This is without a doubt one of the most beautiful things that I have ever seen.
You know the posters around town, the ones that say “It’s like blowing up Mars before we get there”? The URL at the bottom of the posters points towards the Greenpeace Deep Deep Trouble campaign.
And from there I dived in to explore the abyss and came across this and this.
Again I say “wow.” What a universe we live in.
And here’s some facts:
We know more about the moon than we know about the deep sea.
The oceans provide 99 percent of the Earth's living space- the largest space in our universe known to be inhabited by living organisms
One study of an area of deep sea half the size of a tennis court found that it contained 898 species, over half of which were unknown to scientists.
Orange Roughy can live for 150 years.
Giant sea spiders are 30cm across.
Giant squid grow to 12 metres long. No one has ever seen a giant squid in the wild. Oh, and apparently squid have 3 hearts.
The strike of a large Californian species of mantis shrimp is capable of breaking double layered safety glass.
Water pressure at the deepest point in the ocean is more than 8 tons per square inch, the equivalent of one person trying to hold 50 jumbo jets. And yet, there is life down there.
You remember that scary fish on Finding Nemo, the one with the glowing bulb dangling from its forehead? Well, they really exist.
The nets used to trawl the bottom of the sea for fish have openings as wide as the length of a rugby field and three storeys high. At the bottom they have steel rollers weighing hundreds of kilograms. They destroy everything in their path and leave deep gouges in the ocean floor.
Discarded nets drift through the sea and continue to kill fish on the ocean floor.
In 2001 12 countries took approximately 95% of the reported high sea bottom trawling catch. NZ was one of those 12 countries.