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Dive & Discover Begins Today!

Set sail on Dive and Discover to the eastern Mediterranean Sea, today to Dec. 9! WHOI biologists Ginny Edgcomb and Joan Bernhard lead an international team of researchers aboard R/V Atlantis as they explore the unusual life forms in seafloor features called DHABs (Deep Hypersaline Anoxic Basins). Lacking oxygen and up to 10 times as salty as regular seawater, DHABs are some of the most extreme environments on Earth—yet they are home to a rich community of bacteria, archaea, and protists. DHABs formed in the Mediterranean and elsewhere where tectonic activity created contact between seawater and massive salt deposits under the seafloor.(Map by Katherine Joyce, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)