rjzimmerman:

Excerpt:

Recently, an international team of scientists sponsored by Museums Victoria and a government research organization spent a month trawling the ocean floor off the Aussie Coast trying to figure out what lives down there — and how they’ve adapted to survive.

For scientists, the finds are beginning to shed light on the dramatic evolution of creatures in extreme environments. They’ve possibly identified a new fish and found animals living at lower depths than recorded.

For the rest of us, the photos of the findings offer something different: seawater-scented nightmare fuel.

The scientists pulled up more than a thousand sea creatures, which will be studied and catalogued in the months to come, then gaped at by Australian schoolchildren.

They also raised the alarm about the most disturbing thing they uncovered: pounds and pounds of trash. Humans have rarely made it to these depths, the scientists said, but our garbage has .“We have found highly concerning levels of rubbish on the sea floor,” Chief Scientist Tim O’Hara said in a news release. “We’re 100 kilometres off Australia’s coast, and have found PVC pipes, cans of paints, bottles, beer cans, wood chips, and other debris from the days when steamships plied our waters. The seafloor has 200 years of rubbish on it.”

Australian scientists went looking for deep sea creatures and pulled up your nightmares instead