A Tunnel to the Twilight Zone

By Ken Kostel | August 9, 2019

Last year, researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington (UW) discovered that when white sharks are ready to feast, they ride large, swirling ocean currents known as eddies to fast-track their way to the ocean twilight zone—a layer of the ocean between 200 and 1000 meters…

Bringing Light into Darkness

By Kathryn Baltes | May 24, 2019

Oceanographers studying creatures in the ocean twilight zone are facing an optical dilemma. They need to observe the fish in order to study them, but at ocean depths of 200 meters and beyond, there’s very little natural light trickling down from the surface. This means that submersibles developed to image and track these animals need to be…

Round Up the Unusual Suspects: DNA forensics identifies unknown deep-sea organisms

By Kathryn Baltes | February 27, 2019

Annette Govindarajan pipettes twilight zone samples

Annette Govindarajan is a kind of marine detective. She tracks down animals living in different parts of the ocean. For her, the largely unexplored ocean twilight zone—the vast, dimly lit region 650 to 3,280 feet (200 to 1,000 meters) below the surface—still harbors many species yet to be discovered and identified.