Vents and Triangles: A Narrative Review of Deep-Sea Biology and the Coral Triangle's Literature
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: The ocean's two poles of discovery --- the abyss's hydrothermal oases and the coral triangle's reef seas --- bracket marine biology's modern literature: both were mapped in the same decades, both rewrote the assumptions of their fields, and both now face the century's extraction pressures. This article presents a narrative review of that literature. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the deep-sea foundations, in which Lonsdale's vent discovery and Corliss's Galapagos observations, Grassle's ecology, Herring's ocean synthesis, and Ramirez-Llodra's deep census replaced the abyss's biological vacuum with its largest ecosystem; the chemosynthetic revolution, in which Cavanaugh's Riftia symbiosis and Van Dover's vent ecology fixed chemoautotrophy --- life's second energy source --- as the vents' signature and the origin-of-life speculation's laboratory; and the coral triangle and conservation, in which Hoeksema's and Briggs's biogeography, Roberts's reef hotspots, the Reefs at Risk assessment, and Van Dover's deep-sea mining analysis connected the triangle's maximum diversity and the abyss's minimum knowledge to the same conservation agenda. It is concluded that the literature's unity is directional: from discovery to inventory to threat --- the deep sea's and the triangle's literatures are the ocean's two ends of a single account of where life is richest, how it is powered, and what the next century's industries will decide about it.
Authors: Revista, Zen, BIOLOGY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Oceanography
Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Life below water
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204835876