How AI could unlock deep-sea secrets of marine life

https://theconversation.com/how-ai-could-unlock-deep-sea-secrets-of-marine-life-276717

Publish Date: 2026-03-06 12:02:00

Somewhere in the North Atlantic, more than a kilometre beneath its surface, a cold-water coral reef stretches across an unnamed seamount. Despite never appearing on a chart, this underwater forest has existed for centuries, growing a centimetre or two each year.

The reef is a home and feeding ground for dozens of species that depend on it the way a woodland creature depends on trees. It has survived ice ages – but whether it will survive increasing pressures from industrial fishing, deep-sea mining and climate change is, in part, a question about data. If we don’t know it exists, how can we protect it?

A new project called Deep Vision could fundamentally transform our understanding of the deep ocean by digging into pictures and videos sat largely unexamined in research archives around the world. By using AI, thousands of hours of seafloor footage can be analysed to produce the first comprehensive maps of vulnerable marine ecosystems across the entire Atlantic basin.

Over the past two decades, robotic and autonomous underwater vehicles have collected vast quantities of footage from the deep sea. This represents an extraordinary resource – a record of ecosystems that most humans will never see.

The difficulty is that less than half of this imagery has ever been analysed. A single dive can take a trained human analyst two months to process. Multiply that by thousands of dives and you begin to appreciate why this treasure trove of information has remained largely locked away.

The solution, I am convinced, is artificial intelligence.

AI could fundamentally change how quickly discoveries about the deep sea are made.
Yetugraphic/Shutterstock

In research published in 2022, my colleagues and I showed that AI could be trained to successfully analyse over 58,000 deep-sea images in under ten days. The AI model helped us map the distribution of a fragile xenophyophore – a…

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