The Brilliant Abyss

As soon as you stop thinking about it, the deep can so easily vanish out of mind — more so than that other great distant realm, outer space. The deep has no stars at night to remind us it is there, and no moon shining down. And yet, this hidden place reaches into our daily lives and makes vital things happen without our knowing. The deep, quite simply makes this planet habitable.

The oceans, it turns out, are full of bone-eating worms

Not so very long ago, the deep was a tremendous void containing myths, legends and endless unknowns.

The deep sea will never run out of things for us to dream about. Places will remain unseen and unvisited, fleeting moments will be missed, and nimble creatures, whose existence nobody can guess, will keep slipping out of sight. We need to do all we can to keep it that way.

The deep has no stars at night to remind us it is there, and no moon shining down. And yet, this hidden place reaches into our daily lives and makes vital things happen without our knowing. The deep, quite simply, makes this planet habitable.

Some hexactinellids hold themselves aloft on long stalks and look like shocked sock puppets, mouths agape.

In the abyss, the water pressure is 400 times greater than at the surface, or more than 150 times the pressure inside a car tire.

The paper publishing their findings depicts these connections in a diagram, which the scientists call the "birthday party figure" because it's so colorful, with bright streamers looping between many different deep-sea animal groups. It shows something that doesn't normally happen at birthday parties: all the guests are eating each other.

A long, ridged plastic tube, like a vacuum cleaner pipe, known as the slurp gun...

There are no compelling reasons for exploiting the deep, just industry and politics vying to push into that last frontier.