Marine life discovered at this depth; it was thought impossible.

A team of scientists has discovered marine life at depths of nearly 10 kilometers. These are communities of oceanic worms and mollusks that live through a process of chemosynthesis. Since they lack sunlight to carry out photosynthesis, they obtain their energy from chemical reactions.

The discovery of life in such an extreme environment, where light does not reach, was published last Monday in the journal Nature and was co-authored by researchers from New Zealand, China, Russia, and Denmark.

Scientists used the Chinese manned submersible vehicle, named Fendouzhe , to conduct an expedition to the depths of two of the deepest ocean trenches on the planet, the Kuril Trench and the western Aleutian Trench, precisely near the focus of the major earthquake that occurred a few hours ago on the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka.

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The Kuril Trench is located in the Northwest Pacific, east of the Kuril Islands, the Japanese island of Hokkaido, and Kamchatka, and is one of the deepest depressions on the planet.

The Western Aleutians runs east to west along the southern coast of Alaska and the adjacent waters of northeastern Siberia, off the coast of Kamchatka. It extends for approximately 3,400 kilometers, where the Pacific Plate slides beneath the North American Plate.

The mission covered more than 2,500 kilometers of surface area along both trenches, with depths ranging from 5,800 to 9,533 meters.

A thriving community of chemosynthetic life

In these extreme environments, and thanks to the sampling instruments equipped with the Fendouzhe manned vehicle, researchers have discovered "flourishing chemosynthetic life" at depths where they thought it would be unthinkable to encounter such organisms.

These are communities of marine worms—'syboglinid polychaetes'—and ancient bivalve mollusks, which have adapted to produce energy to survive without sunlight. The study suggests that these organisms They synthesize their energy using hydrogen sulfide and methane that seeps through the faults of the tectonic plate.

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There, in these faults that cut through deep sedimentary layers in marine trenches, methane is produced by microbial processes in the organic matter found in the sediments, as researchers have been able to see through isotopic analysis of the samples.

The authors indicate that these chemosynthetic-based communities may be more widespread than previously thought, and that their findings challenge previously held views on life forms in extreme conditions and the carbon cycle in the deep ocean.

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AO