The Atacama Trench is a deep-water channel running along the Pacific coast of Chile and Peru, South America. In 2018, an international team of scientists used free-falling “landers” to study the trench, gathering images and specimens of deep-sea creatures. The team discovered a new snailfish species unique to the Atacama Trench and to all other known fish species.
October 12, 2022
The Atacama Trench is a deep-water channel running along the Pacific coast of Chile and Peru, South America. In 2018, an international team of scientists used free-falling “landers” to study the trench, gathering images and specimens of deep-sea creatures. The team discovered a new snailfish species unique to the Atacama Trench and to all other known fish species.
The small blue fish, named Paraliparis selti by the team—”selti” meaning “blue” in Kunza, the language of the indigenous peoples of the Atacama Desert—lives in the hadal zone, waters deeper than 6,000 meters, or about 20,000 feet.
The newly discovered species “doesn’t look like other snailfishes from the hadal zone, these ultradeep regions of the oceans,” says Thomas Linley, Ph.
