Blue Machine

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt

To keep eating without killing herself with salt,fn34 the turtle must cry around eight litres of tears every hour.

It’s clear that there are a lot of things down there that both frustrate and fascinate the biologists. There are also microbes inside the nodules, but no one knows how they get enough food, tucked away from the water outside. There are animals growing on top of the nodules, possibly using them as a stepladder so that they can scavenge food away from the sea floor. No one knows how old any of these animals are or how long they live, but they are all living in a very slow system where there is plenty of space and a pitiful amount of food. It appears to be completely dark, but Adrian shows me a photograph of a freshly recovered nodule with a small worm tucked in a crevice. The worm is (or was) peering out at the world – it has eyes, which implies that there must be something for them to see. But what? We go back to the video, and then into the field of view comes the weirdest of them all: a xenophyophore. It sticks up from the seabed like a hand, and it looks relatively rigid. But this relatively large organism is a single cell: a type of foraminiferan that sucks up minerals from its surroundings and uses them to build an exoskeleton to contain itself. It’s only found down here, on the abyssal plains, and like all of its neighbours it’s the source of far more questions than answers. The shape of these parts of the ocean floor – reasonably flat, very deep and well away from the churning ecosystems that might cover them up with detritus – is critical to the type of life that exists

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