When Chilean scientist Osvaldo Ulloa led an expedition 8,000m under the sea to an area where no human had ever been, his team discovered microscopic organisms that generated more questions than answers.
The January submarine expedition dove into the Atacama Trench, created by the meeting of two tectonic plates in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
“We pulled off the feat of taking humans into the trench where no other human being had been before,” said Ulloa, the director of the Millennium Institute of Oceanography at the University of Concepcion.
Photo: AFP / CALADAN OCEANIC - IMO / MATIAS PIZARRO
He was joined by US explorer Victor Vescovo and Millennium assistant director Ruben Escribano on the 12-week journey off Chile’s northern coast in the 5,900km long trench that extends up to Ecuador.
By the time the expedition reached a depth of 100m, it was already in pitch-black darkness, with the crew members’ vision limited to what the submarine’s powerful LED light could capture.
Further down in the darkness emerged remarkable examples of deep sea life.
“We came across geological structures, and there we saw a type of holothurians or translucent sea cucumbers, like jelly, that we had not recorded and were most probably new species,” Ulloa said. “We also discovered bacterial communities that had filaments that we did not even know existed in the Atacama Trench, and which feed on chemical and inorganic compounds. That opened up a huge number of questions: What are those compounds? What type of bacteria are they? We have no idea, we’re going to have to go back there.”
The expedition also found species of amphipods, a type of crustacean closely related to shrimp, which were scavenging other crustaceans, segmented worms and translucent fish.
They were discovered in the same place in another expedition in 2018.
The Atacama Trench is an area that has produced many earthquakes and tsunamis.
“We will put three sensors on the South American Plate and two on the Nazca Plate to see how the oceanic floor is deformed,” Ulloa said.
For the moment, “these types of sensors only exist on land,” he added.
The devices would enable scientists to observe where energy is building in areas that have not had an earthquake, thus helping predict where the next temblor would take place.
“It is an incredibly ambitious project,” Ulloa said, adding that it is “the largest experiment that has been done in underwater geology here in Chile.”
The sensors are due to be placed during the second half of this year.
“There is a lot of interest from the international community to put more sensors in this region to study all the processes associated with the collision of these two plates,” Ulloa said.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Three sisters from Ohio who inherited a dime kept in a bank vault for more than 40 years knew it had some value, but they had no idea just how much until just a few years ago. The extraordinarily rare coin, struck by the US Mint in San Francisco in 1975, could bring more than US$500,000, said Ian Russell, president of GreatCollections, which specializes in currency and is handling an online auction that ends next month. What makes the dime depicting former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt so valuable is a missing “S” mint mark for San Francisco, one of just two
RSS