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Third Fugro Vessel to Join MH370 Search.

Third Fugro Vessel to Join MH370 Search.

Live Broadcasters Spotted a Shark During the Broadcast.

New tool to track underwater acoustic waves could find MH370.

Bitten by a great white shark: survivors on their near-death experience.

China's new manned submersible finished the first ocean expedition of its operation stage, according to Science and Technology Daily.

Historians name 2 Indian Ocean 19th century shipwrecks.

Are Seagrass meadows the key to carbon storage?

Lost Australia diver swam miles to shore stalked by shark.

Formation of a huge underwater volcano offshore the Comoros.

Groundbreaking Indian Ocean science mission reaches an end.

Victor VESCOVO completes the third dive of the Five Deeps Expedition and team discovers potential new hadal species.

Seychelles chief calls from the deep for ocean protection.

The Java Trench is the only subduction trench in the Indian Ocean that extends to the hadal zone (> 6,000 m water depth), and except for sevenbenthic trawls acquired around the 1950s, there has been little to no sampling at hadal depths undertaken since. In 2019, we undertook a 5-day expedition comprising a scientific dive using a full ocean depth-rated submersible, the DSV Limiting Factor, seven hadal-lander deployments, and high-resolution bathymetric survey. The submersible performed a video transect from the deepest point of the trench, up a 150 m high near-vertical escarpment located on the forearc, and then across a plateau at a depth of ∼7,050 m to make in situ observations of the habitat heterogeneity and biodiversity inhabiting these hadal depths. We found the Java Trench hadal community to be diverse and represented by 10 phyla, 21 classes, 34 orders and 55 families, with many new records and extensions in either depth or geographic range, including a rare encounter of a hadal ascidian. The submersible transect revealed six habitats spanning the terrain. The deepest trench axis comprised fine-grained sediments dominated by holothurians, whereas evidence of active rock slope failure and associated talus deposits were prevalent in near-vertical and vertical sections of the escarpment. Sediment pockets and sediment pouring down the steep wall in "chutes" were commonly observed. The slope terrain was dominated by two species in the order Actiniaria and an asteroid, as well as 36 instances of orange, yellow, and white bacterial mats, likely exploiting discontinuities in the exposed bedrock, that may indicate a prevalence of chemosynthetic input into this hadal ecosystem. Near the top of the escarpment was an overhang populated by > 100 hexactinellid (glass) sponges. The substrate of the plateau returned to fine-grained sediment, but with a decreased density and diversity of epifauna relative to the trench floor. By providing the first visual insights of the h