Next time you’re taking a dip in the ocean, just know some very, very strange things are underneath you.
And no, we’re not talking about sharks. It’s the depths of the ocean, an impenetrably dark and crushing place where, somehow, life thrives.
A team of scientists boarded a submersible to the bottom of two trenches in a patch of the northwest Pacific Ocean, between Japan and Alaska.
The sub reached a depth of 31,000 feet, three times deeper than where the shipwreck of the Titanic is.
They weren’t looking for shipwrecks of long-lost treasure; rather, the groovy critters that live so far down that sunbeams can’t penetrate.
When we think of life at these depths, we end up picturing fearsome, glowing monsters with fishing rod-like appendages that eat almost everything.
But what the submersible vessel, Fendouzhe, photographed was a little different.
They found fields of frenulate siboglinids, tube worms stretching 30cm tall and just 1mm thick.
These crimson worms were seen reaching out with their ‘red haemoglobin-filled’ tentacles, with white snails perched on top of them, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Wednesday.
Crawling over them were white, spiky creatures called macellicephaloides grandicirra, about as big as a light bulb.
Clusters of yapping, nine-inch clams and wispy anemones were also photographed in the Kuril-Kamchatka and Aleutian habal trenches.
What might look like slivers of half-melted snow were actually microbial mats, dusting dozens of feet of the ocean floor.
The hadal trenches can be thought of like an upside-down mountain, where the ‘peak’ is the edge of one tectonic plate sliding into another.
Anything at these depths is constantly being crushed by up to 98 megapascals (MPa), a unit of pressure, or about 140 times the pressure of an elephant standing on you.
Rather than lap up the Sun like plants or us with SAD lamps, these floppy worms rely on chemical reactions, called chemosynthesis, to survive.
Covering these bottom dwellers are microbes that view the deep sea as an all-you-can-eat buffet, where tasty methane and hydrogen sulphide are burped out of cracks in the Earth’s crust.
It converts these fumes into organic compounds, including sugars, for the tube worms, clams and the other ‘thriving communities’ that call the deep sea home to eat, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep Sea Science and Engineering team said.
Given how many scientists believe that all terrestrial life sprang out of the depths of the Earth’s oceans, the researchers were excited by what they saw, to say the least.
They said: ‘This groundbreaking discovery not only challenges conventional wisdom about the ability of life to survive at extreme depths but also provides a new perspective on the complex mechanisms of the deep-sea carbon cycle.’
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