Deep-sea submersible discovers flourishing ecosystem

The residents of the bottom have never been so spectacular.

In a submersible building of high technology deeper than the height of Mount Everest, scientists discovered a flourishing ecosystem at around 30,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

The Chinese-led research team found thorny and brilliant marine worms that were walking through fields of crimson tubes, itself another type of worm, coming out of the earth’s crust like flowers.

There were dense lits of clams, each up to 9 inches long, and snowy microbial carpets creating a sub-strain sprinkling, a few tens of feet wide.

“This is the first time that communities based on chemosynthesis have been directly observed at extreme depths,” News Dominic Papineau, principal researcher at the Chinese Science Academy.

Papineau, who was one of the authors of research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, added that “many Hadal animals of these trenches are spectacular in their forms and colors”, and because they survive by hosting microbes that metabolize methane, rather than photosynthesis.

At 19,000 to 30,000 feet, the Hadales trenches are the deepest ocean areas that occur at the edge of a tectonic plate as it slides under another. “Longtime theories suggest that communities based on chemosynthesis are widespread in Hadales trenches, but few of these communities have been discovered,” Papineau said.

Kareen Schnabel, marine environmentalist at Earth Sciences New Zealand, who was not involved in the study, said that the team had discovered something “really rather unusual”.

“There were signs of large forms of life and really abundant animals in these particularly deep areas,” she said.

“Because it is such pressure in these incredible depths, you do not necessarily expect them to live in these places,” she said about creatures.

“The depths surveyed here, associated with the flourishing discovery communities and the distribution ranges observed, considerably widen the distributions of the habitat, the depth and the biogeographic known for a large species,” wrote the researchers.

The rays of the sun do not reach these depths, so that creatures rely on chemosynthesis – the process of conversion of chemicals into food – rather than photosynthesis.

“These communities are supported by fluids rich in hydrogen and rich in methane which are transported along the defects crossing layers of deep sediment in trenches,” said the researchers.

They are also faced with a constant crushing pressure up to 98 megapascals (MPA), a pressure unit, which is more than six times the strength of the bite of an alligator.

The dives for this last research were carried out in July and August from last year by an international team of scientists, led by the Institute of Sciences and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

They investigated the Kuril-Kamchatka trench, which measures approximately 1,300 miles long and flows from Hokkaido to Japan at the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia, and the Aleutian trench, which extends to around 1,800 miles from Alaska and Kenai peninsulas in Kamchatka.

Schnabel had previously conducted investigations on the high seas in the same submersible to three people, called Fendouzhe,, which was used for this research.

She described the experience of venturing as far in a submersible – a sea type which became sadly famous after an implosé during an expedition in 2023 at the Titanic.

“There is a certain nervousness, of course, because you balance above a 10-kilometer hole in the earth,” she said about her trip to more than 32,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific in 2022 to search for a trench in the north of New Zealand.

“You have a small window that has only 12 centimeters in diameter you can watch.

She said she was shocked by what she had seen at the bottom of the trench, through the 4.7 -inch window of the submersible.

“When I fell, and we settled on the bottom of the ocean to take a look, I was amazed to see how much life and how many animals there was,” she said.

There is no doubt that life could exist at these depths, but what took the research team by surprise is the abundance of the ecosystem they found.

The discoveries “question the current models of life to extreme limits” and show that these ecosystems could be more widespread than we thought previously.