There, Bova and her colleagues collected sediment cores from the seafloor spanning hundreds of thousands of years of climate history.
If ancient bobbit worms did terrorize the seafloor back then, their burrows are a rare example of invertebrates hunting vertebrates — usually it’s the other way around.
It took the trio four years to create their iconic cartographic masterpiece, an unparalleled, panoramic visualization that continues to shape how both scientists and the public think about the seafloor.
New seafloor is created at the center of the oceans and lost as plates sink back into the planet’s interior.
Instead, the somewhat-clean water is then dumped into the Pacific Ocean via a five-mile pipe along the seafloor.
Researchers are also exploring how deep-sea trenches bury carbon and other chemicals in the seafloor.