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Mysterious Holes

NOAA has been trying to crowdsource explanations for these holes. Though many of the public’s responses include aliens and human machinery, scientists believe the holes have a natural explanation.
NOAA has been trying to crowdsource explanations for these holes. Though many of the public’s responses include aliens and human machinery, scientists believe the holes have a natural explanation. Photo: NOAA Ocean Exploration, Voyage to the Ridge 2022

Expedition researchers noticed these very orderly holes on the seafloor four separate times on during the ninth ROV dive. The scientists aren’t sure what caused them (or even if they were produced from above or below), but believe they are the result of natural causes.

“If you look in the fossil record, there are also indications of similar sorts of features. And so this suggests there is an organism that has been making these sorts of features for a very long time,” said one researcher in a NOAA video on the topic.

Yet, even though there’s past evidence of similar linear holes in the seafloor, we still don’t know where they are coming from. Which highlights just how little we know generally, about ocean ecosystems.

“We’ve got no idea what makes these things… it’s a mystery, basically,” said Michael Vecchione, a zoologist at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, in the NOAA video. He thinks the most likely explanation may be a tunneling organism.

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