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BEIJING: China broadcast live images of its new manned submersible parked at the bottom of the Mariana Trench on Friday, as part of a historic mission in the planet’s deepest undersea valley.
The “Fendouzhe”, or “Striver,” descended more than 10,000 m into the underwater trench in the western Pacific Ocean with three investigators on board, state broadcaster CCTV said.
Only a handful of people have visited the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a crescent-shaped depression in the earth’s crust that is deeper than the height of Mount Everest and is more than 2,550 km long.
The first explorers visited the trench in 1960 on a short expedition, after which there were no missions until Hollywood director James Cameron made the first solo trip to the bottom in 2012.
Cameron described a “bleak” and “strange” environment.
Video footage filmed and broadcast by a deep-sea camera this week showed the green and white Chinese submersible moving through dark waters surrounded by clouds of sediment as it slowly touched the seabed.
Fendouzhe, who has made multiple dives in recent days, had earlier this month set a national record of 10,909 meters for manned deep-sea diving after landing at the deepest known point in the trench, Challenger Deep, just barely below the world record of 10,927 m. established by an American explorer in 2019.
The November 10 mission broadcast the world’s first live video from Challenger Deep.
Deep water resources
The submersible, equipped with robotic arms to collect biological samples and sonar “eyes” that use sound waves to identify surrounding objects, performs repeated dives to test its capabilities.
It carries so much equipment that engineers added a forehead-shaped bulbous protrusion containing floating materials to the boat to help maintain its balance.
Fendouzhe, China’s third manned deep-sea submersible, is looking at “the many species and distribution of living things on the seabed,” scientists on board told CCTV.
The water pressure at the bottom of the trench is eight tons per square inch, about a thousand times the atmospheric pressure at sea level, but scientists have found that the dark, cold waters of the trench are teeming with life.
The Chinese researchers will collect samples for their work, CCTV said.
Previous studies have found thriving communities of single-celled organisms that survive on organic debris that had settled on the ocean floor, but very few large animals.
The mission will also carry out investigations into “deep-sea materials,” CCTV said, as China advances deep-sea mining.
This month, Beijing established a joint training and research center with the International Seabed Authority, which will train professionals in deep-sea technology and conduct research on mining valuable minerals at the bottom of the ocean.
Fendouzhe is expected to set standards for China’s future deep-sea vessels.
“It takes more than two trials before we can call it a real success,” Zhu Min, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences involved in the mission, told CCTV on Tuesday.
