A deep-sea mining test shows ecosystem damage can begin immediately, with more than one-third of seafloor animals lost in a single pass.

Far below the reach of sunlight, scientists have stumbled on a patch of vivid blue mud on the Pacific seafloor that appears to host organisms thriving in conditions long thought impossible. The ...

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 ...

An enormous but poorly understood region of the global ocean—referred to as the abyssal benthic boundary layer—lies just a few meters above the seafloor and has only been sampled a handful of times. A ...

When most of us look out at the ocean, we see a mostly flat blue surface stretching to the horizon. It’s easy to imagine the sea beneath as calm and largely static – a massive, still abyss far removed ...