Mariana Trench - David Attenborough's Documentary on the Deepest Sea Floor

the giant squid an almost mythical monster that lives in the depths of the ocean there are other creatures there so strange and strange that they could come from a nightmare others are exquisitely beautiful and dazzling with their lights and colors almost all live at depths of around a thousand meters that We've only just begun to explore now, yet we're developing technology that can take us to places where the ocean is 10 times deeper. An international team of scientists is setting out to discover if there is anything that lives at these much greater depths in the water. The pressure can be a thousand times greater than on the surface and there is little food until recently, many scientists assumed that those waters must be sterile, how could a creature survive in such conditions?

Now we know that there is life down there, but we still know very little about it. It is an expedition to explore the

deepest

frontier on earth. We are heading towards the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The seabed between Japan and Australia is cut by a huge sea

trench

that It extends for two thousand five hundred kilometers it is the

deepest

in the world the Mariana Trench such immense

trench

es are rare and most are found in the Pacific. Around its edge there are deep cracks created by movements far below the Earth's crust and many points along them have created a series of underwater trenches to dive here is to enter Another world as we descend it becomes darker and darker until at 200 meters deep there is barely any light.

Many of the creatures that live here have enormous eyes that allow them to capture what little light there is, and some produce their own light below 1000 meters. There is no sunlight, whatever it is, finding food in the dark is not easy. Some fish here have gigantic mouths so they can catch almost anything edible that comes their way. Others stand on stilts on the sea

floor

waiting for the food to move from the pressure in these blacks. The depths are immense. An experiment with a large steel ball shows how large it is under a pressure equivalent to that of 2000 meters deep.

The thick steel walls collapse. How can animals living in such conditions survive? The bodies of most sea creatures are largely composed of water which is incompressible so these creatures are not crushed by it, but below a certain depth the enormous pressure creates a different problem when the sea

floor

falls to More than 6000 meters the pressure is so enormous that it destroys the structure of the cells of which an animal is a part. This part of the ocean is called the Hagel zone and here life is almost impossible but not completely. There are some living beings here but they are very few and difficult to find.

The objective of the expedition is to look for them in the transition from marijuana. The scientists from one of Japan's leading DC research institutes are leading the project. The first stage will be to send a platform and set it on the seabed. They call it the lander. It carries a high-resolution camera specially modified to work at these extreme depths. of raw fish are attached to one of the arms of the lander to attract any deep-sea creatures that may be down here. I'm not sure what kind of marine life we'll be able to capture with the camera, but fingers crossed the lambda is ready to go.

The water is crystal clear slowly the lander descends the Mariana trench is thousands of kilometers from the earth and these seas contain very few nutrients so there is little food for marine life here. Almost three and a half hours have passed and the lander is finally approaching the bottom. here it is more than eight kilometers deep the water pressure is 800 times greater than at the surface what kind of creature could survive here the lander's camera will glimpse them you will recognize them they are amphipods, shrimp-like creatures about three centimeters long So far they have only been found in the Heydal area.

They seem to have little difficulty dealing with the enormous pressure. The lander's camera is scheduled to turn on for one hour every three hours. Now the equipment will have to wait until it turns on again. Wow, look. that there has been an extraordinary change the bait is covered in amphipods this is incredible it looks like a pile of sushi every time the camera is turned on the numbers are greater the anthropods have stripped the bait of the fish to the bones but the anthropods themselves could now attract other larger, hungrier creatures that scientists watch closely the lander is 8,178 meters below the surface a real fish has never been seen at this depth if one appeared it would be a record the lander has been sitting at the bottom of the sea ​​for 18 hours the team is starting To give up hope of seeing something new, this is a strange looking creature and appears to be some kind of fish.

It looks a bit like a tadpole, but it clearly has a backbone, is about 20 centimeters long, and must be some type of fish. is again at the bottom, researchers believe it may be the same species discovered elsewhere in the Mariana Trench by another team three years ago. It is known simply as the Marian snail fish, only one fish was found in the 18 hours it must This means that the population density is very low, that is probably what this indicates when the lander descended again to seven kilometers and medium and also recorded some exciting images. A huge white amphipod, a giant more than ten times the size of the first one they saw, is called a supergiant amphipod and after a while the lander is surrounded by ghostly white shapes plus marian snail fish are attracted to the small amphiboles that They feed on bait.

Their eyes can probably see little in the dark but they have special sensory pores around their mouths that allow them to detect movements in the water. The snailfish looks almost like a wave and yet it must be difficult to withstand the conditions. here. No other fish is known to live as deep as this one. To understand how animals survive at these extreme depths, a team of international scientists has come together, all bringing different skills and all passionate about uncovering the mysteries of the deep sea, which is why our goal is 8200 metres. There they are now planning to capture a live snail fish at a depth of eight thousand meters so that they can examine the functioning of its body in detail dr jeff drazen is from the united states has been working on deep sea ecology for many years if you are going to the top of mount everest and you look around and you say there's snow and ice and that's mount everest, you miss most of that mountain and it's the same with the trench, so now it's very important for research Dr Alan Jamison is from Britain, is an expert in the deep sea and has been at the forefront of designing technology to explore it.

Well, we have two systems that will be deployed today looking for snailfish. The first is a bait camera. baits on the seabed here and has been filmed by two separate cameras, then this second system is a large fish trap, so it would attract snail fish to the trap and retrieve our physical specimens quite frequently, the depths at The ones we are working on are regular. It is not known that very often we see things for the first time and that is what is incredibly exciting. My passion. The deepest places. Places where no one had been before.

Well, there were no known places to go. The team will use a variety of different lambdas designed in different countries. will be lowered to about 8,000 meters, the depth at which snails are known to be found, the first guy carries a fish trap, once the fish have entered the basket they cannot escape, the next in line It's the edoko, also designed to capture live animals and built by a group of small companies in Tokyo, I'm sure we'll come back tomorrow and have some fish the next day, the landers return to the surface, yes, I got it, I got it, there's something trapped inside the web, but They all look like the old super giant amphipod Alicella Gigantia seven eight nine nine wow, this is cool.

These amphipods are true monsters like most crustaceans. Their bodies are encased in hard, shell-like armor and they have sharp, pointed tails. They use them for fishing. they can't eat them, they use that fish, it tries to eat them and they poke it, yeah okay, all this here is just an oily liquid that helps it float, you will see in the videos that kind of floating, so there are almost no muscles, nothing nothing. to eat the supergiant antipodes are the largest in the world and can grow up to more than 30 centimeters long how they do it remains a mystery the fish trap has also returned very pretty and has brought back what they expected for a snail fish.

I hurried back to the lab for an immediate examination. Well, this is one of our little sailfish, the Marian snail. It is perfect. I think we are very excited. We've been working on it for a long time. The body of the fish is soft and gelatinous. It has no scales and its skin is transparent, so you can see through it the muscles under its small eyes, they are probably useless, but no one knows for sure. Some blind fish still retain rudimentary eyes under the skin, so the fish have several sensory pores on their heads and you see them, yes, most of the snailfish's pores are located around its mouth and are used to detect movements in the water, but they disappear very quickly, magical force disappearing, now they are gone, okay, the skin is extremely delicate and the pores disappear.

Almost instantly, the researchers quickly take note of the position of each pawn and then this is underneath looking up, so this is the mouth here at the bottom of the jaw. You can see a lot of small holes, but there are some very, very small dogs behind the eyes. and going down the sides of the head as a bit sensory, so the vibrations in the water probably help the snailfish to search for prey in the darkness of the depths, even the smallest movement made by a small crustacean will be picked up by these specialized bodies. A closer look at the bodies of deep-sea fish is also beginning to explain how they survive the extreme pressures of the deep sea.

Dr. Paul Yancey has been trying to answer this question for a long time. His research has led him to a substance commonly found in saltwater fish called trimethylamine oxide or tmao. It is a chemical that most people are probably familiar with if they have been to a fish market. It's that faint fishy smell that comes from all these different species here and the tmao helps the animals survive the high pressure. At depth, the water pressure in the Heydal zone is so great that it almost destroys the body's cells, but how exactly does it happen? There are proteins within cells that carry out functions essential for life.

It seems that under high pressure the water molecules are pushed towards the proteins. and prevent them from working, this is where TMAO helps it bind tightly to water molecules and prevents them from altering the way proteins work. Dr Yancey has discovered that deep-sea fish have higher levels of TMAO than others and the milk snail has the highest. All of this remarkable finding suggests that the milk snail fish may be better adapted to life at depth than any other species. The Mariana Trench began forming about 50 million years ago, which is relatively recent in Earth's long history, where few creatures alive today appear to have evolved. ways to survive in its depths, we believe that fish have evolved in shallow waters and most of the major groups of fish have not reached the deep sea, so it seems very difficult for animals to develop the ability to work under pressure, so Imagine it has taken millions of years and only a few types of fish have managed to get down.

The team is preparing to launch another lambda to obtain more images of the snailfish in its natural habitat. They wait anxiously to see if their bait attracts visitors. oh there it is there are snail fish here two of them there are two oh so yeah that was great the lander has settled on the ocean floor about 8,000 meters below the surface the bait has already attracted both the antipodes and to the snail fish and the team gets a wonderful view of life in the deepest parts of the earth's oceans look what he just ate that's fantastic for his delight the camera is recording a fish feeding on amphipods it's just the thing type of behavior that researchers expected to see snailfish may look like a harmless tadpole but havesome formidable weapons.

A CT scan reveals details of your internal anatomy. It has over a hundred sharp teeth that ensure its prey cannot escape and at the back of its throat is a second pair of jaws. with more teeth is a complex system that allows the fish to crush and grind food and thus feed on a wide variety of prey and may be one of the reasons why the marian snail is able to live at such extreme depths where food is so scarce in the deep sea you don't know when your next meal will be so you want to adapt to eating whatever you can find, maybe that's where they spend their energy making a very strong jaw to crush the prey they make.

They look quite fragile but they seem very successful. We are beginning to understand how the milk snail and other deep sea creatures managed to survive in the deepest parts of our oceans. The first to meet a fresh carcass are these scavenging amphipods that follow them. larger predatory amphipods and these in turn are hunted by the milk snailfish which crushes the shells of the amphipods with its specialized jaws. Surprisingly, there appears to be an entire community of animals flourishing at depths of up to five miles in the sea, but what is the smallest of these creatures doing?

They usually feed on these amphipods. They are scavengers that eat dead and decaying matter, but very little food reaches these depths. Now, new research has shown that they rely not only on the occasional animal carcass, but also on something more surprising: driftwood. Wood is notoriously difficult to digest. But amphipods have developed a powerful wood-destroying enzyme that can break it down and extract energy from it. Pieces of wood sometimes sink in ocean trenches. These can form an important part of the alpha body's diet and allow it to live where few other creatures can. We have a long way to go.

As we explore the depths of the ocean, we are left with many questions and we will have to continue exploring the trenches to try to find them and try to answer many other questions that the team is now addressing. For the location near the entrance to the Mariana Trench this time they are sending a remotely operated vehicle and a rov they hope to find a place that was discovered several years ago At 5700 meters below the surface the rov moves along the steep rocky slopes of the trench and around the corner they find what they have been looking for: it is a ghostly site that resembles stalactite formations in a dark cave and there is also life within this strange underwater landscape, a tangle of tubular worms of deep waters and at the bottom of the sea a bed of giant white clams.

They had not been seen in the trench before. All of these life forms can only exist here because the water that seeps from the depths is rich in dissolved chemicals that can be converted into food by an entire community of fish deep sea creatures the leaks in the

mariana

trench are still mysterious and largely unexplored the expedition is now heading towards the deepest part of the

mariana

trench there is a slot in the southern edge called challenging depth on january 23, 1960 the united states navy made history by sending the first manned deep-sea ship into its depths, its two-man crew sat inside a small sphere at the bottom of the submersible.

The rest of the boat was a floatation chamber filled with gasoline to give it buoyancy and the two men who attempted it. The trip was made by Lieutenant Don Walsh and the scientist Jack Picard. The descent lasted almost five hours but they reached the bottom and at a depth of almost 11 kilometers. The submersible that made this historic trip is called Trieste and is now preserved in the US Navy Museum. In Washington, Don Walsh remembers the epic journey well. As you can see, this window here is not facing the front, it points towards the seabed. He claims to have seen something extraordinary at the bottom of the ocean.

We had exterior lights that are at the bottom of the globe. We could see from here up to about 10 meters on the sea floor, just before landing on the bottom we saw a flat fish like a flounder or a halibut. Jacques was at the window, he said, come here, look at fish and he walked away from the I went up through the window, looked at him and that's what it seemed to me. This was almost a quick snapshot because as soon as we landed, our vision disappeared. This is Don's drawing of the fish he thinks he saw, but most scientists are skeptical and have a good reason why deep-sea fish need high levels of TMAO to withstand enormous water pressure, but At extreme depths of more than 8,000 meters it is believed that fish would need so much water that their bodies would stop functioning properly.

I know a lot of marine biologists fish. The specialists said that we didn't see a fish because you couldn't live at that depth and so on. I'm willing to allow or admit that maybe we didn't see what we saw, but for now until we prove ourselves wrong. I will have to continue with the fish because I know what a fish is like after the descent of the Trieste more than 50 years ago, only unmanned vessels made the trip to the depths of the Challenger; Then, in 2012, film director James Cameron became the third man to descend to At the bottom, in the small area of ​​the trench he explored, he saw several deep-sea creatures, but no fish.

The question of whether there are fish in the deepest parts of our ocean is fascinating. Japanese scientists have teamed up with filmmakers to develop a new type of rov that could answer the question: is one that can move freely along the ocean floor at a depth of ten thousand meters? All its parts are specially designed to be able to withstand Extreme pressures It has taken an entire year to complete its construction Now the rov is heading to the depths of the Challenger for the first time Engineers carry out final safety checks The rov is equipped with high-resolution cameras that can be operated from the surface It is a unique system where the rov and its launcher are sent together the two parts are docked during the descent lowered by a main cable from the mother ship to seven thousand meters the smaller vehicle is separated from the launcher and a one millimeter fiber optic cable It is now the only connection between the two undocked the lighter vehicle they can move more freely to explore the bottom of the ocean it is four in the morning the team prepared to launch the new system the rov will take six hours to reach the bottom so they begin long before dawn the rov sends images to the space ship control as it descends after three hours the rov and the launcher are at a depth of 7,000 meters now all systems will undock the separation will begin everyone is nervous during the tests the thin fiber optic cable broke repeatedly at this stage continue separation full time 757 this is stressful undocking went smoothly and the rov continues its dive until the bottom of the pit is now beyond the depth to which the fish can survive 10,000 meters and it is more than 10 kilometers below the surface 50 meters to the bottom the countdown to the bottom has begun 30 meters five meters it is difficult to see on the seabed we are seeing it oh there it is that is final but after In six hours and 20 minutes the rov finally reached the bottom.

This is the deepest place in all of the earth's oceans. The temperature is 2.4 degrees above freezing and the ocean floor is covered by a thick layer of sediment this arid lunar landscape seems lifeless the rov begins to move slowly across the ocean floor the water pressure at this depth is so enormous that it is equivalent to a ton of weight placed on the tip of your finger can anything really survive ? Here the team watches carefully for any sign of life and there is a small white shrimp-like creature, given the enormous pressure at which it is swimming with surprising speed. an amphipod is the first time one has been observed at this depth here the team has detected something else it is a type of sea cucumber a soft bodied marine creature its closest relatives are starfish and sea urchins most of sea ​​cucumbers feed on plankton and debris on the seafloor the researchers had not seen this type before it could be a new species then the rov discovers even more the ocean floor around it seems disturbed it seems as if they have been feeding cucumbers The researchers are excited because they never imagined there would be such a large number of sea cucumbers at this depth.

These animals are all lined up in the same direction, suggesting that there is a current flowing along the bottom and sea cucumbers may be facing the current to save energy, so it appears that the deeper reaches of our oceans harbor more life than ever before. that we once thought possible. What appears to be a desolate landscape is actually home to some highly specialized creatures, but how is it possible that sea cucumbers and anthopods are not crushed to death by water more than 10 kilometers deep? Recent research has revealed that another chemical may hold the answer: it has been found in large quantities along with tmao in deep-sea amphipods and is called siloinositol.

It has a flat molecular structure that may allow it to fit between protein molecules and counteract the effect of water pressure, and cylo inositol can protect proteins in a way that it cannot, it will only work up to a certain depth in deeper water. proteins bind together and stop working properly if siloinositol is present, it can get between the proteins and restore their function. We still don't know if other creatures living at these depths have high levels of silo-inositol and they don't. It is inconceivable that some fish could make use of a substance like this. If so, Don Walsh might have been right when he claimed to have seen one about 50 years ago.

Our expeditions diving into the deepest part of the Mariana Trench have revealed sea cucumbers and anthopods. but so far he hasn't been able to find any fish. This will remain one of the unsolved mysteries of the trench, while deep sea exploration has unraveled some of the mysteries of our oceans. One question continues to baffle scientists. Where were the animals that live in the Mariana Trench born? comes from dr. Hiroshi Kitazato has studied deep-sea creatures for many years and has an extraordinary theory. DNA analysis of life forms in the hail zone has made great progress in recent years.

Based on those results, we can say with a certain degree of confidence that these creatures likely come from Antarctic waters. In fact, the Mariana Trench and Antarctica have one thing in common: their waters are very cold and poor in food. . It was also discovered that amphipods from the Mariana Trench have the same cold tolerance gene found in Antarctic amphipods, as for snailfish, they are common in all our oceans, but they are most abundant in Antarctic waters, for What the Marianas snailfish may have originated in the Antarctic seas, in fact, there are deep ocean currents that connect Antarctica with the Mariana Trench.

Antarctic cold water from the bottom and flows along the bottom of the sea to other oceans in the Pacific, one of them crosses the equator and empties into the Mariana Trench. The animals that are found today in the Mariana Trench could have made the journey adapting to their new environments along the way The Mariana Trench only reached its current depth 10 million years ago, so the creatures that live here must have evolved relatively recently. Only animals like snails and antipodes, already adapted to living in the cold, would have been able to make this epic journey. The Mariana Trench is just one of them. of the many deep gorges hidden beneath our oceans, but it has given us a brief glimpse of some remarkable animals that manage to survive in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet.

If creatures like these can remain unknown for so long, what others could still be there? hiding in the depths is a reminder of how little we still know about the deepest reaches of our oceans.