MOTHER SHIP: The R/V Atlantis, seen here on its maiden voyage to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in 1997, ferried Virginia Edgcomb and her collaborators to areas in the Mediterranean Sea that harbor hypersaline environments deep under the surface.PHOTO BY SHELLEY LAUZON, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION
On a late-November morning in 2011, microbial ecologist Virginia Edgcomb of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) departed Piraeus, the port of Athens, Greece, with a few dozen other scientists on the R/V Atlantis, a US Navy research vessel operated by WHOI. Their destination: a group of super-salty, anoxic basins on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea several hundred kilometers away. These unique habitats, which can be more than 10 times the salinity of normal sea water and depleted of dissolved oxygen, were created as tectonic activity in the Mediterranean region exposed buried salt deposits that had formed when the sea dried up some 5.5 million years ago.
“They are among the most extreme environments on Earth,” says deep-sea biologist Roberto Danovaro of the Polytechnic ...
