Beautiful world under sea 🥰

This footage reveals a habitat that is productive, colourful, dynamic and full of a wide variety of biodiversity, including sponges, sea spiders, urchins, sea cucumbers and sea stars.” These species, recorded near Australia’s Casey research station, live in water that is -1.5 degrees Celsius year round and covered in 1.5 metres (nearly five feet) of sea ice for 10 months of the year.

“Occasionally an iceberg may move around and wipe out an unlucky community, but mostly the sea ice provides protection from the storms that rage above, making it a relatively stable environment in which biodiversity can flourish,” he said. Scientists are in Antarctica working on better understanding the impact of acidification on Southern Ocean sea-floor communities under increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Project leader Johnny Stark said a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere was absorbed by the ocean, which increases its acidity.