Over a Hundred New Species Might Have Been Discovered in the Deep Sea

During a deep-sea expedition off the coast of Chile, a group of scientists discovered that two underwater mountain chains could be home to more than 100 new species, hoping the data collected will lead to the designation of an international high-seas marine protected area.

“On this expedition, we were able to observe over 150 species that have not been reported for the region, and we believe potentially 100 or more of those are new species to science,” explains Erin Easton, an assistant professor at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. “We observed forests of corals, so we saw a forest of bamboo corals that were probably thousands of years old.”

The Schmidt Ocean expedition used an underwater robot to explore the Nazca Ridge and Salas y Gomez Ridge, which stretch across 2,900 kilometres in the Southeastern Pacific, and the Juan Fernandez Ridge off the west coast of South America. They discovered deep-sea corals, glass sponges, sea urchins, amphipods, and squat lobsters and mapped 52,777 km² of seafloor.