Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea

What happened

According to The Guardian’s source item, Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea, The bottom of the ocean has barely been explored, but every journey to the deep reveals wondrous new lifeforms. As underwater mining gains momentum, we risk destroying one of the Earth’s last great wildernesses On 8 March 2014, at 1.20am, Malaysian Airlines flight 370 veered off its scheduled route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. An hour later, military radar spotted the plane heading west over the Andaman Sea. Six or seven hours later, it is presumed to have crashed somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean, one of the least studied bodies of water in the world. Just how little we knew about this part of the ocean became clear during the subsequent search for the missing aircraft. Before a proper underwater search could even begin, a vast stretch of seafloor had to be mapped. Over the next three years, a team of ships from Australia, China and Malaysia scanned the bottom with a combination

Context

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What to watch

Open questions include whether primary sources issue follow-up statements, whether local or market impacts become clearer, and whether additional reporting changes the timeline or adds material context.

Source

Primary source: Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea via The Guardian. VINI cites and links the source; it does not reproduce the publisher’s full article text without rights clearance.