Deep deep down
Under the sea, there'll be no accusations, just friendly crustaceans... ahem.
US scientists have sent down a robot submarine to plump the depths of the lowest place on Earth - the Marianas Trench.
Situated in the western Pacific Ocean, the trench is more then 10km deep, a dark, alien world far removed from life for us happy land-lovers.
The sub Nereus is one tough cookie. At the very bottom it experiences pressures a thousand times higher than the surface.
It recorded video and used its robotic arm to scoop up samples of the seabed.
So what's is down there?
Plenty. The soil is rich in single cell organisms thought to be similar to the world's earliest life forms.
And there's also shrimp, sea cucumbers, something called scale worms, and actual fish!
Will humans ever go so deep? Well they already have!
During the crazy 60s a Swiss-built sub with a crew of two managed to get to the bottom and spot a few (very) flat fish before they went back up.
Weird Science Factoid: Spiders have transparent blood.
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
