It is probably the last frontier yet to be explored by man.
But it seems that it will not remain so for long. Biologists plan to explore under the Arctic ice into the Canada basin, The Guardian reports.
The size of Alaska, the steep-sided submarine hole is thought to have been isolated from the surrounding ocean for millions of years.
The study will be an extensive survey of marine life over 10 years involving 300 researchers from 53 countries. It is expected to cost $1billion (£548m).
While centuries of whaling, fishing and naval hydrographic surveys have given biologists an idea about marine life, it has not been sufficient as almost 60% per cent of the planet surface -- called benthos by the oceanographers -- has not been studied.
According to biologists these areas could be rich in life as the savannahs and prairies of the continents.
"If you look through all of history, the total amount of sea bottom that has actually been sampled and looked at biologically is about one ten thousandth of one per cent," Ron O'Dor, chief scientist to the international census of marine life, and a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia told The Guardian. "One of the cruises last year found 400 undescribed species. There is an enormous amount we don't know about this abyssal plain. It is the largest habitat on the planet."
A New York charity -- the Alfred P Sloan Foundation -- has given $600,000 for the project. Researchers from Russia, Europe, the US and Canada will study the Canada basin.
Ringed by Yukon Territory and Alaska and linked to the Pacific by the shallow Bering Strait, it is vast still pool of saltwater up to 3,800 metres (about 12,500ft) below the Arctic Ocean ice. US and Russian submarines faced off each other during the Cold War.
"The turnover of water in the basin is the slowest on the planet," Prof O'Dor was quoted by The Guardian as saying. "Calculations indicate that it takes at least 500 years for water to turn over or to exchange. There are not a lot of predators coming into the area, and it is very cold, so things grow very slowly. If things grow slowly, they die slowly and so it could well be that we are going to find a kind of lost world."
Agencies
