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The Atacama Trench, located off the coast of Peru and Chile, is one of the deepest oceanic regions on our planet, and scientists think it could be an ecological haven. Scientists collected four specimens of a new predatory crustacean species named Dulcibella camanchaca at 7,902 meters in the Atacama Trench in October 2023. A 2026 crewed expedition completed more than 36 dives and surveyed about 180 kilometers of the trench. It returned with the largest biological collection yet assembled there.<\/p>\n
The Atacama Trench<\/a>, also known as the Peru-Chile Trench, runs roughly 3,700 miles along the western edge of South America. Off northern Chile it drops below 26,000 feet, deep inside the hadal zone\u2014the name for the undersea region where sunlight can\u2019t penetrate and the water sits a few degrees above freezing. It is not, for the record, the deepest water on Earth. Challenger Deep in the Pacific\u2019s Mariana Trench reaches about 35,876 feet. But the Atacama is deep enough to qualify as its own world, and it\u2019s walled off from other trenches by thousands of miles of open abyss.<\/p>\n Scientists have long been interested in exploring this zone, and the discoveries<\/a> haven\u2019t disappointed. In 2023, the Instituto Milenio de Oceanograf\u00eda (IMO)\u2014based at Universidad de Concepci\u00f3n in Chile\u2014carried out a deep ocean survey aboard the research vessel Abate Molina<\/a>, which was originally donated to Chile by the Japanese government in the early 1990s. Once the specimens were recovered, they were frozen for preservation and subsequently underwent analysis.<\/p>\n Only one of the four animals actually did the scientific heavy lifting. That specimen, a 1.5-inch female, was flash-frozen aboard ship, then dissected, photographed, and sequenced. The team read two short stretches of its mitochondrial DNA, the 16S and COI genes that taxonomists use as identification barcodes, and compared them against known amphipods. Nothing matched closely enough. The other three were preserved in a chemical stabilizer and set aside, still unexamined. The researchers described the new species in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMost excitingly, the DNA and morphology data pointed to this species<\/a> being a new genus too, emphasizing the Atacama Trench as an endemic hotspot,\u201d Johanna Weston, lead author of the study and expert on the Hadal zone from WHOI, said in a press statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n That endemism argument is the part still waiting on evidence. D. camanchaca has been recorded in only one place, but it\u2019s hard to rule out the possibility that it might also live somewhere else. Recent work cuts against the assumption: a 2026 survey<\/a> found the amphipod Profundum solomoni in three widely separated trenches, and a Science study published<\/a> in May 2026 catalogued 32 ocean-bottom species in the Kermadec and Mariana trenches while turning up similar communities in five other hadal regions, Atacama among them. Trenches can be evolutionarily strange without every resident being a local.<\/p>\n And while nobody has yet watched D. camanchaca eat, its body is clearly built for violence. It has a slender, fast-looking frame, mouthparts made for shredding rather than filtering, and a pair of oversized, grasping front limbs that work like spring-loaded claws. In most amphipods, those limbs are unremarkable. But in D. camanchaca, they dominate the animal\u2019s front end, which is the anatomical signature of something that grabs living prey instead of waiting for a dead whale to drift down.<\/p>\n At 25,925 feet, the water presses down at roughly 790 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level. But the two-inch-long D. camanchaca is able to live there, molting, swimming, and hunting under a load that would flatten most creatures. Precisely how it manages that isn\u2019t yet fully understood.<\/p>\n \u201cThis finding underlines the importance of continued deep-ocean exploration<\/a>, particularly in Chile\u2019s front yard,\u201d IMO\u2019s Carolina Gonz\u00e1lez, co-lead author of the study, said in a press statement<\/a>. \u201cMore discoveries are expected as we continue to study the Atacama Trench.\u201d<\/p>\n Gonz\u00e1lez got her wish faster than anyone expected. In early 2026, the Joint China-Chile Atacama Trench Expedition put Fendouzhe\u2014a crewed submersible rated for extreme ocean depths\u2014into the trench with scientists inside it. The Universidad de Concepci\u00f3n has conducted more than 36 dives that collectively surveyed about 112 miles of seafloor, with the deepest descent reaching 26,434 feet. The wider trans-Pacific program ran 156 days and logged 63 dives, 50 of them below 20,000 feet.<\/p>\n
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