• Question: What's at the bottom of the ocean?

    Asked by Júlia to Eoin, Ester, Ildiko, Natasha, Paul, Tom on 6 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by Júlia.
    • Photo: Eoin McKinney

      Eoin McKinney answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      The seabed….! But there is a lot of stuff down there we barely know about. Some people esimate that we have only discovered around a third of what lives in the sea. Most things in the deep, deep oceans tend to look very weird, too, as their environment is so far removed from ours (its pretty dark down there as light can’t penetrate that far). vampire squid, wolffish, viperfish…. they often get appropriately frightening names, too. Its one of the last frontiers for exploration on the planet and tends to offer up some really surprising findings from time to time.

    • Photo: Ildiko Somorjai

      Ildiko Somorjai answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      At the bottom of the ocean you find great deep sea craters and volcanoes even-the Earth’s crust is basically shifting all the time and as they do the plates crash into each other (in slo-mo though!). One of the most amazing things I have ever seen is the “brine” lake at the bottom the Gulf of Mexico-super salty water that basically is sitting at the bottom of the ocean there-it looks a bit like a shimmering oil pool because the density of the saltwater is different between the ocean and the brine lake…. It is pretty toxic to organisms we recognise i.e. fish but there may be specialist bacteria or other small organisms living down there that we know absolutely nothing about!

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