When the submarine plunged to about 1,500 meters below sea level, ecologist Jeff Drazen asked the pilots to cut the strobe lights that had been guiding them through the pitch-black waters. For a moment, they continued falling to the sea floor in complete darkness.

Then, the creatures of the deep sea began dazzling the crew with a striking display of bioluminescent lights, emitting signals to one another as they encountered this new strange object in their habitat.

“It’s like you are falling through the stars,” Drazen told Salon in a phone interview. “There are twinkling lights everywhere.”

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Thousands of meters below sea level, the creatures that live in the deep sea survive without direct sunlight, plants or the warmth of the sun. Much of the deep ocean is vacant, with extremely cold, lightless regions making it difficult for life as we know it to survive. Yet spectacular animals reside there, including the vampire squid, which has the largest eyes proportional to its body of any animal (though this cephalopod is neither a vampire or a squid); a pearly white octopus nicknamed “Casper”; and, of course, the toothy Angler fish that became an internet sensation when one rose to the surface earlier this year.

Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order promoting deep sea mining, which is currently prohibited under international law. And on Tuesday, the Department of the Interior announced it is initiating the process to evaluate a potential mineral lease sale in the waters offshore American Samoa. As industry eyes nodules found on the ocean floor as a potential way to extract nickel, copper and cobalt for making things like electric car batteries, scientists warn that deep sea mining is likely to be detrimental to life that exists there.

"We’re the first people that have ever seen some of the sites that we dive at."

“We don't know that much about the deep sea because we have explored so little,” said Jim Barry, a seafloor ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, “We should make sure we know what is there before we do much to destroy things.”

The deep sea begins at about 200 meters below sea level, where light starts to diminish in a region called the twilight zone. The deepest part of the ocean lies in the Mariana Trench in........

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