Question: is the ocean floor like a diffrent world ?

Jon Copley answered on 16 Jun 2010:

Yes, I think it is. The landscape down there looks so different from anything we’re used to here above the waves. At the undersea volcanoes where I work, the lava solidifies into weird shapes because it is erupting underwater. So you get pillars of rock, and odd-looking cliffs, valleys and knolls. But elsewhere there are also vast plains of mud, called the abyssal plains, that are incredibly flat for hundreds of miles.

Plus it’s dark, apart from a few flashes of light made by some deep-sea animals to hunt, confuse their predators, or find mates. So when you’re down there in a minisub, you’re suddenly aware of this vast alien landscape stretching out for thousands of miles in the darkness around you, beyond the tiny pool of light from your sub’s headlamps.

Then there are the inhabitants of the deep ocean – and they are certainly not like the animals we’re used to. Animals with bodies made out of transparent jelly, covering in lines of coloured fire where the lights of our sub catch rows of tiny paddle-like hairs that they use to swim. Fish with amazing jaws, because food usually gets more scarce the deeper you go. I could go on, and fill a book with descriptions of the unusual animals that live down there (in fact, I have to do just that over the next few months, as I’m writing a new university textbook about deep-sea biology!).

Two of my scientific heroes are William Beebe and Otis Barton, because they were the first people ever to venture into the deep ocean, when they dived in their “bathysphere” back in the 1930s. As the first people to see the deep-sea world with their own eyes, I think they summed it up best: William Beebe wrote that they saw fish that could “outdragon” any figments of our imagination. And Otis Barton wrote: “No human eye had glimpsed this part of the planet before us, this pitch-black country lighted only by the pale gleam of an occasional spiralling shrimp.”

But perhaps the best way to answer this question is to show you – so here’s a video of what it’s like down there (at least where we went on a recent expedition), and some of the species that we find:

http://www.thesearethevoyages.net/ias/deepvents.html