New Fish Species Discovered 4.5 Miles Under the Ocean 96
eldavojohn writes "The University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab (a partner in the recent census of marine life) has discovered a new snailfish. That might not sound very exciting, unless you consider that its habitat is an impressive four and a half miles below the ocean's surface (video). If my calculations are correct, that's over ten and a half thousand PSI, or about seventy-three million Pascals. The videos and pictures are a couple years old, as the team has traveled around Japan, South America and New Zealand to ascertain the biodiversity of these depths. The group hopes to eventually bring specimens to the surface. It seems the deepest parts of the ocean, once thought to be devoid of life, are actually home to some organisms. As researchers build better technology for underwater exploration, tales of yore containing unimaginable monsters seem a little more realistic than before."
Depth is irrelevant. (Score:3, Interesting)
Stop thinking about it like what would happen to you at that depth because thats not what happens.
Everything in the body of the fish formed at that pressure, which means it doesn't really feel the pressure. Your body didn't. Its internal pressure is about 14psi, if you took it down there, it would be crushed until it reached equilibrium with the outside pressure.
Likewise, if your brought the fish to the surface, or tried to, it would literally explode before it got to the surface as the internal pressure would be too great for its cells to contain.
You can see the same thing if you pull a fish up from even 150 feet too quickly, its eyeballs will pop out of its skull and its internal organs sometimes pushed out of its mouth.
We need to stop thinking that theres something special about life at these pressures or depths like its rare. We've known for 50 years there are fish down deeper than that, there were fish at the bottom of the Marianas trench, this one is slightly more than HALF that deep.
When you are born at such pressures, anything else seems insane ... kind of like going into space without a space suit, which is pretty much what the fish would need to survive at the surface since its body is designed to operate at much higher pressures.