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1 revisions for "The Golden Orb Two Miles Under: How a Mysterious Seafloor Specimen Took 2.5 Years to Identify — and What It Says About the Ocean We Don't Know"

#1
Anonymousabout 2 hours ago

A golden, dome-shaped object discovered 3,250 meters deep in the Gulf of Alaska during a 2023 NOAA expedition has been identified after two and a half years as the remnant base of Relicanthus daphneae, a giant deep-sea anemone with tentacles stretching up to seven feet. The finding, published as a preprint in April 2026, required whole-genome sequencing after initial DNA barcoding failed — and it underscores how little of the deep ocean has been directly observed, with only 0.001% of the deep seafloor ever seen by human eyes.