The Marvelous Seamounts of the Southeast Pacific
An expedition to a little-explored region returns with deep-sea wonders. The post The Marvelous Seamounts of the Southeast Pacific appeared first on Nautilus.
The underwater mountains of the Nazca and Salas y Gómez ridges are a world unto themselves. Running for 1,800 miles off the coast of Peru, they are isolated by a vast low-oxygen zone, the depths of the Atacama Trench, and the powerful Humboldt Current—an isolation that allowed evolution to follow its own trajectory.
“Almost half of the species living there live only there,” says Javier Sellanes, a marine ecologist at Chile’s Universidad Católica del Norte.
