Scientists with the Schmidt Ocean Institute have identified a massive undersea peak along the Salas y Gomez Ridge in the southeastern Pacific, a formation that rises higher from the ocean floor than Mount Olympus stands above sea level in Greece, and one of the most prominent seamounts documented in the 2024 survey. The 2024 expedition, conducted off the coast of South America, also turned up dozens of species believed to be new to science, including some of the most unusual deep-sea organisms ever recorded. The findings point to a vast underwater mountain range that remains almost entirely unexplored, raising urgent questions about how much of the ocean’s biological wealth exists beyond the reach of current conservation frameworks.
A Hidden Mountain Range in the Southeast Pacific
The Salas y Gomez Ridge stretches across a remote section of the southeastern Pacific, far from major shipping lanes and largely ignored by previous mapping efforts. The Schmidt Ocean Institute’s 2024 expedition used remotely operated vehicles to survey seamounts along this ridge, producing some of the first detailed images and biological inventories of these underwater formations. What researchers found was a chain of peaks that dwarf many well-known terrestrial mountains, with the largest rising to a height that exceeds the roughly 9,570-foot elevation of Greece’s Mount Olympus. According to reporting on the Chilean seamounts, the ridge lies in waters that have historically attracted little scientific attention, which helps explain why such a prominent feature remained undocumented for so long.
The sheer scale of these formations challenges a common misperception: that the ocean floor is a flat, featureless plain. Seamounts like those on the Salas y Gomez Ridge act as biological anchors, concentrating nutrients and creating habitats that support dense clusters of marine life. Because ocean currents deflect around and over these peaks, they generate upwelling zones where cold, nutrient-rich water reaches shallower depths. This physical process helps explain why the expedition found such extraordinary biodiversity concentrated on and around the seamounts, rather than spread evenly across the open ocean floor. It also underscores how much of the planet’s topography remains hidden beneath the waves, shaping climate and ecosystems in ways that surface observations alone cannot capture.
Dozens of Potential New Species, Plus Record-Setting Finds
The biological haul from the expedition was striking. Researchers cataloged dozens of species believed to be new to science, including creatures informally described as “dragons” and sea toads. These organisms inhabit a zone of near-total darkness, surviving on chemical energy and the sparse organic material that drifts down from sunlit waters above. The variety of body plans and survival strategies observed on a single chain of seamounts suggests that each peak may function as a kind of isolated evolutionary laboratory, producing species found nowhere else on Earth. For taxonomists and ecologists, every dive on the ridge effectively opened a new chapter in the catalogue of deep-sea life.
Two findings stood out even among this collection of oddities. The expedition recorded what is believed to be the longest creature ever observed in the wild: a siphonophore, a colonial organism made up of thousands of individual animals working as a single unit. The team also documented photosynthetic organisms surviving at record depths, far below the point where most scientists assumed sunlight could sustain any biological activity. That discovery has implications well beyond taxonomy. If photosynthesis can occur deeper than previously thought, it means the base of the deep-sea food web may be broader and more resilient than existing models predict, a detail that could reshape how marine biologists estimate total ocean productivity and how climate scientists think about carbon cycling in the abyss.
Why Most of the Ocean Floor Remains a Blank Spot
The fact that a mountain taller than Mount Olympus went uncharted until a dedicated expedition went looking for it speaks to the staggering gaps in ocean mapping. Estimates from the oceanographic community suggest that more than 80 percent of the global seafloor has never been surveyed at high resolution. By comparison, the surfaces of the Moon and Mars have been mapped in far greater detail. The cost and technical difficulty of deep-ocean exploration are the main barriers. Remotely operated vehicles capable of reaching the depths where these seamounts sit require specialized ships, trained crews, and weeks of continuous operation, all of which must be funded against competing scientific and political priorities.
The Schmidt Ocean Institute, a private nonprofit founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, has emerged as one of the few organizations willing to fund these kinds of open-ended deep-sea research missions. Government agencies in most countries allocate only a small fraction of their science budgets to ocean exploration, often focusing instead on coastal monitoring, fisheries, or climate-related observations closer to shore. That funding gap means that discoveries like the Salas y Gomez Ridge seamounts tend to happen sporadically, driven by the priorities of a handful of philanthropic institutions rather than by any systematic global survey. As a result, each expedition fills in a small piece of the map, but the overall picture remains fragmentary, and vast stretches of seafloor may never be visited before industrial pressures arrive.
Deep-Sea Mining Pressures and Conservation Stakes
The timing of the discovery matters because the deep ocean is no longer as remote from industrial activity as it once was. Multiple nations and private companies have filed claims or expressed interest in mining the seafloor for polymetallic nodules, cobalt crusts, and rare-earth elements. Seamounts are among the most mineral-rich formations on the ocean floor, which places them directly in the crosshairs of the extractive industry. The biological richness documented on the Salas y Gomez Ridge makes a pointed case that mining these formations could destroy ecosystems that science has barely begun to catalog, potentially wiping out species before they are formally described or understood.
Most coverage of deep-sea mining debates frames the issue as a simple tradeoff between economic value and environmental risk. That framing misses a critical detail exposed by the Schmidt expedition: the species found on these seamounts are not just rare, they are functionally unique. Organisms like the record-depth photosynthetic life forms and the colonial siphonophore are not duplicated elsewhere. Losing them would not just reduce biodiversity counts on a spreadsheet. It would eliminate biological processes and chemical pathways that scientists do not yet fully understand, and that may have applications in medicine, materials science, or climate adaptation. The conservation argument here is not sentimental, it is practical. You cannot study or benefit from what has already been destroyed, and once mining scars a seamount, recovery on geological timescales may be impossible.
What the Ridge Tells Us About Ocean Science
The Salas y Gomez Ridge discovery illustrates how much of modern ocean science depends on long-term commitments rather than one-off expeditions. Maintaining research vessels, training ROV pilots, and processing the flood of biological and geological data all require stable backing. Some of that support now comes from readers and subscribers who choose to fund in-depth environmental reporting and science coverage, whether through ongoing contributions or by opting into weekly print products that help sustain investigative work on remote regions like the southeast Pacific. In parallel, philanthropic institutions and public agencies must decide whether mapping the deep sea ranks alongside more familiar research priorities on land.
The ridge also highlights the need for better global coordination. International rules for activities in the high seas, from fishing to potential mining, are being debated at the same moment that scientists are revealing just how intricate and fragile these deep ecosystems are. Decisions made in conference rooms will determine whether newly discovered seamounts become protected refuges or industrial zones. Behind those negotiations are thousands of individual careers in marine biology, engineering, journalism, and policy, many of them built around trying to understand or explain places that most people will never see firsthand. The Salas y Gomez findings serve as a reminder that the deep ocean is not an empty frontier waiting to be used. It is already a complex, living landscape, and how societies choose to value it will shape the future of the planet’s largest habitat.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
