Some of the most uncharted parts of our planet aren’t particularly hard to get to. They aren’t unreachable, like the deepest oceans or the darkest caves. They are unexplored because they are fleeting. They blink in and out of existence, appearing unpredictably and vanishing quickly.

Woodfalls mean that trees get two chances to support vast webs of life—once on land and again at sea, once while alive and again while dead.

And the animals that accumulate on these sunken logs aren’t generic bottom-dwellers. If you search for them on other parts of the ocean floor, or even in the surrounding sediment, you won’t find them. They are woodfall specialists. McClain estimates that around 90 percent of these species are found on sunken