Submersible finds sea creatures thriving within the deepest elements of the ocean

NEW YORK — An underwater voyage has revealed a community of creatures thriving on the backside of deep-sea ocean trenches.

In these extreme environments, the crushing stress, scant meals and lack of sunlight could make it exhausting to outlive. Scientists know that tiny microbes prosper there, however much less is understood about proof of bigger marine life.

Researchers touring alongside the Kuril–Kamchatka and Aleutian trenches within the northwest Pacific Ocean used a submersible to search out tubeworms and mollusks flourishing at over 31,000 toes (9.5 kilometers) deep. The deepest a part of the ocean goes all the way down to about 36,000 toes (11 kilometers).

Scientists had surveyed this space earlier than and had hints that bigger creatures would possibly stay at such depths. The new discovery confirms these suspicions and reveals simply how intensive the communities are, mentioned Julie Huber, a deep sea microbiologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

“Look how many there are, look how deep they are,” said Huber, who was not involved with the research. “They don’t all look the same and they’re in a place that we haven’t had good access to before.”

The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

In the absence of light to make their own food, many trench-dwellers big and small survive on key elements like carbon that trickle down from higher in the ocean.

Scientists think microbes in this new network may instead be capitalizing on carbon that’s accumulated in the trench over time, processing it to create chemicals that seep through cracks in the ocean floor. The tubeworms and mollusks may survive by eating those tiny creatures or living with them and snacking on the products of their labor, scientists said.

With this discovery, future studies will focus on how these deep-sea creatures adapted to survive in such extreme conditions and how exactly they harness chemical reactions for food, study authors Mengran Du with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Vladimir Mordukhovich with the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

Their existence challenges “long-standing assumptions about life’s potential at extreme depths,” the authors said.

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