A Lander Captured Something Alive in the Mariana Trench at 27,000 Feet — It shouldn't Exist

A Lander Captured Something Alive in the Mariana Trench at 27,000 Feet — It shouldn't Exist In August 2022, a camera mounted to an autonomous lander recorded a fish at 8,336 meters below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. That number takes a second to process. 8,336 meters is 27,349 feet. It is deeper than Mount Everest is tall, with a thousand feet to spare. At that depth the water pressure is pushing down at roughly 1,200 atmospheres. The temperature sits just above freezing. No sunlight reaches within three miles of that depth. No photosynthesis. No plants. No surface food chain.And a vertebrate was there. A small, pale, almost translucent fish, moving through the dark as though the pressure was nothing. Feeding. Living.The animal was a juvenile snailfish, identified as belonging to the genus Pseudoliparis. And it set a record nobody who studies the deep ocean expected to see broken: the deepest confirmed sighting of any vertebrate anywhere on Earth.