This vast, alien landscape, covering half the Earth's surface, is the last great frontier on our planet. Great expanses of it appear barren - at least to the naked eye. But communities of bizarre organisms spring up around cracks in the sea floor or feast on dead animals that fall from above. And the seemingly empty spaces between these isolated pockets are home to many less visible forms of life. Even within the mud, tiny organisms consume every speck of food that drifts down to the bottom.

IN THIS EXHIBIT: Life on the Sea Floor
This exhibit shows three separate deep sea floor sites: a whale carcass in the Eastern Pacific, at a depth of 1.6 kilometers (1 mile); an abyssal plain scene in the Pacific Ocean at about 4 km (2.5 miles); and a hydrothermal vent community on the East Pacific Rise 2.5 km (1.5 miles) below sea level.