Deep-sea vehicles spot 'alien' sharks deep beneath the waves in the Pacific

Posted by pkaeding 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by MostlyStable 1 day ago

There are loads of unknown (to science) deep sea sharks out there, most of them quite small. A friend of mine in grad school spent several trips on a deep sea trawler out of Madagascar and described multiple new species.

Comment by doodlebugging 1 day ago

Sometimes the first opportunity to see something occurs while you are actively destroying the habitat where it lives. Sounds like your friend's work took advantage of the access that deep sea trawlers would have to species unknown to science, allowing them to have a rough idea of their distribution. In a sense this is very useful to researchers who can argue the case that trawling is too destructive for that area due to the presence of species new to science.

Trawling and mining, both activities mentioned in the article, can be very destructive to habitats. With the global race to lock up sources of rare elements and elements that are more commonly found in conflict zone nations the sea floor is seen as the best source for some of these. The manganese nodules that I learned about in geoscience classes decades ago are targeted by miners today who will have no qualms about scraping the seafloor clean just as those fishing fleets strip the oceans of wild fish species.

Comment by __bb 1 day ago

> The manganese nodules that I learned about in geoscience classes decades ago are targeted by miners today who will have no qualms about scraping the seafloor clean

This (and the concept of extinction credits) is an opening plot point in the book “Venomous Lumpsucker”, which I found a good read.

Comment by doodlebugging 21 hours ago

Thank you for that recommendation! I read a lot and this sounds interesting.

Comment by nradov 1 day ago

FWIW, one of the executives working on seafloor mining claims that they'll only suck up a limited pattern of manganese nodules from the seafloor and leave the rest undisturbed. If we're going to have an industrial economy then we do need the metals and extracting them will inevitably cause some environmental impact whether that's on land or under the ocean.

https://music.youtube.com/podcast/2zrIilw-87k

Comment by ceejayoz 1 day ago

Yeah, sure, and tobacco execs claimed cigarettes didn't cause lung cancer.

Comment by nradov 23 hours ago

We don't need cigarettes but metals are a necessity. How would you prefer we get them?

Comment by ceejayoz 22 hours ago

Do we not have these metals now, before we've done a single bit of seafloor mining?

Comment by nradov 17 hours ago

Lack of those metals is one of the key limiting factors holding back the electrification and re-industrialization of the US economy.

Comment by ceejayoz 17 hours ago

[citation needed]

Comment by Keyframe 23 hours ago

Asteroids mining!

Comment by doodlebugging 20 hours ago

>Asteroids

Every time I see this I am taken back to a time when you could walk into a convenience store and drop a quarter into a machine and blast asteroids to smithereens until you made one last mistake and hard to drop another quarter. Thanks!

Comment by XorNot 1 day ago

No one is mining manganese from the sea floor. The whole idea was a CIA cover story for a mission to recover a sunken Soviet submarine that the Americans knew the location of but the Soviets didn't. They needed an explanation for a cargo ship headed out to a specific area with deep sea construction equipment on board: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

Comment by juahan 1 day ago

It was a cover, but they did not invent it. It is an actual sudied thing and there has been some experimental mining operations as well.

Comment by MomsAVoxell 1 day ago

They're mining them now. They weren't then.

Comment by hackeraccount 1 day ago

They aren't. It's still being looked into.

Comment by ceejayoz 1 day ago

The whole point of a cover story is to be plausible.

Comment by doodlebugging 20 hours ago

Please take a moment to review some of the latest details about the subject. I was in college in the 80's and early 90's and this was already being described as a done deal once the technology matured. The Glomar Explorer event had occurred in 1974, and was public info by 1975.

Here for you today is a useful link to a company that is hoping to be the first to operate on a large scale in defined zones [0] such as the CCZ, Clarion-Clipperton Zone, [1]. The technology is already mature and has been for several decades but the process was delayed while appropriate regulations for access to the seafloor and monitoring of destructive potential and harms to existing seafloor organisms could be evaluated and understood, allowing mitigation techniques to be developed. It has become clear in the mining operations that have occurred that the damage to the seafloor takes significant time to repair itself, thousands of years or longer, and that the scars from the operations are functionally permanent.

[0]https://metals.co/coverage/

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarion%E2%80%93Clipperton_zon...

One article from 2025 linked on the Metals Company website has a Barrons interview with their CEO and he describes the current situation as he saw it. [2]

[2]https://www.barrons.com/news/no-doubt-canadian-firm-will-be-...

All articles linked there date to 2025 and some of them are broken but most still work.

The Chinese were mining the seafloor nodules before 2019 [3] and as of that date had more exploration licenses than any other nation.

[3]https://dialogue.earth/en/ocean/10891-china-deep-sea-explora...

Basically, there is mining activity already in progress and it has been locked in a process of licensing and regulatory framework definition for a long time. It is inevitable that all of this will happen on a large scale since it is effectively an opportunity for any participant nation to acquire critical minerals without scarring their own landscape.

This wiki summary probably comes closest to updating the activities and concerns of all parties. The latest meeting about seafloor mining concluded a couple days ago, on July 31st. [4]

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining

EDIT: Here is an update issued days ago about operations on leases near American Samoa. There is no mining activity there at the moment but it could spin up in a short time after sale is finalized. [5]

[5]https://www.boem.gov/marine-minerals/potential-american-samo...

Comment by tchalla 1 day ago

And then we wonder why people don’t believe news articles.

Comment by gr_norm 1 day ago

Wow! It's amazing how little it seems we've explored of the deep ocean, whenever I hear about it. A whole other world down there, lying in wait... the frontiers of our own planet have yet to be conquered!

Comment by FabHK 1 day ago

Indeed. Until around 2021 or so, more people had been to the moon than to the bottom of the ocean (Challenger Deep).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep

Comment by randallsquared 1 day ago

There's so many kinds of microbe we don't have catalogued. The last 30-40 years have been pretty astonishing in that regard.

Comment by hackable_sand 1 day ago

Conquered

Comment by erikerikson 1 day ago

s/conquered/experienced/

s/conquered/discovered/

...

Comment by nkrisc 1 day ago

I think we should be doing less conquering of the planet we live on.

Comment by rf15 1 day ago

me before opening: is this just going to be goblin sharks

the article: Goblin sharks have never before been filmed in their natural habitat

Surprisingly bad headline.

Comment by paradoxyl 1 day ago

yeah, calling these sharks who are native to our world 'alien' is kinda off-putting and obviously click-baity.

Comment by KevinMS 1 day ago

They didn't explain it in the article but some people claim the creature from "Alien" was inspired by these sharks.

Comment by gyomu 1 day ago

LLMs are obsessed with hidden, never seen before goblins - I suspect this is why this story has been doing so well.

https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

Comment by anoplus 1 day ago

This kind of posts make me think. We all love technology because it's so cool, but how cool is nature already? Making our lives awesome is as much about protecting and discovering the sources for our inspiration, as building the stuff we are inspired to build.

Comment by dandaka 1 day ago

There is not much we can do/build with nature. Even if everyone would take idea of "protection/inspiration", there are not many sustainable business models towards that direction. Nature is more aligned with inward observation / meditation, which is more aligned with Eastern tradition.

Comment by itintheory 1 day ago

We sure can do things with nature. for instance, sustain any and all life on our planet. Viewing the natural world purely in an extractive mindset is the very reason we're in the dire mess we're in today.

Comment by dandaka 21 hours ago

Whenever I have this choice "destroy or sustain any and all life", I always pick "sustain". Problem is, I don't often meet such an option to choose. Maybe your life is different.

Comment by the_real_cher 14 hours ago

Saying Nature is not good as a "business model" is such an unintentionally funny Hacker News culture comment.

Comment by altmanaltman 1 day ago

I am sorry but why are you assuming "nature" cares? We benefit from the climate which allowed us to prosper and evolve but there have been periods of time on earth where nature was absolutely inhospitable to life. We just want to keep nature the way it works best for us but that is not protection.

Comment by everyone 1 day ago

Could the light be blinding all the animals? I would assume their eyes would have evolved to be extremely sensitive to light.

Comment by MomsAVoxell 1 day ago

Yes, there is an issue with exploration lights effecting native life.

Recent attempts to capture a giant squid on video were only realized when they switched the lights off.

Comment by everyone 19 hours ago

Could they use very low light cameras? or perhaps lights and cameras that dont operate in the visual range?

Comment by MomsAVoxell 10 hours ago

They used red light to capture the giant squid pictures ..

Comment by mshockwave 1 day ago

or have little vision to begin with

Comment by nly 1 day ago

They can...swim away

Comment by everyone 19 hours ago

Perhaps they may not have an instinct to protect themselves / swim away from blinding lights?

Comment by dredmorbius 19 hours ago

And might well swim toward light (as with, say, moths, sans swimming).

Comment by pvaldes 1 day ago

Probably, most sharks have nictitating membranes to protect the eye, but this family of sharks didn't evolved one apparently. In any case, they can avoid easily the light source swimming away.

Comment by RoundingError1 13 hours ago

Very interesting. It's always fascinating how much we still don't know about this marble.

Comment by triyambakam 1 day ago

> the animal leisurely glid along the sea floor

Strange. I thought it was glided, or at least glode

Comment by mr_toad 1 day ago

Glid vs glided, slid vs slided are examples of the inconsistency of the English language. Glided is more common than glid, and slid is more common than slided. Linguistics says that that makes slide an ‘irregular’ verb, but that’s basically a circular definition.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 1 day ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glid

They are synonyms

Comment by IAmGraydon 1 day ago

It is glided. "Glid" is not a word in the English language.

Comment by virtualwhys 1 day ago

Strange, I've always used glid, glided is so cumbersome in comparison.

Comment by perpetuallunch 1 day ago

Yeah nah.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/yeah-nah_adv

Comment by terrycody 12 hours ago

The BGM of the video is so stunning and "alien", who knows it name plz?

Comment by donatj 1 day ago

It took me longer to get past the "human verification" than to read the entire article. Odd state of the world.

Comment by ajsnigrutin 1 day ago

At least it didn't show the "give us your email to subscribe to our spam" the moment you scroll a milimeter down the page. I started subscribing "admin@theirdomain.com" every time i get a popup like that... maybe i should start using some regulator (fcc,..) email instead.