VIrgin Sends Humans Back into Mariana Trench

If you thought space was the only frontier Virgin has an interest in tackling, you’ve been missing out on Virgin Oceanic’s drive to pilot the first manned submersible all the way to the very bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench--and thus dive deeper than any solo human has ever dived before. It’s a cool story that is still ongoing, and PopSci favorite IEEE Spectrum has an amazing semi-long read from its March issue up online today.

If you’re short on context, the context is this: the Mariana Trench is the deepest subsea place on the planet, reaching a known depth of more than six-and-three-quarters miles (some measurements are deeper but unconfirmed). Only two people have been down there, together, back in 1960 aboard what’s known as a bathyscaphe. The pressure there is something like 1,100 times greater than that at sea level--enough to crush most submersibles like an empty beer can. The temperatures down there are absolutely frigid. So naturally, Virgin is going to send a lone human down there.

The short video trailer below provides a bit more background, but we highly recommend a click through to the IEEE Spectrum piece, which takes you aboard the expedition paving the way for the manned dive. It’s worth perusing.

Environment Clean Generations

Single-Celled Creatures at the Bottom of the Mariana Trench

In recent decades, deep sea researchers have upended our notions of what can survive at some of the deepest submerged places on Earth, revealing that a panoply of life thrives around seafloor vents and elsewhere in the depths. So we probably shouldn’t be surprised that researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have found giant amoebas living at unprecedented depths in the far reaches of the Mariana Trench. What is surprising is that these single-celled organisms are four inches across.

 Xenophyophores are single-celled animals that live exclusively in deep-sea habitats, but they’ve never been seen in areas this deep before--some 6.6 miles beneath the surface in an area known as the Sirena Deep of the Mariana Trench (which is the deepest region on the planet). The previous depth record for xenophyophores was 4.7 miles.

The researchers found the xenophyophores after deploying untethered free-falling/ascending landers into the Sirena Deep. These landers are basically thick-walled glass spheres capable of sustaining eight tons per square inch of pressure. That tells you something about what the conditions are like down there. The fact that there’s a single-celled organism that often measures more than four inches across--that’s four inches per cell--is pretty remarkable.

What’s more, xenophyophores are known to be hosts for a variety of other life forms. That is, where xenophyophores collect there usually turns out to be a pretty diverse ecosystem thriving alongside them. Knowing that, it’s probably unsurprising then that the Scripps team helped yet another species log a new record while its submersibles where down in the Sirena Deep. The dropcams also spied the deepest jellyfish observed to date living down there among the xenophyophores. The more we poke around in one of the harshest environments on the planet, the more we find that it’s a really busy place.

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