Experiments in Life

Okay….I’m gonna get nerdy on you guys….again. I have a blog from a deep sea biology website. And well, since my master’s thesis was on organisms from the deep sea, I thought the blog was appropriate. Anyway, this link will take you to some really cool pictures of some very interesting looking deep sea critters. Just go to the photo gallery and look around. There is even a little blurb telling you more about the thing in the picture. Enjoy.

The Bioluminescence Web Page

Also, another tidbit I found interesting was this:

hydrothermal vents were not discovered until 1976 or so….as one biologist like myself might ask, exactly how much of the deep sea has been explored or sampled since then? Well, someone nerdier than me has figured out an estimate of that. It goes something like this:

ROVS and Submersibles
Total Number of ROVS and Submersibles 20
Total Number of Operational Years 30
Total Number of Dives Per Day 1
Total Number of Lifetime Dives 153600
Total Distance Covered in Each Dive (km) 1
Effective Viewing Distance (m) 10
Area Covered Per Dive (km2) 0.01
Total Area Covered by ROV and Submersibles (km2) 1536

Trawls and Sledges
Average Trawl Distance (km) 1
Average Trawl Opening (m) 5
Total Area Sampled Per Trawl (km2) 0.005
Number of Total Trawls 20000
Total Area Covered by Trawls and Sledges 100

Cores
Core Size (m2) 1
Total Number of Cores 20000
Total Area Covered by Cores (km2) 0.02

Benthic Landers
Total Number of Benthic Landers 20
Total Visual Field (km2) 1
Total Area Covered by Landers (km2) 20

Total Area of Deep Sea Sampled (km2) 1656.02
Earths Surface Area (km2) 150000000
Percentage of Surface Covered by Deep Sea 70.8%
Area of Deep Sea (km2) 106200000
Percentage of Deep Sea Area Covered 0.0016%

Now, isn’t that something !

Note: This information was taken directly from Deep-Sea News. For more information about the above topic, please follow the link.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 14th, 2005 at 3:49 pm and is filed under General Nerdiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.