A scientific expedition into a region of the Pacific Ocean named for Hades, Greek god of the underworld, has uncovered an other-worldly ecosystem 30,000 feet deep. “It’s a totally new thing that has not been seen before,” said Dominic Papineau, an exobiologist at China’s State Key Laboratory of Deep-sea Science and Intelligence Technology in Sanya.
Papineau is co-author of a groundbreaking research paper published in the journal Nature, describing the astonishing array of creatures who live in this daunting and dark environment, sustained by chemicals that leach from the ocean floor. Researcher Mengran Du told The Washington Post she wasn’t sure what expect when she descended in a three-person submersible into one of the deepest trenches in the Pacific. What she and others from China’s Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering saw when they got there was, she said, “unbelievable.”
Like skyscrapers, thick clusters of tubeworms with red-tinged tentacles jutted from the ocean floor, phosphorescent snails scaling them like window washers, she said. In between, white bristly creatures wriggled and writhed…
Scientists have long studied organisms that thrive around hydrothermal vents. But those native to areas known as cold seeps — where gases like methane and hydrogen sulfite leach from the seafloor at near-freezing temperatures — have been little studied.
“Flourishing chemosynthetic communities had long been postulated to exist in the trenches, but this is the first paper that documents their existence below 9 kilometers and at multiple locations,” she said. The adaptability of organizations in those trenches is a shot in the arm for scientists searching for evidence of life in oceans on other celestial bodies, including Europa, a moon of Jupiter.
Excerpt from Scientists Find New Ecosystem in Deepest Trenches of Pacific Ocean, US News and World Report, Aug. 4, 2025
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