Victor Vescovo

They're not something that people are going to go, ooh, ah, like looking at, you know, a lion on the Serengeti.

But from a biological standpoint, they can be quite distinctive and very unique.

These are creatures that live in conditions of eight tons per square inch on every surface of their body.

That's like four automobiles on your fingertip.

That's where they live, in freezing cold water, and they never see sunlight.

We saw colonies of bacteria on the bottom of the ocean, on the rocks, that never see sunlight, and yet they're alive.

Well, how can that be?

There's something called chemosynthesis, where these are colonies of life that are drawing energy from methane seeping from the rocks, living off the chemical reactions in the minerals of the rocks.

This is a different form of life than what we have on the surface of the earth.

In fact, if we find life

outside of Earth in our solar system on Ganymede or Europa or these other moons that may have life, it'll probably look more similar to what we saw in the deep ocean trenches than what we see in the brilliantly lit shallow waters of the ocean or on land.

So the scientists have been really excited about that.

Eight tons per square inch.

At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, it's an incredibly harsh environment.

One of the harshest on the planet, if not the harshest.

That's why I had 90 millimeters of titanium protecting me in my sphere.

And they are designed that way.

It's evolution.

And I'm sure they...

The one time in their life they ever saw light was when my submarine came to visit them.