A review of studies on corrosion of metals and alloys in deep-sea environment

•We review the scarce literature on in situ deep-sea experiments on metal corrosion.•Outlines of investigations on deep-sea shipwrecks and sunk objects are given.•in situ deep-sea corrosion main influencing factors are highlighted.

The interest in deep-sea environment is increasing both in the scientific and business community. In order to meet deep-sea challenges great performances for structure materials are requested, but in situ studies are difficult to be executed due to high experimental cost and technical problems. Indeed, they are quite uncommon in the available literature compared with the amount of research in shallow sea water. This paper reviews the scarce available literature about deep-sea environment studies on corrosion of metals and alloys, some outlines of investigations on sunk objects are given.