Originally published at: Explore the deep sea and its creatures, level by level | Boing Boing
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Deepest human scuba dive to 332 meters! I can’t even imagine how long the decompression took for that dive. 
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Fascinating! I like how everything looks like video game sprites as you approach the bottom.
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Paging @DiveGirl
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That’s a blobfish?
This is a blobfish.
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No, that’s a blobfish that has undergone explosive decompression. The live ones look like fish; what Ted Cruz looks like is a mangled fish corpse.
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The dead fish has more charisma by far
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as one who has only ever explored (recreationally) the tidal and shallow littoral zones, i must say that the open water pelagic zones - photic, bathysphreic, twilight, abyssal, hadal, etc. have always fascinated me. i was brought up steeped in Jaques Cousteau adventure stories (problematic as that is today), and any open ocean exploration was cool AF!
this chart only reinforces the fact that the very, very slim line of abundant life in our vast oceans is so small. the death of our coral reefs will be the end of us all. even the innermost landlocked cities on every continent. even you, Iowa.
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Almost 14 hours of deco time - get your juice boxes ready, fire up a board game (or 12) underwater, and chill out.
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someone linked to this the other day here on BBS and I went on a wikipedia dive with some of the creatures. The cookiecutter shark stood out to me due to the literalness of the name. Incredible how deep some of the sharks live, and very exciting how frequent new discoveries in the deepest depths.
I also looked into the bathyscaohe Trieste, and was shocked to learn that only the little ball on the bottom is crew space, the rest of the more boat-shaped stuff is all bouyancy, ballast and other systems.
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I was going to post a bit from Cousteau’s book earlier about that. He wasn’t a hydrologist or a marine biologist, but his work supporting such studies made this one of the passages which made an impression.
While I quickly calculated the quantity of water on Earth, I spent many years sailing the oceans before I recognized that only a small fraction of that small quantity of water supports life. Even as we began a study of the Mediterranean in spring 1955, I still found it easy to believe in the ocean’s mythical bounty; we took nearly four hundred samples and found waters thick with the phytoplankton that feeds the sea. But after only one month of photosynthesis, even before the summer began, the microscopic plants had already exhausted the nutrients on the high sea; the watery meadows had almost disappeared. The Mediterranean, like a meager soil, could not sustain its crop for long. As I logged more miles in Calypso’s underwater observation chamber, I realized that the high seas are stretches of desert – living desert, to be sure, like land deserts, but only with a thin, hardly visible fog of plankton.
From time to time, the sea blossoms with life; there are luxuriant oases in the deserts of the sea, but those oases are rare. Life abounds in just three ocean areas: the top 160 to 320 feet, where sunlight meets nutrients to provide plant food for fish; the bottom, enriched by organic detritus that settles and decomposes; and especially, the continental shelves. Shallow ribbons of fertility, the continental shelves provide the ocean with its nurseries; here fish lay their eggs. The waters in these coastal areas constitue just one half of 1 percent of total ocean space, yet they support 90 percent of all marine species. The continental shelves give the sea its literally narrow margin for life.
The book goes on to talk about being involved in a study of thermohaline circulation, but I figure that’s a long enough quote already.
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