Underwater Mountain 4 Times Bigger Than Burj Khalifa Discovered Near Chile
A team of oceanographers, led by the Schmidt Ocean Institute in California, has discovered and mapped a huge underwater mountain in the Pacific Ocean, reported CNN.
Giant Underwater Mountain
The newly discovered mountain is located 1,448 kilometers off the coast of Chile. It is 3,109 meters tall, almost quadruple the height of Burj Khalifa in Dubai (830 meters); bigger than Mount Olympus in Greece (2,917 meters); and smaller than Mount Fuji in Japan (3,776 meters).
The oceanographer team was on a 28-day expedition to international waters of the Nazca Ridge using the R/V Falkor (too) research vessel. The team used a sonar system under the ship’s hull to explore and map the region.
The Executive Director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, Jyotika Virmani, said: “Sound waves go down and they bounce back off the surface, and we measure the time it takes to come back and get measured. From that we get a really good idea (of the seabed topography).”
She added that despite the seafloor covers 71% of our planet’s surface, researchers have so far managed to map only 26% of the seafloor to this kind of resolution.
Diverse Ecosystem
The mountain is part of an underwater mountain range that hosts a diverse and rich deep-sea ecosystem. Using an underwater robot to explore the mountain ridges, researchers mapped a vast coral garden consisting of deep-sea corals that provide shelter for an array of organisms such as rockfish, brittle stars, and king crabs.
They identified a ghostly white Casper octopus, seen for the first time in the southern Pacific. They also found two rare Bathyphysa siphonophores, known as flying spaghetti monsters. Additionally, oceanographers captured the first footage of a live Promachoteuthis squid in its natural habitat.
According to oceanographers’ estimations, our planet has at least 100,000 seamounts higher than 1,000 meters. They serve as vital habitats for a wide range of species.
