Until last December, no one had ever seen the bottom of the Tasman Fracture, a trench that drops more than four kilometers below the surface of the ocean. A group of Australian and American researchers recently spent a month hundreds of kilometers southwest of the Tasmanian coast, exploring the fracture’s depths. Jess Adkins, a professor at Caltech and one of the project’s lead scientists, remembers sitting in his control room and watching the underwater life on his monitors with a sense of awe
