When Chilean scientist Osvaldo Ulloa led an expedition 8,000 meters under the sea to an area where no human had ever been, his team discovered microscopic organisms that generated more questions than answers. The January submarine expedition dove into the Atacama Trench, created by the meeting of two tectonic plates in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

“We pulled off the feat of taking humans into the trench where no other human being had been before,” Ulloa, the director of the Millennium Institute of Oceanography at the University of Concepcion, told AFP…