Abyss Report: Into the Dark
The mystery a single dive solved, read off the instruments: ROV telemetry, sonar and spectrogram.
Why No Fish Lives Below 8,400 Metres
On 31 August 2022 a NOAA robot reached its own limit, 6,000 metres down in the Puerto Rico Trench, and filmed a pale fish at 5,990 m. The trench keeps going to about 8,400. No fish...
The Viral Deep-Sea Jellyfish Still Has No Species
In April 2016 a NOAA robot filmed a jellyfish hanging motionless at 3,750 metres on an unofficially named seamount south of Guam, and the video went around the world. It has a genu...
How to Find a Whale in 187,000 Hours of NOAA Hydrophone Audio
NOAA's Pacific hydrophone archive is 187,000 hours of public audio, free to anyone, and almost nobody finds anything in it. Six readings of one file explain why: two of every three...
Biotwang: The Mariana Trench Sound Was a Whale Near the Surface
In October 2014 a glider east of Guam recorded a call nobody could name: a low moan that ends in a metallic twang. The 2016 paper guessed a minke whale. A ship, sonobuoys and nine ...
The Casper Octopus Still Has No Name. Here Is Why
On 27 February 2016 a NOAA robot sent to collect two rocks at 4,290 metres off Necker Island found a small, ghost-white octopod no one had seen before. Ten years later it still has...
The Galapagos Vent Garden Is Gone. Here Is Its Heir
In February 1977 a team of geologists went looking for hot water on the Galapagos Rift and found giant clams and tubeworms instead, with no biologist on board. The famous vent fiel...
The Coffinfish Holds Its Breath for Up to Four Minutes
On 17 June 2018, at 1,299 metres on the Blake Escarpment off Georgia, the ROV Deep Discoverer stopped in front of a sea toad and kept it in frame for nine and a half minutes. It di...
NOAA Filmed a 5 mm Fish in 2019. It Still Has No Name.
On 1 September 2019, at 1,353 metres in the Northeast Channel off Nova Scotia, the ROV Deep Discoverer filmed a fish a few millimetres long. Seven years later it is still unidentif...
The Two Dots In Every NOAA Dive Video Are a Ruler
Every dive package NOAA publishes carries six things worth reading, and most people watching this footage never notice any of them: two laser dots, a depth number, the light itself...
The 52 Hz Whale Paper Never Used the Word Lonely
Since 1989 a single source in the North Pacific has been making a tone near 52 hertz. It was tracked for twelve consecutive seasons by the US Navy's SOSUS arrays and published in D...
The Worm's Name Stopped Being Correct Before Most People Heard It
One thousand six hundred and eighteen metres down, on the same dive as this channel's last episode, a robot finds a worm colony living directly on solid methane -- rock that catche...
The Lake at the Bottom of the Sea
At 1,624 metres in the Gulf of Mexico there is a lake, with a shoreline, a beach and a rim of drowned mussels. In 2017 a NOAA robot parked over it for twenty-five minutes with two ...
The Squid Nobody Has Ever Caught
In 2021 a NOAA robot spent four minutes filming a five-metre squid at 2,382 metres in the Gulf of Mexico. No intact adult of this animal has ever been collected - everything scienc...
Nobody Has Ever Heard the Bloop, Including You
The most famous mystery sound in the ocean is a recording running sixteen times too fast. Undo that, and the event lasted two minutes and forty-one seconds and sat between thirteen...
Nobody Could Name the Golden Orb, So They Took It
In 2023 an ROV found a smooth gold dome stuck to a rock 3,250 metres down in the Gulf of Alaska. Nobody watching the live feed could say what it was - and the control room recordin...
The Type Specimen of This Species Is a Video File, and the Animal Swam Away
Almost every named animal on Earth has one physical individual set aside in a museum, in a jar, as the standard that decides what the name means. This one has a video file instead ...