Over 60 researchers from institutions across China, who made 33 dives into the deep ocean’s hadal zone with a manned submersible collecting samples of sediment and seawater, discovered an amazing complex of deep ocean microbial biodiversity.
The hadal zone, also known as the hadopelagic zone, is the deepest region of the ocean, lying within oceanic trenches. The hadal zone ranges from around 6 to 11 km below sea level, and exists in long, narrow, topographic V-shaped depressions
Subsequent analysis by the scientists of their samples identified 7,564 microbe species, of which nearly 90 percent were new to science.
Just 6 kilometers of water separate the ocean’s surface from the depths of the hadal zone. Yet for as much as we know , it might as well be another world.
The new study has recovered a plethora of never-before-seen microbes from areas of the ocean floor that include the Mariana Trench. Analyzing their alien methods for survival could give biologists a whole new bank of resources to use in everything from medicine to evolutionary research.
The research team has made its findings available online for other scientists to dig into, under the title of the Mariana Trench Environment and Ecology Research (MEER) project – adding to our understanding of how life survives in extreme conditions, and opening up new research opportunities in biotechnology. The research has been published in the scientific jounal Cell.
Source: Nature, March 7, 2025. https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discover…
See scientific paper in Cell, https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)01479-X
China Environment News 