Every year on 8th June, the United Nations celebrate World Ocean Day to draw attention to the importance of the world’s oceans and the threats they face. The main threat is what we don’t even know yet. We know less about the deep sea than we do about the far side of the moon, even though it makes up two thirds of the Earth’s surface. Angelika Brandt wants to change that. She is a professor at Goethe University and a deep-sea researcher at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Nature Museum in Frankfurt. In the “Foreign Worlds” issue of Forschung Frankfurt, she reports that she discovers countless new deep-sea species on each of her research trips and has even found microplastics at a depth of 9600 meters.
