Discovery of widely available abyssal rock patches reveals overlooked habitat type and prompts rethinking deep-sea biodiversity
Torben Riehl, Anne‐Cathrin Wölfl, Nico Augustin, Colin W. Devey, Angelika Brandt
Abstract
Significance Ground-truthed analyses of multibeam sonar data along a fracture zone of the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge reveal an abyssal seafloor much rockier than previously assumed. Our data show rock exposures occurring at all crustal ages from 0–100 Ma along the Vema Fracture Zone and that approximately 260,000 km 2 of rock habitats can be expected to occur along Atlantic fracture zones alone. This higher than expected geodiversity implies that future sampling campaigns should be considerably more sophisticated than at present to capture the full deep-sea habitat heterogeneity. We provide a baseline to unravel the processes responsible for the evolution and persistence of biodiversity on the deep seafloor as well as to determine the significant scales of these processes in the benthoscape.