scientists manage to take valuable samples at a depth of 8km

The sample was taken 8km deep under the ocean, where cold, darkness reign, and pressure that can be up to 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere. We are obviously talking here about a core as a vertical sampling of sediments. A team of American scientists from the University of Rhode Island, in the United States, recently succeeded in taking a soil sample for the first time from the bottom of the Puerto Rico pit, the deepest place in the Atlantic Ocean.

They lowered to the bottom of the pit a large tube topped with a ballast which sank into the ground and collected, a little like an immense syringe, the different layers of sediment piled up on top of each other. others. They thus brought up on the deck of the boat a cylindrical carrot 11m long. It is the deepest core ever taken in the Atlantic since the development of these drilling techniques in the 1960s.

This kind of sampling is used to understand the extreme limits of life under water and under pressure. Because we find in these sediments all kinds of microorganisms, bacteria and microbes that manage to survive and reproduce in conditions that exceed current knowledge. They manage to survive by breathing a million times slower than the microbes usually studied in the laboratory and researchers do not understand how they multiply because they do not have enough energy available to divide. In any case, in theory and in the state of our knowledge. These scientists will therefore study the genetics of these strange organisms that survive in areas that have been very little explored by man so far.

The first results will be published in two or three years, but the researchers think that this core of the depths will give scientists at least ten years of work, so its content is exceptional. Certain parts of the sample were also frozen at minus 80 degrees so that new analyzes could take place with new techniques in a few years.