Oceanographers Mapping Underwater Mountain Find Flying Spaghetti Monster – Slashdot

Though the ocean covers about 70% of earth, we humans have only mapped a quarter of its floor to a high resolution, reports CNN. Many of the world’s highest mountains aren’t visible on land — they rise up thousands of meters from the seafloor. An expedition to the Nazca Ridge, 900 miles off the coast of Chile, has mapped and explored a newly discovered seamount four times taller than the world’s tallest building. What’s more, the underwater mountain’s peaks, crags and ridges are home to coral gardens that host rare deep-dwelling octopuses, squids and creatures known as flying spaghetti monsters, some of which hadn’t been well documented before this research.
The undersea mountain is 1.9 miles (3,109 meters) tall, according to another article, which notes that the researchers also used a sonar system to bounce waves to the ocean floor, timing how long they took to reach the surface: The researchers documented a ghostly white Casper octopus, marking the first time this deep-dwelling cephalopod has been seen in the southern Pacific. They also spotted two rare Bathyphysa siphonophores, sometimes known as flying spaghetti monsters for their stringlike appearance. “The (Casper) octopus has never been captured, so it doesn’t actually have a scientific name yet,” Virmani said. The team also recorded the first footage of a live Promachoteuthis squid, known only from a few collected specimens.