What Did Scientists Record on the Floor of an Arctic Fjord in Greenland?

The Discovery in Inglefield Bredning

Scientists deployed a paired video camera and hydrophone on the seafloor of Inglefield Bredning, a fjord in northwestern Greenland, and recorded narwhal calls every single day — while the camera captured a snailfish swimming tail-first across the Arctic seafloor, an observation never made before in these waters.

An Unprecedented Seafloor Observatory

Near the remote town of Qaanaaq in northwestern Greenland, researchers set up something that had never been done in this region before: a moored camera and a hydrophone anchored simultaneously on the fjord floor. Most deep-sea monitoring efforts use one instrument or the other. Deploying both at the same time, in the same location, created a rare dual observatory — one device to watch, one to listen.

The results were immediate and remarkable. From the very first day the instruments were operational, the hydrophone began picking up narwhal vocalizations echoing through the cold, dark water. And it kept picking them up. Every single day.

Narwhals: The Animal Behind the Calls

Narwhals (Monodon monoceros) are medium-sized toothed whales found primarily in Arctic waters around Canada, Greenland, and Russia. They are famous for their long, spiraling tusk — but that tusk is not a horn. It is a hypertrophied left canine tooth, capable of growing to nearly ten feet in length. It contains millions of nerve endings and is thought to function as a sensory organ, detecting changes in water temperature, salinity, and pressure.

Narwhals use a range of clicks, whistles, and pulse sounds to navigate and communicate. The fact that these calls were detected every single day in Inglefield Bredning suggests the fjord is a consistent and heavily used part of their range — a finding with real implications for conservation and habitat protection in a region increasingly affected by climate change.

The Snailfish: Earth’s Deepest Fish

While the hydrophone was busy cataloging narwhal acoustics, the camera caught something extraordinary on the seafloor: a snailfish, drifting tail-first through the frame.

Snailfish belong to the family Liparidae and hold the verified record as the deepest-living fish on Earth. Individuals have been confirmed at depths exceeding 26,000 feet (roughly 8,000 meters) in the Pacific Ocean’s hadal trenches. They are gelatinous, almost translucent creatures — built not in spite of crushing pressure and near-freezing temperatures, but because of millions of years of adaptation to exactly those conditions.

What made the footage especially striking was the direction of travel. The snailfish moved tail-first — an unusual swimming orientation that researchers have rarely documented. Whether this reflects a foraging strategy, a response to current, or simply a behavioral quirk remains an open question.

Why This Matters

Deep-sea and Arctic research both suffer from the same fundamental problem: access is extraordinarily difficult and expensive. Long-term moored instruments like the ones deployed in Inglefield Bredning offer a solution — passive, continuous observation that captures behavior no dive or research vessel could reliably catch.

This deployment demonstrated that even a well-studied species like the narwhal can surprise scientists when observed with the right tools in the right place. And a snailfish swimming backward across an Arctic fjord floor is a reminder that the deep ocean still holds behaviors, adaptations, and moments that science has never witnessed.

The Broader Picture

Inglefield Bredning is part of a broader Arctic ecosystem under increasing pressure. Sea ice loss, warming water temperatures, and shifting prey distributions are already altering the behavior and migration patterns of species like the narwhal. Long-term acoustic and video monitoring stations on the seafloor could become critical tools for tracking these changes — documenting not just what lives in these waters, but how those animals are responding to a rapidly changing environment.

The ocean floor, even in one of Earth’s most remote corners, is anything but empty.