( PopSci.com ) -- Until last December , no one had ever seen the bottom of the Tasman Fracture , a trench that drops more than four kilometers below the surface of the ocean . A group of Australian and American researchers recently spent a month hundreds of kilometers southwest of the Tasmanian coast , exploring the fracture 's depths . This funnel-shaped sea squirt , never before seen , will snap shut like a Venus flytrap around shrimp that are unfortunate enough to go near it . Jess Adkins , a professor at Caltech and one of the project 's lead scientists , remembers sitting in his control room and watching the underwater life on his monitors with a sense of awe . Once , he says , none of the scientists or pilots said a word for 10 minutes straight as their submersible glided over an undiscovered coral reef full of urchins and sponges and sea stars . The researchers explored the fracture with Jason , a remotely-operated submersible the size of a small car . On loan from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute , it carried a high-definition camera that weighed more than 500 pounds and beamed underwater video up to the ship through a long fiber-optic tether . At 3,000 meters below sea level , the crew saw thousands of sea spiders . At 3,500 , millions of specimens of a new , purple-spotted sea anemone . At 4,000 meters , a single never-before-seen carnivorous sea squirt with a funnel-shaped body that snapped shut like a Venus flytrap around any shrimp unfortunate enough to brush against it . Back on land , the three new species ( the anemone , the sea squirt , and a new kind of barnacle ) have drawn the most attention , but it 's the team 's coral collection , some 10,000 pieces of it , that can tell us about the history of our climate and , perhaps , its future . A coral skeleton acts as a tape recorder of its environment . As it grows , the coral 's chemical structure ( specifically the weight of its oxygen molecules ) varies depending on the temperature of the water around it . And , because the coral 's uranium decays into thorium over time , it is conveniently datable . By charting different corals ' ages and oxygen weights , researchers can map the ocean 's changing temperature . During the coming months , expedition scientists will compare 40,000 years of oceanic and atmospheric records . The ocean 's temperature and carbon dioxide levels are important because of their impact on our atmosphere . The watery part of the world absorbs and stores sixty times more CO2 than the atmosphere . Huge reservoirs of the ocean 's CO2 lurk in its coldest , densest waters ( found in the Tasman Fracture and off Greenland ) . Because cold water releases more CO2 into the air than warm water , the rate at which bottom water rises to the surface has a profound effect on the atmosphere above . Until recently , we had assumed that our climate was relatively stable . After all , for the past 10,000 years -- during which we developed the alphabet , electrical wiring , and microchip necessary for this article -- little has changed . But early-'90s research on Greenland 's ice core proved that , over the past 100,000 years , climate stability has been the exception , not the norm . During the last glacial period , global temperatures fluttered up and down by as much as several degrees in as little as a decade . CO2 levels in the atmosphere changed along with the temperature , though more slowly . The researchers ' ultimate goal is to see if changes in the ocean followed or proceeded changes in the atmosphere . Adkins suspects that the ocean ( and in particular the depths of the ocean ) played a part in triggering the climate 's sudden fluctuations . He 's sure , though , that we 're adding more CO2 to the ocean now , in the form of burning fossil fuels , than it has ever held before . Given how little we know about how the ocean regulates the amount of CO2 in our air ( we 've mapped the surface of Mars , he points out , but not the ocean floor ) he wonders if that 's such a good idea . We do know that increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the ocean makes it more acidic . And whether or not it sets off a climate shift of Pleistocenic proportions , acidification could kill the researchers ' newly-discovered , awe-inspiring reef , along with others we have n't even found yet . There would be just as much ocean to study , but less to find . Copyright © 2009 Popular Science .
Scientists investigated the Great Fracture , a deep trench in the sea . They used a remote - controlled machine which sent back data . Discoveries included a new fish , the sea turtle and a new species of barnacle .