These Animals Are Feasting on the Ruins of an Extinct World

Karasik, the largest underwater mountain in the Arctic, was meant to be dead. Volcanically, it is. But biologically, it’s home to a teeming community of creatures, surviving in an environment with barely any food, through means that no one expected.

The mountain lies 300 kilometers from the North Pole, at a ridge where the tectonic plates that hold Europe and North America are slowly drifting apart. With its base sitting 5,000 meters below the surface, and its tip 560 meters below a thick sheet of ice, Karasik had barely been explored since its discovery in 2001.

And then, in 2016, Antje Boetius, a deep-sea researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute, in Germany, led a team to Karasik. Cutting through the, the researchers towed along a special underwater camera at the end of a long steel cable. From the deck, they saw the first ever images of Karasik come into focus. “At first you see nothing, because it’s all blurry and the lights only penetrate for 10 meters or so,” Boetius told me. “But when we were five meters away, it looked like it was covered with round blobs. And then we got closer, and we all screamed, ‘Sponges!’”