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The Marvelous Seamounts of the Southeast Pacific
An expedition to a little-explored region returns with deep-sea wonders.
To learn more, Sellanes and a team of scientists set out earlier this year aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Falkor (too) research vessel, equipped with a remotely operated submersible and all the instrumentation they would need to explore the depths. In the course of mapping more than 20,000 square miles of seafloor and discovering four seamounts, the researchers found a veritable deep-sea wonderland: millennia-old corals, watermelon-sized urchins, fish adapted for walking, and more than 100 species thought to be new to science. Doing so can be a matter of human self-interest, notes Sellanes: Commercially important fisheries may depend on species whose life cycles are tied to those seamount communities.
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