Setting Off into the Unknown
While exploring off the coast of Alaska, the NOAA Ocean Exploration underwater craft found a single golden orb for seemingly the first time.
Source: WONDER WORLD/YouTube
Footage captured by the team shows the object just sitting on the sea bed, visible from nearly two miles below the surface where the light usually cannot reach.
Discovering the Orb
Once the team retrieved the orb, they discovered it was about 10 centimeters wide and attached to a rock.
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Scientists were unsure about the orb’s identity when they observed it during the 2023 livestream. “I don’t know what to make of that,” one baffled researcher said during its initial discovery.
A Large Hole in the Orb
Looking at the orb closer, another researcher noticed that there was a hole on one side of the orb. “It’s definitely got a big old hole in it, so something tried to get in or tired to get out,” the researcher said in the video.
Source: Freepik
Some speculated at the time that the orb was an egg, but it wasn’t a golden goose that laid it. Unsure of the orb’s origins, the researchers kept looking for answers.
The Start of a Horror Movie
If the orb was indeed an egg, then the orb would have been more common to see groups of similar forms packed closely together. Another guess about what the orb could be was an encrusting sponge.
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“It’s like the beginning of a horror movie,” one scientist said, most likely referring to the facehugger in “Alien.”
The Orb is of This World
Even upon closer examination, however, they still couldn’t identify it “beyond the fact that it is biological in origin,” says Sam Candio, the expedition’s coordinator, in a statement.
Source: Freepik
Finding odd, beautiful new things like this golden orb is nothing new to scientists who often go off on exploratory missions like this one. What makes this one different from the rest is that scientists are not able to broadly categorize what this orb is.
A Deep-Sea Delight
“What’s unusual about this thing is we’re not even sure what it is,” Kerry Howell, a deep-sea ecologist at the University of Plymouth in England, said to the Guardian. “Is it an egg, is it a sponge, what is it?”
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“Isn’t the deep sea so delightfully strange?” Sam Candio, the expedition’s coordinator, in a statement.
Exploring the Unexplored
Scientists are continuing to investigate the unexplored regions of the Gulf of Alaska using ROVs and multibeam sonar technologies at depths between 650 and 19,700 feet.
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The goal for this exploration is to “fill gaps in our understanding” of the region through studying “deep-sea coral and sponge habitats, fish habitats, chemosynthetic communities, and the water column and to improve knowledge of past and potential geohazards,” according to NOAA.
The Unknowns of the Oceans
This discovery of this golden orb highlights the importance of these types of missions. Nearly 80% of the Earth’s oceans remain unexplored.
Source: Wikipedia
Vast areas like the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are home to various and untapped opportunities for scientific discovery and understanding of our planet’s history and its future.
An Unknown Species in the Sea
Who knows what undiscovered species or prehistoric species could be living beneath the ocean’s surface? Maybe there is a golden goose of the sea that is unknown to us just waiting to be discovered off the coast of Alaska.
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If new species are discovered, then they could be useful in revealing “new sources for medical therapies and vaccines, food, energy, and other societal benefits and knowledge,” Candio said.
Nothing to Worry About
While the discovery of the golden orb might have looked like the beginnings of a horror movie, Jon Copley, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton in England, tells the Washington Post that the orb is “certainly nothing that should worry us.”
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“We often find things in the deep ocean that we haven’t seen before or don’t immediately recognize, because the deep ocean is vast and we’ve only been exploring what lives there over the past couple of centuries, unlike life on land,” he tells the publication.
It Could be an Egg
Right now, the team believes the golden orb is just an egg of an unknown species because of several factors noted by the team.
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“We’re going with egg because of the texture. It felt fleshy and it doesn’t have any obvious anatomy. It has a hole in it that suggests something has come in or gone out. But it doesn’t look like any egg I’ve ever seen,” Howell tells the Guardian.