These ideas all arose in recorded commentary from scientists aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association ship Okeanos Explorer last week as they observed a mysterious "golden orb" attached to a rock outcropping via remote camera some 2 miles below the surface in waters off the coast of Alaska.
"Isn't the deep sea so delightfully strange?" Candio said in a press statement. "While we were able to collect the 'golden orb' and bring it onto the ship, we still are not able to identify it beyond the fact that it is biological in origin. "I just hope when we poke it, something doesn't decide to come out," one scientist can be heard saying on a video recording of the retrieval of the specimen, per theSeascape Alaska 5 expedition
While the intriguing gold orb specimen was found at a depth of about 2 miles, some of the remote dives will descend to nearly 4 miles beneath the surface of the Gulf of Alaska to explore deep-sea coral and sponge habitats, fish habitats, chemosynthetic communities and the water column and to improve knowledge of past and potential geohazards, per NOAA's mission statement.