Large communities of bacteria in the Mariana Trench

Deep sea trenches act as hot spots for microbial activity because they receive an unusually high flux of organic matter, made up of dead animals, algae and other microbes, sourced from the surrounding much shallower sea-bottom.

An international research team announces the first scientific results from one of the most inaccessible places on Earth: the bottom of the Mariana Trench located nearly 11 kilometers below sea level in the western Pacific, which makes it the deepest site on Earth.

Their analyses document that a highly active bacteria community exists in the sediment of the trench - even though the environment is under extreme pressure almost 1,100 times higher than at sea level.

In fact, the trench sediments house almost 10 times more bacteria than in the sediments of the surrounding abyssal plain at much shallower water depth of 5-6 km water.

Deep sea trenches are hot spots
Deep sea trenches act as hot spots for microbial activity because they receive an unusually high flux of organic matter, made up of dead animals, algae and other microbes, sourced from the surrounding much shallower sea-bottom.

It is likely that some of this material becomes dislodged from the shallower depths during earthquakes, which are common in the area.

So, even though deep sea trenches like the Mariana Trench only amount to about two percent of the World Ocean area, they have a relatively larger impact on marine carbon balance - and thus on the global carbon cycle, says Professor Ronnie Glud from Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the University of Southern Denmark.

Ronnie Glud and researchers from Germany (HGF-MPG Research Group on Deep-Sea Ecology and Technology of the Max Planck Institute in Bremen, Scotland's (Scottish Association for Marine Science), Japan's (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology),  and Denmark (University of Copenhagen), explore the deepest parts of the oceans, and the team's first results from these extreme environments were published in the widely recognized international journal Nature Geoscience.

UK Science team Discover Deepest undersea vents - Video

British scientists exploring the ocean floor in the Caribbean have discovered an "astounding" set of hydrothermal vents, the deepest anywhere in the world.

Deploying a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) in the Cayman Trough, a giant underwater canyon, they stumbled across a previously-unknown site nearly 5000m below the surface.

Video pictures relayed live back to the research ship mounting the operation show spindly chimneys up to 10m high and belching out dark water - "a stunning sight", according to one scientist.

In the immense pressure of the sea three miles down, the ROV, known as ISIS, was gently steered around the vents, taking pictures and gathering samples.

Hydrothermal vents are among the strangest features of the deep ocean and their existence was not known until the 1970s. Since then they have been discovered at about 200 sites around the world including the Southern Ocean and the Atlantic.

Read the full story here www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21520404

NASA, Hubble's Deepest View Of Universe Unveils Never-Before-Seen Galaxies

The image was taken by the HUDF09 team, which has made it available for research by astronomers worldwide.

The photo was taken with the new WFC3/infrared camera on Hubble in late August 2009, during a total of four days of pointing for 173,000 seconds of total exposure time.

The new Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken the deepest image yet of the Universe in near-infrared light.

The faintest and reddest objects in the image are likely the oldest galaxies ever identified, having formed between only 600-900 million years after the Big Bang.

In 2004, Hubble created the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the deepest visible-light image of the Universe, and now, with its brand-new camera, Hubble is seeing even farther. This image was taken in the same region as the visible HUDF, but is taken at longer wavelengths.

Hubble's newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) collects light from near-infrared wavelengths and therefore looks even farther back towards the Big Bang, because the light from hot young stars in these very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the Universe.

This new deep view also provides insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the Universe's history.

A boon to astronomers worldwide, the new WFC3 data - taken by the HUDF09 team - have set a multitude of teams to work, furiously searching for the most distant galaxies yet discovered. In just three months, twelve scientific papers on these new data have been submitted.

The image was taken by the HUDF09 team, which has made it available for research by astronomers worldwide. The photo was taken with the new WFC3/infrared camera on Hubble in late August 2009, during a total of four days of pointing for 173 000 seconds of total exposure time.

Infrared light is invisible to the human eye and therefore does not have colours that can be perceived. The representation is "natural" in that shorter infrared wavelengths are represented as blue and the longer wavelengths as red. The faintest objects are about one billion times fainter than the dimmest visible objects seen with the naked eye.

These Hubble observations are blazing a trail for Hubble's successor, the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will look even farther into the Universe than Hubble, at infrared wavelengths. The launch of JWST is planned for 2014.