic

Fossils including possible baleen-whale ribs found at a depth of 5656 metres in the Indian Ocean Global TREnD, IDSSE The world’s deepest known whale graveyard has been discovered in the southern Indian Ocean at a depth of 7 kilometres. The remains found there include a new species of extinct beaked whale and other fossils that are over 5 million years old. In early 2023, Peng Zhou at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues undertook 32 dives in a crewed submersible along 1200 kilometres of the seafloor, in an area known as the Diamantina Zone. The expedition was part of the Global Hadal Exploration Programme, an effort led by Chinese scientists to explore all the deepest parts of the planet’s oceans, which range from 6000 to 11,000 metres below the surface. At these depths there is no light, and life must survive on what falls from the surface or generate its own energy from chemicals – known as chemosynthesis. The first fossil whales were found at a depth of 7002 metres in a part …