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Deutsche Welle TV - English
Expedition to the Ocean Floor
TOMORROW TODAY takes a fascinating look into the work of marine researchers – a five-part series in cooperation with the Deutsche Welle TV.
The exploration of the deep sea is one of the great scientific challenges of the future. This is a gigantic area. Covering two thirds of the earth’s surface, it is an unknown world with bizarre geological structures and exotic inhabitants. So far, only one percent of the deep ocean habitat has been explored.
Black Smokers and Hot Springs
Geologist Wolfgang Bach’s research area is one of the most remarkable structures in the deep sea.
The MARUM scientist, who is also a professor at Bremen University studies the hydrothermal vents called "black smokers." Some of these chimney-like hot water springs on the sea bed are formed in the mid-Atlantic, in an area known as the Logatchev Field where tectonic plates are moving apart and a new ocean floor is emerging from below. How the black smokers come into being, and what enables molluscs, shrimp and crabs to exist in their chemically aggressive environment are just two of the questions that Wolfgang Bach wants to answer. In this film, he shows Tomorrow Today stunning images from – as he puts it – "the oases in the desert of the ocean floor."
Corals in the Cold
Marine geologist Claudia Wienberg studies animals whose existence was unknown until a few years ago – cold water corals that live in the cooler regions of the Atlantic or the Mediterranean.
Like their tropical relatives, cold water corals can form gigantic reefs which serve as habitats for many different ocean animals and plants. For some researchers they are fascinating for other reasons as well: because the growth of the reefs is influenced by environmental conditions, their structure can provide information about the climate in the past. Extreme changes in the environment can be deadly; in more than 20 percent of the reefs, the corals have died out.
In the course of her expeditions Claudia Wienberg made a remarkable discovery. In the Gulf of Cadiz off the Spanish coast she found giant fields of coral remains. Now she is devoting part of her research to finding out the causes of the coral death. Her initial hypothesis is that over the past centuries the water temperature and nutrient levels have changed drastically. The results of Wienberg’s study may help predict the fate of the living cold water corals found off the Norwegian or Irish coasts.
Traces of Climate Change
MARUM scientists Ursula Röhl and Alex Wülbers are investigating what the ocean floor has to tell us about the climate in the past.
The geologists are part of the international IODP (Integrated Ocean Drilling Program) project.
In this report they talk about an especially challenging expedition; how with a drilling ship they navigated the Arctic ice to the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater shelf that extends through the northern polar region. There, where the once supposedly "eternal ice cap" has begun to disappear, drillings can now be carried out deep into the sea bed.
The cores of sediment the scientists drill out of the ocean floor are kept in cold storage at MARUM. The collection plays a central role in the IODP project. The two researchers tell us about the fascinating information they are trying to extract from the deep-sea core samples.
The Secret of Underwater Asphalt
Florence Schubotz is a geochemist at MARUM. She studies a very special habitat in the Gulf of Mexico. There at depths of 3,000 meters large areas of the sea floor are covered with swathes of asphalt.
This material originates in the petroleum deposits beneath the sea bed. As hydrocarbons leak out through cracks in the sea floor, lighter components rise up to the water surface, the cooled, denser components remain on the seabed, leaving a solid mass of asphalt. The result is a submarine landscape that resembles a cooled volcanic lava field. Inhospitable as it may seem, these formations are home to a unique community of organisms.
Life under the Sea
Heiko Sahling is a biologist and deep sea geoscientist at the MARUM Research Center. The area he studies is in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Pakistan.
There, at depths down to 3,000 meters, something fascinating is happening. Natural gas is emerging from the sea bed, to produce a surreal world of millions of tiny bubbles, which has already spurred the fancy of science fiction authors. In these exotic surroundings, the scientist has discovered both new animal species and communities and new geological truths. But the main questions that drive him are concerned with the methane gas emitted here. How much is emitted, how does it affect the biological world of the deep sea, and how much reaches the surface to enter the atmosphere? That is also relevant to climate researchers, because methane is a major greenhouse gas that increases global warming. Heiko Sahling takes Tomorrow Today viewers on an expedition on the METEOR research vessel. He tells us about life on board, about burning ice and about organisms that no one has seen before.