Ever been in the right place at the right time? Te Papa Fish Curator Thom Linley joined an international team aboard the state-of-the-art research vessel Falkor to explore previously uncharted antarctic areas exposed by retreating sea ice, in summer this year.
As luck would have it a section of the ice shelf the size of Chicago broke away, while the cutting-edge vessel, filled with the right tools and experts, just happened to be stationed right next door!
Within just a few days, the team were exploring 510 square kilometres that had previously been covered in a 150 m-thick ice shelf for hundreds of years! Making worldwide headlines, they found a thriving deep-sea community with some answers but many more questions.
Come along to this talk to hear what they discovered in this incredibly fortuitous world first!
Dr Thom Linley is a fish curator at Te Papa and has been working with deep-sea fish for about the last 15 years. He is a big fan of recording deep-sea fish in their environment and feels this is the best context to understand them. He has been lucky enough to be involved in a lot of firsts, such as capturing video of the world’s deepest fishes, including those living in our very own Kermadec Trench. His work has featured on Blue Planet II, Shark Week, Expedition Deep Ocean, and Journey to the Mariana Trench. He also created and co-hosts The Deep-Sea Podcast.