by The floor dwellers have never been more spectacular.
In a tiny, deeper high-tech diver than the height of Mount Everest, scientists have discovered a flowering ecosystem that is about 30,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
The research team led by China’s research team found that spiky, bright Marinian worms looked through fields of purple tubes, even a different kind of worm that stuck out of the earth’s crust like flowers.
There were dense mussel beds, each of which were up to 9 inches long, and snow -like microbial mats formed an essential underwater dust, a few dozens of foot.
“This is the first time that communities based in chemosynthesis were observed directly in extreme depths,” Dominic Papineau, senior research scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told NBC News.
Hadal Chemosynthesis-based communities (Institute for Natural Sciences and Engineering, CAS)
Papineau, who was among the authors of the research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, added that “many Hadalt animals from these trenches are spectacular in their shapes and colors”, and because they survive through the hosting of microbes, methane and not through photosynthesis.
At 19,000 to 30,000 feet, Hadal trenches are the deepest zones of the ocean, which occur on the edge of a tectonic plate when gliding under another. “Long -term theories suggest that communities based on chemosynthesis are widespread in the Hadal trenches, but only a few such communities were discovered,” said Papineau.
Kareen Schnabel, a marine ecologist at the Earth Sciences New Zealand, who was not involved in the study, said the team discovered something “really quite unusual”.
“There were signs of really abundant, great life forms and animals in these particularly deep areas,” she said.
Winter Sweet Valley, captured by the manned diving area fendouzhe at a depth of 30,000 feet. (Institute for Natural Sciences and Engineering, CAS)
Rede-living polychaetons dominate at 22,500 meters at the deepest Aleuten with spots of white microbial mats. (Institute for Natural Sciences and Engineering, CAS)
“Because it is so high in these incredible depths, they would not necessarily expect them to live in these places,” she said about the creatures.
“The depths examined here, combined with the discovered flourishing communities and the observation of the distribution, expand the well -known habitat, depth and the biogeographic distributions for many species,” the researchers wrote.
The sun rays do not reach these depths, so the creatures rely on chemosynthesis – the process of converting chemicals into food – and not on photosynthesis.
“These communities are maintained by hydrogen sulfide-rich and methane-rich liquids that are transported along errors that cross deep sediment layers in ditches,” said the researchers.
They are also exposed to constant crushing pressure of up to 98 megapascals (MPA), a pressure unit that is more than six times the strength of the bite of an alligator.
The dives for these latest research were carried out in July and August last year by an international team under the direction of the Institute for Science and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The small bull eye of the three -person diving flow, Fendouzhe. (Kareen Schnabel)
They examined the Kuril-Kamchatka-Graben, which is about 1,300 miles long and from Hokkaido in Japan to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia and the Aleutian Graben, which extends around 1,800 miles from the peninsulas Alaska and Kenai to Kamchatka, runs over 1,800 miles from Alaska and Kenai Peninsulas.
Schnabel previously carried out deep-sea surveys in the same three-person diver as fendouzhePresent This was used for this research.
She described the experience of caring so far down – a kind of lake tour that was notorious after one expedition from 2023 in the Titanic.
“Of course there is some nervousness when you dangle over a 10-kilometer hole in the earth,” she said of her journey of more than 32,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific in 2022 to research a ditch north of New Zealand.
“You have a small window that only has a diameter of 12 centimeters from which you can look. You cannot stretch your legs while sitting in a small titanium ball on a small bench that is only 1.8 meters wide,” she said or about 6 feet.
Free moving polychaetons navigate dense colonies of frenulated Siboglinids. (Institute for Natural Sciences and Engineering, CAS)
She said she was shocked by what she saw at the bottom of the trench, through the 4.7-inch window of the diving bleeding.
“When I had to go down and we actually settled on the sea floor to take a look at it, I was stunned to see how much life and how many animals there was,” she said.
There was little doubt that life could exist in these depths, but what the research team surprised was the abundance of the ecosystem they found.
The discoveries “demand current models of life to extreme limits” and show that these ecosystems are more common than previously assumed, as they have written.
This article was originally published on nbcnews.com
