Two submersibles will descend to the sea floor each with a pilot and two seats.
The zones range from tiny stretches of coastline to large tracts of sea floor.
Then there was the blowout preventer, a huge stack of valves on the sea floor.
At this ridge, the sea floor spreads very slowly about 2cm (less than an inch) a year.
The PowerBuoy generates 150 kilowatts of electricity and resembles a giant vertical dumbbell anchored to the sea floor.
Norway's biggest oil company, Statoil, is already burying CO2 under the sea floor.
This was intended to force it back down on to the sea floor.
The caisson could not simply be capped, because the oil pressure would blow its suction pile out of the sea floor.
Video footage from the sea floor showed the sinuous heave of oil into the sea weakening as the mud was pumped in.
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More than 150 million years ago, massive blooms of microscopic marine plants created a huge blanket of organic material on the sea floor.
Once in position, the underwater columns are filled with water and anchored to the sea floor with giant suction cups and tension cables.
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The pressures are too great, and no engineering or materials conceivable today would allow us to build livable-sized spaces on the deep sea floor.
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At stake were lucrative new oil and gas fields -- by some estimates ten billion tons of oil -- on the Arctic sea floor.
The cylinder is anchored to gravel ballast on the sea floor.
Even better, suggests John Delaney, one of the leaders of the expedition, the smokers are spewing out microbes that actually live beneath the sea floor.
And much of the oil that has leaked out of the Jessica will end up on the sea floor where it will pose further threats.
The feed from a camera on board a salvage ship was discontinued Saturday after the apparatus was raised from the sea floor and placed on the vessel Q4000.
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He described mining hydrothermal vents as "more invasive" because it would involve breaking up the uppermost metre of the sea floor and piping the rock fragments to the surface.
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Methane is the principal component of natural gas, and massive amounts of it are trapped in reservoirs beneath the sea floor and under a layer of the ice-like substance.
The test well, Jack-2, delved through 7, 000 feet of water and 20, 000 feet of sea floor to tap oil trapped in tertiary rock laid down 60 million years ago.
Oil from the mile-deep well may be collecting in underwater clouds, potentially endangering a cornucopia of life from the sea floor to the surface, preliminary sampling by university researchers suggests.
From a platform of sea-ice, a team of researchers from Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States has been drilling down into the sea floor beneath the McMurdo Sound.
The Hawaiian company Kona Blue raises a type of yellowtail from eggs to harvest in 3, 000 cubic-meter cages tethered to the sea floor, one-half mile off the coast of Kona.
To drill the well, engineers have devised an ingenious system of hollow "riser pipes" that create a hermetic seal between the well opening on the sea floor and the ship swaying above.
On May 26th BP, the company responsible for the well that Deepwater Horizon had drilled, started to pump heavy drilling mud into the well's blowout preventer, a set of valves on the sea floor.
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Using Linux-based servers working in parallel, they generate a computer model of how a drill bit must twist and turn to hit one or more formations as much as 9, 000 meters below the sea floor.
Dr. BLACK: It takes photographs every couple of seconds so we end up with a strip of images about 1500 meters long and it's using those images to count the fish swimming above the sea floor.
Criticism of the disaster has sprung in part from decisions made over the design of the BP well, which used a single pipe, known as a "long string", that ran from the sea floor to the bottom of the well.
In addition to a sea floor mapping project, the researchers will make chemical analyses of water samples that will help them determine the temperature, salinity and composition of a strong circumpolar current that flows around the boundary of the Arctic Ocean.
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One theory is that an initial warming changed the distribution of heat in the oceans so that deposits of gas hydrates on the sea floor were released, with carbon dioxide and methane rising to the surface and entering the atmosphere, causing further greenhouse warming.
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