What China Found At The Bottom Of The Mariana Trench (And Why The U.S. Navy Is Panicking)

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]In late 2021, a Chinese submersible named Fendua, which translates roughly as Strive, descended 33 times into the Marana Trench. And what it found down there has quietly rewritten everything we thought we understood about the deepest ecosystem on the planet. The discoveries are so significant that in March 2025, the journal Cell, one of the most prestigious scientific publications in the world, ran four papers about this expedition as its cover story simultaneously. That happens when you've found something that changes the conversation entirely. So, let's go down. First, you need to understand what the Haddle Zone actually is. The had zone is the name scientists give to any part of the ocean deeper than 6 km.

[00:00:49][music] The word comes from Hades, the Greek underworld. Scientists named it after a place of the dead. That tells you something about what they expected to find there. Before the Chinese expedition in 2021, the entire body of systematic scientific research on Hadal sediment microbes amounted to 96 sediment samples collected across 34 sites spread across nine separate published studies over multiple decades.

[00:01:20]That is the sum total of what science knew about the microbial life in the deepest ocean trenches when Fendui first descended. The reason, to be fair, is access. Getting anything down to 11 km and back is one of the most difficult engineering challenges in existence. The pressure at that depth will rupture most materials. The cold interferes with electronics.

[00:01:46]Building a vehicle capable of surviving those conditions, that is a genuinely extraordinary problem. Some researchers argue that deep sea exploration is harder than building something to survive the vacuum of space because in space you are fighting absence. At 11 km depth you are fighting force. China built the solution and then they used it in a way nobody had managed before. The vehicle is called Fendu. It was developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is rated for full ocean depth, meaning it can reach anywhere on the seafloor, including the absolute bottom of the Mariana Trench, at nearly 11,000 m. Its pressure sphere is constructed from a domestically [music] developed titanium alloy, strong enough to resist the crushing weight of 6 mi of water. Its acoustic positioning and control systems allow it to navigate and operate on the seafloor with a precision the scientists described as comparable to working on land. This matters.

[00:02:52]Previous deep sea submersibles had reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The American vessel Trieste did it in 1960 briefly once. James Cameron reached the bottom in a solo submersible in 2012. But visiting the deepest point [music] once or a handful of times is not the same as building a vehicle capable of going there repeatedly, operating scientifically, collecting systematic samples, and doing it reliably enough to sustain a monthslong research program. Fender is the only vehicle in the world currently capable of doing that. There is no other. In the autumn of 2021, China's research vessel Tanuo one carried Fendu [music] to the Western Pacific. 21 scientists were on board. 17 of them personally descended to the Hadal zone. Over 2 months, October through December, they conducted 33 dives across three distinct locations. The Mariana Trench itself, the nearby Yap Trench, and the Philippine Basin to the west. They collected more than 2,000 samples.

[00:04:02]Water, sediment cores, and living organisms gathered directly from the trench floor. The scope of this was unprecedented.

[00:04:11]Every dive required piloting the submersible down through miles of open water, landing on a seafloor that had been visited only a handful of times in all of human history. operating equipment in total darkness under a thousand atmospheres of pressure, collecting carefully labeled samples and then ascending again for hours. They did this 33 times systematically, methodically. This was the mayor project, the Marana Trench Environment and Ecology Research Project, a collaboration between Shanghai Giaoong University, the Institute of Deep Sea Science and Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Genome Research Organization BGI Group. Before a single scientific result was published, the expedition had already accomplished something meaningful simply by the scale of what it attempted. The 1,648 sediment samples alone from a total of 145 separate sites across the three Hadal regions represented more [music] than 10 times the total number of Hadal sediment samples collected in all of scientific history. Before 2021, 10 times more what they found inside those samples is where the story stops being about logistics and starts being about something much stranger. When the researchers began analyzing the sediment, they were looking for microorganisms, [music] the tiny single-sellled forms of life that exist in virtually every environment on Earth.

[00:05:45]They expected to find some. They expected those organisms to be interesting in ways consistent with what had been found in previous limited Hadal research. Perhaps some unusual adaptations, perhaps some novel species, perhaps confirming a few existing theories about how life survives at extreme depths. None of that quite prepared them for what the data showed.

[00:06:09]using a genomic sequencing technique called metagenomics. Essentially reading the DNA of every organism present in a sample without needing to culture them in a lab, which matters because the vast majority of microorganisms cannot be grown under laboratory conditions. The team processed 1,194 of their sediment samples through full shotgun sequencing. This generated on average 77 gigabases of sequencing data per sample. The total data set which they [music] named the MIR data set weighs in at 92 terabases. That number is difficult to put in ordinary language. It is [music] as the researchers noted equivalent to the total output of global marine microbial sequencing research across the entire previous decade. [music] From all of that data, after assembling, filtering, and derictting the results, they identified 7,564 [music] distinct species level microbial genomes. 7,564 separate species living in Haddle sediments. That number alone would have been remarkable. But what [music] happened when they compared those species to every known database of life on Earth was genuinely surprising. 89.4% [music] 4% had never been described before. Not in the global ocean microbiome database, [music] which contains sequences from hundreds of sampling locations around the world's oceans. Not in the deep sea [music] sediment collections, which cover typical deep sea floors at depths less than 4,000 [music] m. Not in the nine previous had research publications with all their samples combined. Not in the comprehensive genome taxonomy [music] database that catalogs all known microbial life. Not anywhere. Nearly nine out of 10 [music] species living in the bottom of the world's deepest trench were completely unknown to science. The microbial diversity they found in that 1% of the ocean floor, [music] that tiny sliver of H hadal area was, the researchers calculated, comparable in complexity to the total known microbial diversity of the entire global ocean.

[00:08:25][music] One trench, 2 months of work, and the biological novelty discovered [music] was as great as everything previously known from all the world's seas combined. And at the far edge of even that extraordinary finding, three of the species they identified were so different from anything in any reference database that they couldn't be classified even at [music] the level of film. Not at the species level, not at the genus level [music] or the family or the order or the class or the film. In biology, a filmm is a vast grouping. All vertebrate animals from fish to humans to birds belong to a single film.

[00:09:07]Finding something that doesn't [music] fit into any known film means you've encountered life that diverged from everything else on the tree [music] of life at a point so distant that it effectively represents its own separate branch of existence. The team named these three organisms MIR01, MIR 02, and MIR03 and flagged [music] them as potentially representing entirely undocumented highle lineages. Entirely [music] undocumented highlevel lineages of life in the year 2025 on Earth. But finding them was only the beginning. The more scientifically consequential question was, how are they surviving? The Haddle Zone is by every ordinary measure a terrible place to live. There is almost no food. Organic material that sinks from the surface takes weeks to reach the bottom and most of it gets consumed or degraded on the way down. The extreme pressure distorts proteins, the molecular machines that perform virtually every biological function in ways that would destroy the cells of most organisms. Near freezing temperatures slow chemical reactions to a crawl, making metabolism sluggish and difficult. And yet, here were nearly 8,000 species of microorganisms, not just surviving, but according to the data, thriving. The team looked at the genomes of these organisms for answers.

[00:10:37]And what they found revealed two completely distinct strategies, two different evolutionary answers to the same impossible question of how to live in the abyss. The first is what the researchers called the streamlined strategy.

[00:10:53]Certain had microbes have dramatically smaller genomes than their relatives from shallower water. Where a related organism in the upper ocean might carry a genome of around 5 megabases, 5 million base pairs of DNA, a pressure adapted had organism might carry closer to 4 megabases. They've shed genetic material across evolutionary time, stripping themselves down to a minimal efficient core. And the functions they've kept reveal what matters most down here. These streamlined organisms specialize in two things. First eating aromatic compounds. Aromatic compounds are a class of organic molecule that include substances like touine, ethylenzene, nitroenzene and napylene chemicals related to petroleum, coal and many industrial pollutants. They are abundant in the geological material that accumulates in deep sediments, but they are difficult to metabolize. Most life on Earth cannot touch them. The streamlined had microbes have evolved not just the ability to metabolize aromatic compounds, but a set of genes specifically tailored to breaking down the full range of them. In an environment where food is nearly non-existent, [music] they evolve to eat what everything else ignores. Second, [music] antioxidation.

[00:12:17]Both extreme pressure and extreme cold generate reactive oxygen species, aggressive molecules that attack and damage DNA and proteins. The streamlined had microbes carry unusually robust and efficient systems for neutralizing this damage. The antioxidant pathways of these organisms have been [music] paired back to their most essential, most effective form. One of the mere researchers described this as a potential model for understanding anti-aging biology and disease resistance in complex organisms, including humans. The most extreme environment on Earth appears to have produced some of the most efficient cellular protection machinery ever documented. The second strategy is the inverse. Rather than shrinking, certain hadle organisms have expanded. These are what the researchers called versatile microbes. larger genomes, broader metabolic repertoires, more complex toolkits. They are not specialists.

[00:13:19]They are opportunists who've evolved to respond to shifting local conditions within the trench. They can form bofilms, sticky communities that adhere to surfaces. They can resist antibiotics.

[00:13:32]They can assemble fugella to move through their environment. They carry elaborate systems for sensing temperature changes, viral attacks, chemical signals, and the presence of potential competitors. Where the streamlined organisms are precision instruments, the versatile ones are generalists capable of exploiting whatever opportunity arises. Both strategies work. They work in different regions of the trench and at different levels within the sediment column. The surface layers are dominated by the selective pressure of the extreme environment itself. The pressure, the cold, the scarcity. Deeper in the sediment, where redux chemistry shifts and microenvironmental gradients created by geological processes take over, different communities take hold. The trench floor is not a uniform wasteland.

[00:14:24]It is a vertically stratified ecosystem as structured and layered in its organization as a forest is in its horizontal spread of niches. As the researchers analyzed the microbial communities deeper and deeper into the sediment, centimeter by centimeter through 30 cm push cores extracted from the seafloor. They found something else unexpected microbial networks.

[00:14:51]Co-occurrence patterns showing that organisms were not living independently but in structured relationships trading metabolic products cooperating to accomplish biological processes. no single organism could perform alone. In the deeper sediment layers, these networks were substantially more complex than at the surface. The average degree of connections in the deep layers was between 5 and 23 times greater than in the surface layers. The deeper you went into the mud, the more interconnected life became. A web of cooperation, invisible and ancient, in the dark, below the dark. But the MIA project wasn't only collecting sediment cores.

[00:15:35]They were collecting living animals. And what they found in those animals added an entirely different dimension to the picture of hadal life. The amphipod Hondelia gigas lives at depths between [music] 6,800 and 11,000 m. Amphipods look roughly like shrimp, though they're not closely related. They're small, a few cm, and they exist in the Mariana Trench in vast numbers, scavenging whatever organic material sinks to the bottom. The MER team collected 622 specimens and generated the first complete genome for this animal, the first time anyone had fully sequenced the genetic blueprint of a creature from the deepest ocean. The genome was enormous, 13.92 gigabases. For comparison, the human genome is about 3.2 gigabases. [music] More than 70% of Hondela Gigas' genome consists of repetitive sequences, regions of DNA that duplicate and recur throughout the genetic code. And the team believes this unusual structure may be related to the animals ability to withstand extreme pressure. Generating the sequencing data alone required 245.97 tab of output, the largest genomic [music] data set ever produced for any single marine species in history. They found something interesting in the population genetics of this animal.

[00:17:08]Across the vertical range of depths sampled from 6,800 m down to 11,000 m, the Hendelia gigas populations showed no meaningful genetic differentiation.

[00:17:21]Animals from moderate depths and animals from the very bottom of the trench were genetically almost identical, suggesting these creatures migrate freely across a 4 km vertical range. Depth apparently is not a barrier for them, but geography is. The populations in the West Philippine basin, roughly 1,500 km away, were genetically distinct from those in the Marana and Yap trenches.

[00:17:51]They have been isolated long enough to diverge. Distance separates them. The crushing pressure of the trench does not. And then the fish. The researchers examined 11 species of deep sea fish.

[00:18:04][music] Genetic analysis revealed that some of these fish lineages trace back to the mid cretaceous period approximately 100 million years ago when the surface of the earth above them was a [music] very different place and dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrates on land. These fish lineages survived the asteroid impact. They survived every major mass extinction event in the geological record. [music] Whatever catastrophe periodically resets life on the surface down here in the cold and the dark, the [music] fish just kept going. Many deep sea fish have lost the genes for detecting visible light entirely. Photo reception is metabolically costly. And in a world with no light whatsoever, maintaining the molecular machinery of vision is [music] a waste of energy that evolution eliminated long ago. But certain species within specific orders have retained functional vision genes. Apparently sensitive to the bioluminescent signals generated by other deep sea creatures.

[00:19:06]In a world with no sunlight, some organisms have held on to the ability to see light that other creatures make themselves. The hadal snail fish go further still. They've lost phototopic vision completely, but they've amplified the genes responsible for low light sensitivity. [music] They have optimized for darkness. Then there was the finding that contradicted a long-standing theory. For decades, scientists believed that a chemical compound called trimethylamine n oxide, TMAO, increased in fish as depth increased.

[00:19:43]TMAO stabilizes proteins against pressure defamation. And previous research seemed to confirm a steady deepening of TMAO concentration with depth. It made intuitive sense. Deeper means more pressure. More pressure means more protein stress. More stress means more TMAO. The mere fish data found no significant rise in TMAO levels in fish below 6,000 m. The pattern breaks at the hadle threshold. Either the previous studies were methodologically flawed or something different is operating at extreme depths that current models don't account for. A gene called RTF1, which appears to maintain stable gene expression under pressure by a different mechanism, was found to have undergone a [music] unique transformation across many fish species below 3,000 m. That may be part of the explanation, but the question remains open. And then came the finding nobody was celebrating in fish tissue, in sediment samples. From the Challenger Deep, the single deepest point on Earth, in the most remote, most inaccessible location imaginable. The researchers found persistent organic pollutants. Synthetic industrial chemicals. byproducts of human manufacturing activity accumulated over decades, sinking through seven miles of ocean to settle at the bottom of the world. The deepest place on Earth has been reached by human pollution. It was there before the submersible arrived. It will be there long after it leaves. Then the story deepened further, literally.

[00:21:23]In the summer of 2024, Fendua descended again, this time to a different set of trenches, the Kurill Kamchatka trench in the Northwest Pacific and the Western Aleian [music] trench nearby. And it found something that had been theorized for [music] decades, but never confirmed at anything approaching this scale.

[00:21:43]Cheosynthetic ecosystems spread across 2,500 km of Hadal seafloor. Almost all life on Earth derives its energy ultimately from sunlight. Plants and algae capture solar energy through photosynthesis, converting carbon dioxide and water into organic molecules that feed everything else. The chain begins with light. But chemosynthesis operates by a completely different principle. Instead of sunlight, organisms use the energy released by chemical reactions, specifically the oxidation of hydrogen sulfide and methane seeping from geological features to build organic matter from scratch. These ecosystems run on geology. They don't need the sun at all. Chemosynthetic communities had been documented before. The first were discovered at hydrothermal vents on the mid ocean ridge in 1977.

[00:22:40]And the [music] discovery was genuinely revolutionary.

[00:22:44]It proved that life could exist entirely without sunlight and fundamentally changed the scientific understanding of what an ecosystem could look like. Cold seep communities running on methane rather than superheated vent fluid were found later at shallower depths. But at hadal depths below 6,000 m, only two small chemosynthetic communities had ever been documented. One at 6,437 m. One at between 7,326 and 7,434 m. Two small patches in the entire known Haddle zone. The 2024 expedition changed that picture permanently. During dive FDZ 271 in the Kural Kamchatka trench at a depth of 9,533 m nearly 10 km below the surface.

[00:23:44]Fenduia encountered dense colonies of tubeworms carpeting the seafloor. These organisms called frenulate cyboglin linids have no digestive system. They harbor symbiotic bacteria inside their bodies that perform chemosynthesis, converting hydrogen sulfide and methane from geological seeps into the energy the worm needs to live. They run entirely on chemistry from the rocks below them. And here they were at 9,533 m in numbers dense enough to dominate the seafloor as far as the cameras could see. The site was named the deepest because it is exactly that the deepest known location of active chemosynthetic life ever discovered on Earth. And it was not alone. Over 23 subsequent dives, [music] the team found more. Sight after sight.

[00:24:38]Wintersweet Valley at 9,120 m where thousands of tubeworms extended red hemoglobin filled tentacles from the sediment across a seep field 2 km long.

[00:24:52]Cotton field at 9,566 m dense with living cyoglanids. Dead valley nearby the same depth where another field of tubeworms had died.

[00:25:04]their tubes lying horizontally covered in white fauulant material suggesting that the methane flow driving that seep had ceased. Clam bed at 5,800 m where aggregations of chemosynthetic vesicomide by valves were packed at up to 293 individuals per square meter.

[00:25:26]Blue Marsh at 6,635 m. [music] icy river at 6,630 m where white microbial mats stretched for tens of meters across the seafloor surrounded by living tubeworms. By the end of the expedition, the team had documented chemosynthesis-based communities distributed continuously along a stretch of 2,500 km across the floors of both trenches. [music] 19 of 23 dives encountered active seep communities. The depth range spanned from 5,800 m [music] to 9,533 m. Maximum tubeworm density reached 5,813 individuals per square meter in some patches. This is not a geological curiosity. This is a major ecosystem sprawling, ancient, geologically powered across thousands of kilometers of the deep ocean floor that science had essentially no idea was there. The mechanism involves the tectonics of the trenches themselves. Where the Pacific plate subducts beneath the adjacent plates, organic matter accumulates in the V-shaped geometry of the trench bottom, a natural sediment trap. Under the low oxygen conditions in deep sediment layers, microbes reduce carbon dioxide from that organic material and produce methane. The methane accumulates beneath impermeable sediment layers. The compression forces of plate subduction push it laterally toward the edge of the accretionary prism. The wedge of deformed sediment built up where the plates collide. Geological faults running through that wedge provide conduits for the methane to migrate upward until it seeps through the seafloor, sustaining the communities above. A full biological cycle driven by geological forces at the bottom of the world in [music] complete darkness. No sunlight required. The methane concentrations measured in sediment cores from seep sites reached 118,882 parts per million, vastly exceeding the threshold where methane begins forming solid methane hydrate crystals within the sediment column. Methane hydrates are icelike solids in which gas molecules are trapped inside a crystalline lattice of water. They represent an enormous reservoir of carbon in the deep ocean. Their presence at Hadal depths across multiple trench systems suggests that global models of deep sea methane reserves may be significantly underestimating the true inventory that matters. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. If hadal methane hydrates were destabilized by ocean temperature changes or pressure shifts, the release of that methane into the water column and eventually the atmosphere would have climate implications that existing models are not accounting for. The mere expedition found that this material is there at depths we weren't monitoring in amounts we weren't estimating. Then in late 2025, Fenduza left again, this time the Pacific crossing, a joint mission with Chile involving 83 researchers from six [music] countries, China, Chile, Germany, Denmark, Canada, and [music] Spain, 156 days at sea. More than 40,000 km traveled, roughly the circumference of the Earth along the equator. The mission focused on the Atakama Trench off the coast of South America, a trench system that had never previously been explored at full depth [music] by any team from any country. The research vessel returned in May 2026, arriving in Guanghou just days ago. During this expedition, Fendua completed 63 dives.

[00:29:32]50 of them reached depths below 6,000 m.

[00:29:35]The team collected over 3,500 biological and geological specimens.

[00:29:41]What they found included the deepest chemosynthetic ecosystem ever identified in the southern hemisphere, a community sustained entirely by geological fluids functioning without any sunlight whatsoever. Thousands of meters below the productive ocean zone. The researchers called it a dark life oasis.

[00:30:02]Multiple species of had snailfish were documented capable of surviving pressures equivalent to approximately 2 tons per square cm. Abundant benthic organisms photographed across the trench floor, the vast majority of which researchers believe represent species previously unknown to science and fault structures on the seafloor. physical rupture patterns created by historical major earthquakes, providing rare insitu evidence for how seismic activity reshapes the deep ocean landscape and the biological communities [music] that depend on it. The data from this expedition is still being processed. The papers haven't been written. The sequencing analysis is ongoing, but the direction of what's being found is entirely consistent with what came before it. The had zone is far more alive, far more complex, and far more consequential than the scientific consensus assumed even a decade ago.

[00:31:02]Let's pause here because the sheer weight of what was just described requires a moment to absorb. In a single expedition in 2021, a Chinese scientific team descended to the deepest ocean trench on Earth 33 times and cataloged more new species than had been found in all previous Hadal research combined.

[00:31:23]Then in 2024, a follow-up expedition found that the floor of two Hadal trenches across a span of 2,500 km was lined with thriving chemosynthetic ecosystems that science had no idea existed. Ecosystems that don't need sunlight. ecosystems powered entirely by geological chemistry by methane and hydrogen sulfide seeping from fault lines at nearly 10 km depth.

[00:31:54]And then in 2025 and 2026, a third expedition found the same thing in the southern hemisphere in a trench that had never been explored at full depth by anyone. Three expeditions, [music] three sets of discoveries, each one individually would have been the headline result of a [music] decade of deep sea research. And the database they built in [music] the process, the MIR data set, is now available. 7,564 species level genomes from organisms no one had ever seen before. Genetic [music] blueprints for life forms that evolved solutions to problems humans are still trying to solve. The entire data set [music] publicly downloadable. A library of biological innovation assembled by evolution over hundreds of millions of years at [music] the bottom of the world. That database is going to be studied for decades. The papers [music] that come out of it are going to appear in journals for years long after the immediate headlines have faded. And the applications, if [music] the researchers are right about the potential, will extend into medicine, biotechnology, [music] materials, science, and environmental remediation in ways that are difficult to [music] fully predict.

[00:33:12]Now, the streamlined antioxidant systems of had microbes could inform drug development for [music] age related diseases. The aromatic compound metabolism could clean up environments that have been contaminated by industrial activity [music] for generations. The pressure resistance mechanisms of Hadal animals could inspire engineering materials for applications from deep sea infrastructure to aerospace. This is not [music] speculation. This is the stated view of the scientists who did the work based on what they found in the organisms themselves. So why does this matter beyond [music] the science itself? Start with the data. The MIR data set 92 terabases of genetic information covering 7,564 [music] species of had microorganisms plus genomic data on amphipods and 11 fish species has been made publicly available. That is a genuine act of [music] scientific openness. But the people who compiled that data set, who designed the sampling strategy, who built the analytical pipelines, who [music] have the contextual expertise to extract its full significance, they are in Shanghai, in Shenzhen at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The gap between having access to data and having the knowledge to use it is not trivial, and China currently [music] has both.

[00:34:34]Consider what some of those organisms represent as potential resources. The streamlined [music] had microbes have evolved antioxidant systems paired back over millions of years of selection to lean optimized molecular machinery. One of the mere researchers explicitly noted that studying these systems [music] could offer new insights into anti-aging biology and disease resistance [music] in complex animals including humans. The organisms that metabolize aromatic compounds that eat the chemical family associated with industrial pollutants and petroleum derivatives could potentially be harnessed for bioreediation, breaking down oil spills, processing plastic degradation products, treating contaminated sediments. The genomes of animals that survive pressures equivalent to 2 tons per square centimeter contain evolutionary solutions to engineering problems that human technology is still working on.

[00:35:34]New genes, new structures, new functions.

[00:35:39]That is the phrase the lead scientist used. Those words have specific meanings in the context of biotechnology, medicine, and material science. And then there is the strategic dimension. The deep ocean is not a geopolitically neutral environment. Undersea cables carry the vast majority of the world's internet traffic. Military submarines operate at depths that interface with deep sea topography. Knowing where the geological faults run at the bottom of the Pacific, where sediment accumulates, where underwater terrain creates channels or barriers, where methane seeps indicate active geological processes. This is not merely scientific information. [music] It is strategic information. China has now conducted the most systematic survey of Hadal environments in all of scientific history. They know the physical structure, the biological communities, the geological processes, and the chemical composition of multiple had trench systems [music] better than anyone else on Earth. No other country has anything close to the data they have or the vehicle capable of collecting more. Fendu is the only full ocean depth man submersible in operational service.

[00:36:56]There is no comparable American, European or Japanese vehicle. The United States has maintained deep ocean capability through its naval programs, but those capabilities concentrate on operational depths of a few hundred to a few thousand m submarine warfare, cable operations, intelligence gathering in the mid ocean. The had zone below 6,000 m has not been a priority. It is now, or at least it should be. China's investment in Fendua, [music] in the MIA project, in the global Hadal exploration program, in the 2025 China Chile expedition. This is not scientific curiosity operating in a vacuum. It is strategic positioning in a domain that has been overlooked for decades, in a domain where overlooking it has now become consequential. The Chinese government's decision to include deep sea science and technology in its official government work report for 2025, the first time this had ever happened, makes the intent explicit.

[00:38:03]When a government places a research program alongside commercial space and emerging industrial sectors in its national planning documents, it is signaling investment priority and a long view of where advantage will come from.

[00:38:18]The ocean floor is the next frontier.

[00:38:22]China is already there. There is a larger question that all of this pushes toward without quite resolving. We have known for some time that life on Earth is more resilient and more widely distributed than the scientific consensus once assumed. Microbes found in deep mineshafts kilome underground living off the energy in rocks. microbes in Antarctic ice, in boiling hot springs, in the hyperarid soils of the Atakama desert, in the stratosphere.

[00:38:54]Every time instruments were pointed at a place considered biologically impossible, life was found adapted precisely to that impossibility. The Hadel zone was supposed to [music] be different. Cold, dark, crushing, starving. The place where even the hardiest organisms finally hit their limit. We named it after the underworld because we thought nothing serious lived there. It's not the exception. It is another example of the same pattern. And this one is extraordinary.

[00:39:23]7,000 564 species of microorganisms.

[00:39:29]Three potential new filer of life with no known relatives anywhere on Earth.

[00:39:34]Chemosynthetic ecosystems [music] spanning 2,500 km at nearly 10 km depth. A complete food chain from bacteria to amphipods to fish functioning entirely without sunlight. Organisms that eat industrial pollutants as their primary carbon source. Fish whose evolutionary lineages predate the extinction of the dinosaurs by tens of millions of years. Animals whose genomes are four times the size of the human genome and consist mostly of repetitive sequence. and industrial pollutants from human manufacturing activity resting in the sediment at the absolute deepest point on Earth. All of it in a place we barely looked at. All of it discovered in 2 months of systematic work by a team that finally had the right technology and used it methodically. The MIA project collected [music] 10 times more Hadel samples than all previous research combined and found that nearly 90% of what lives down there was previously unknown to science. That is a fundamental statement about how little we understand the [music] planet we actually live on. And it is a statement that carries consequences scientific, technological, strategic that we are only beginning to fully reckon with. Because if nine out of 10 species at the deepest point on Earth are new to science, if the bottom of our own planet's ocean is that unexplored, that unknown, that full of life we've never seen, then the question is obvious. What else is down there? And the more unsettling version of that question, what else have we been wrong about? What other environments have we written off as uninhabitable, as scientifically uninteresting?

[00:41:26]as not worth the effort of systematic investigation. And what might we find there if we ever pointed the right instruments in the right direction? The Mariana Trench has been present for as long as there have been oceans. We have had the technological capability to explore it in some form for decades.

[00:41:46]What we lacked until recently and until China built the necessary vehicle was the specific capability [music] to explore it systematically, not to drop in once and leave, to return again and again methodically until the picture was clear. Fendu did [music] that. 33 dives in 2021, 23 more in the Kuril Kamchatka and Alucian trenches in 2024. 63 dives in the Atakama trench in 2025 and 2026.

[00:42:18]Each expedition expanding the database.

[00:42:21]Each set of samples deepening the picture of what lives at extreme depth and how it manages to live there. The organisms down there didn't wait for us to pay attention. They've been evolving for hundreds of millions of years under conditions that would destroy most life within seconds of exposure. They built ecosystems [music] in total darkness running on chemistry and geology and the slow inexurable force of tectonic plates. They survived the asteroid impact that ended the Cretaceous. They survived every mass extinction in the geological record. They survived the industrial revolution, absorbed its chemical byproducts, and some of them apparently evolved to eat [music] those byproducts. They're still there in the sediment, in the water column, in the [music] fault zones and methane seeps that lace the trench floors. And now we have their genomes, all 7,564 of them, plus the amphipods, plus the fish, sitting in a database, waiting to be fully understood. The scientists involved in the MIR project have said explicitly that this data set may provide new options for addressing the global depletion of biological resources.

[00:43:38]New prospects for biotechnology, medicine, and energy derived from organisms that have spent hundreds of millions of years solving extreme engineering problems in the dark. new insights into the limits of life itself that could inform our understanding of what might be possible on other worlds in the liquid oceans beneath the ice [music] of Europa or Enceladus, for instance, where similar combinations of pressure, cold, darkness, and geological chemistry [music] might sustain life we haven't yet imagined looking for. These are not small ideas. They are the kinds of ideas that come from genuinely new scientific [music] territory from a place that was unexplored long past the point when it should have been and that [music] turned out to contain more than anyone expected. We built the tools to reach the bottom [music] of the ocean. We used them finally systematically. We found that it was teameming with [music] life stranger more abundant more novel and more consequential than we had assumed and the work is ongoing. The data from the most recent [music] expedition is still being processed. The papers haven't been written. The next dive is being planned. There's a whole world 11 [music] km below us. It turns out we had almost no idea what was in it. [music] We named it after the land of the dead.

[00:45:00]We assumed it was empty. We looked away for decades while entire ecosystems evolved in the darkness and built their own food chains and developed their own biological solutions to problems that human science hasn't yet solved. Now we're looking and what we're finding is changing the story of life on Earth where it exists, what it's capable of, [music] and what it tells us about the limits of biology itself. We're going to need better maps [music] and we're going to need to pay very close attention to who's drawing them and what they plan to do with what they