This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
\n\nOn a bright, sunny day last May, I stood on a boat surrounded by the turquoise waters of the island nation of Palau. I was there in the western Pacific watching scuba divers as they prepared to bring up evidence of a mysterious aquatic world.
\n\nPalau is famous for its spectacular and rich coral reefs. But these divers were planning to descend past those sun-lit marine communities and down into a lesser-known twilight zone known as the “mesophotic coral ecosystem.”
\n\nDivers prepare to retrieve research structures from down in the “deep reefs.”
\n\nMesophotic essentially means “middle” and “light,” which is where these ecosystems are—not quite in the bright daylight, not quite in the profound darkness, but somewhere in between. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call these communities, which range from some 30 meters to 150 meters below the surface, the “deep reefs.”
\n\nOne of the divers on the boat with me was a zoologist and curator at the California Academy of Sciences named Luiz Rocha, who has spent decades studying these deep reefs and their secrets.
\n\n“Anything between 30 meters and 150 meters is really, really unknown,”…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/