New York (AP)-An underwater trip has unveiled a network of creatures that thrive on the bottom of the deep-sea oceanbires.
In these extreme environments, the pressure pressure, the sparse food and the lack of sunlight can make it difficult to survive. Scientists know that tiny microbes are thriving there, but less known about evidence of a larger sea life.
Researchers who travel along the Kuril Kamchatka and Aleuten trenches in the northwestern Pacific used a diving casting to find depths and mollusks that bloomed in over 31,000 feet (9.5 kilometers). The deepest part of the ocean drops to about 11 kilometers.
Scientists had already examined this area and had indications that larger creatures could live in such depths. The new discovery confirms this suspicion and shows how extensive the communities are, said Julie Huber, a deep sea microbiologist with the Oceanographic Institution of Woods Hole.
“See how many there are, see how deep you are,” said Huber, who was not involved in research. “You don’t all look the same and you are in a place to which we still had no good access.”
The results were published in the Nature magazine on Wednesday.
In the absence of light to prepare their own food, many trench residents survive large and small elements such as carbon that drop from the ocean of higher shutdowns.
Scientists believe that microbes in this new network could instead benefit from carbon that is accumulated in the ditch over time, and processes it to create chemicals that seep through cracks in the sea floor. The tu fogs and mollusks can survive by eating these tiny creatures or living with them and collecting the products of their work, said scientists.
With this discovery, future studies will concentrate on how these deep -sea creatures survive under such extreme conditions and how exactly they use chemical reactions to food that authors Mengran you study with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Vladimir Mordukhovich with the Russian Academy of Sciences in a statement.
Their existence demands “long -term assumptions about the potential of life in extreme depths,” said the authors.
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