Japan is embarking on an ambitious effort to retrieve rare earth elements from the ocean floor as it seeks to loosen China’s grip over the metals vital to missiles, radar systems and drones. A ...

Beds of Bathymodiolus mussels provide important habitat for other deep-sea critters, including sea stars, scaleworms and limpets. NOAA Ocean Exploration. The deep sea is the large ...

Deep sea mining has been off limits thus far, both because it's awfully hard, and because governments haven't yet firmed up regulations around extracting minerals offshore. That might soon change, as ...

Meet the “ghost fish,” a phantom of the abyss. Here’s how we found the first ever proof of its existence just a few years ago. The deep sea is a part of the world that very few humans get the chance ...

Researchers have discovered evidence of oxygen production in the deep Pacific Ocean, independent of sunlight and living ...

The deep sea is cold, dark and under immense pressure. Yet life has found a way to prevail there, in the form of some of Earth’s strangest creatures. Since deep-sea critters have adapted to near ...

A cnidarian is attached to a dead sponge stalk on a manganese nodule in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Diva Amon and Craig Smith, University of Hawaii at Mānoa Picture an ocean world so deep and dark it ...

A robot the size of a small house crawls across the ocean floor like a giant’s pool cleaner, vacuuming up potato-sized rocks called polymetallic nodules. Packed with nickel, copper, manganese, and ...

Some deep-sea fish may be able to see light in a different way from most other vertebrates, according to a new study. The ...