Life Below Water Goes Deep: Our Planet’s Greatest Untold Story

Credit: NOAA Photo Library

The third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC 3), scheduled to take place in Nice, France from 9-13 June, will bring together Heads of State, scientists, civil society and business leaders around a single goal: to halt the silent collapse of the planet's largest – and arguably most vital – ecosystem.

By Diva Amon and Lissette Victorero
NICE, France, Jun 2 2025 (IPS)

As David Attenborough reflects in his new documentary Ocean, “After living for nearly 100 years on this planet, I now understand the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea”. We wholeheartedly agree – and urge governments convening at the 3rd United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC3) in France next month to remember that life below water goes deep.

Everything below 200 metres – the deep sea – works silently to keep Earth habitable. It’s our planet’s greatest untold story: a living archive of evolution, adaptation, and resilience. This hidden world is not just a scientific wonder, it’s a cornerstone of life.

The deep sea captures a quarter of the carbon dioxide we emit, regulates global temperatures, drives ocean currents, and supports biodiversity that nurtures ocean health, enabling the fisheries that nourish billions.

Despite its importance, the deep sea remains largely unexplored. A recent study revealed that humans have only seen 0.001% of the deep seafloor, an area approximately a tenth of the size of Belgium. Still, even with our limited glimpses, the discoveries are astonishing. Just months ago, scientists off Canada’s coast discovered thousands of glowing golden skate eggs clustered beside an active underwater volcano – an otherworldly nursery never seen before.

The fiery seamount, pulsing with geothermal heat, acts as a natural incubator for skate pups that, like all in the deep, are adapted to crushing pressures and a total absence of sunlight, and continue to challenge our understanding of the limits of life.

And yet, even as we begin to glimpse its mysteries, the deep sea faces destruction.

An unknown realm already under siege

Ancient seamounts, abyssal plains, hydrothermal vents, and more – home to some of nature’s most extraordinary adaptations – face destruction before we’ve even catalogued, understood, or valued their inhabitants. The deep harbours communities that exist nowhere else on Earth; living time capsules that could hold keys to understanding life’s origins or solutions to some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

No wonder many are recognised in global agreements as vulnerable ecosystems, places where special care is most needed to maintain a healthy ocean.

For over 70 years, destructive fishing practices have inflicted extensive damage on the deep, including seamounts. Bottom trawlers drag nets weighted with heavy rollers across the seabed, flattening everything in their path while hunting deep-dwelling fish of extraordinary age and resilience – some over 250 years old.

These practices destroy coral forests and sponge gardens that have grown over centuries or even millennia – ecological cathedrals that may never return. This destruction not only erases ecosystems, it unravels the foundations of complex and connected ocean systems, stripping away vital breeding and feeding grounds.

Meanwhile, a nascent deep-sea mining industry is pushing to open the ocean floor to commercial extraction. Each operation could damage thousands of square kilometres, crush delicate life, create clouds of sediment that can impair breathing, communication, or feeding of ocean species far beyond the mining site, and destroy habitats that have developed over thousands to millions of years.

The destruction of these largely out-of-sight ecosystems doesn’t only just mean the loss of extraordinary and undiscovered species and ecosystems. It means undermining the processes that make life on Earth possible, from climate regulation to food security. And, as with many environmental crises, those already most vulnerable will likely suffer the greatest burden.

A warning from the scientific community.

Since 2004, scientists have been raising the alarm about the destruction of deep-sea ecosystems and the potential knock-on effects, first from bottom trawling, and now from deep-sea mining. Their message remains consistent and urgent: we must understand the deep before we decide to condemn it to ruin.

Today, this warning has become a global call to action. Over 900 marine scientists and policy experts have endorsed a moratorium on deep-sea mining. They are joined by an unprecedented alliance of 33 countries – including France, Palau, Brazil, Germany, Canada, and Samoa – as well as parliamentarians, celebrities, youth leaders, major companies like BMW, Google, and Volvo, and leading financial institutions such as Credit Suisse, Lloyd’s, and NatWest.

This growing coalition underscores a simple truth: the deep sea is too important, fragile, and poorly understood to gamble with.

This June, the One Ocean Science Congress and the monumental UNOC3, in Nice, France, present pivotal opportunities for governments to act. The official focus of UNOC3 is Sustainable Development Goal 14: “Life Below Water”, but this must extend deeper…literally.

Governments must seize this moment to make bold, lasting commitments:

1) Protect seamounts and other vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems from destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling.
2) Implement a moratorium on deep-sea mining until independent scientific studies understand its full ecological cost.
3) Invest in deep-sea science that is uncoupled from extractive interests.

The choice before us

The science is unequivocal: the deep sea provides essential services critical to all life on Earth. What we stand to gain through understanding this realm far outweighs what we’d earn by destroying it.

As world governments gather in Nice, we face a simple choice: protect our planet’s most mysterious and vital frontier, or exploit it blindly before we even begin to understand what we are losing.

The health of our ocean – and our own well-being – depends on us choosing wisely.

Dr. Diva Amon, a marine biologist, is a researcher and adviser at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the director of SpeSeas, an ocean conservation NGO based in Trinidad and Tobago. She is also a co-lead of the Biodiversity Conservation Task Force of the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, and SpeSeas is a member of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.

Dr. Lissette Víctorero is a deep-sea ecologist specialised in deep-sea fisheries and the macroecology of vulnerable habitats such as seamounts and hydrothermal vents. She serves as Science Advisor to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition and co-leads the Fisheries Working Group of the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI).

IPS UN Bureau