Original subtitles

[Jeremy Wade] Could a small piece of aircraft debris

found on a remote desert island

finally solve America's greatest aviation mystery?

Is this part of Amelia Earhart's airplane?

[Jeremy] Why are space agencies like NASA

scouring the deepest parts of the ocean

for signs of extraterrestrial life?

We know more about the surface of Mars

than we know about our deep seas.

[Jeremy] And what could explain

the hundreds of mysterious ghost ships

washing up on the shores of Japan?

Could the North Koreans be sending spies to Japan in these boats?

[Jeremy] The underwater realm is another dimension.

It's a physically hostile place,

where dreams of promise can sink into darkness.

I'm Jeremy Wade,

and I'm searching the world

to bring you the most iconic and baffling underwater

mysteries known to science.

The vast majority of our ocean is unobserved,

unmapped and unexplored.

[Jeremy] It's a dangerous frontier

that swallows evidence.

You have nowhere to run.

[Jeremy] Where unknown is normal

and understanding is rare.

It's one of history's most perplexing disappearances.

In 1937, aviation pioneer,

Amelia Earhart, vanishes over the Pacific Ocean.

There are no traces of what happened to her

or her aircraft.

This lack of evidence has opened the door to nearly 100 years of rumor,

hearsay, and wild conspiracy theories.

But now, can a small piece of aircraft debris

found on the beach of a remote tropical island

finally help solve this mystery?

July 1937,

Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan,

are flying over the Pacific Ocean

in their twin engine, Lockheed Electra.

Amelia Earhart is this glamorous,

exciting aviatrix,

who's breaking glass ceilings

with her adventures and her flying.

[Dr. Beverly Goodman] She had already become the first woman

to do a transatlantic flight.

She was on her way to becoming the first woman

to circumnavigate the globe.

[Jeremy] Earhart is 22,000 mile

into this record-breaking journey,

only one thing stands between her and glory...

The vast Pacific Ocean.

She was doing the hardest bit,

2,500 mile, over water flight

to a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific

called Howland Island.

It's a tiny target for them to reach,

but they're going to need to refuel there.

[Jeremy] Luckily, Earhart and Noonan have a helping hand.

Anchored off the coast of the island is the Itasca,

a U.S. Coast Guard ship equipped with a radio transmitter

to help guide them in.

But as Earhart closes in,

things start to unravel.

[Amelia Earhart over radio] We cannot reach you by radio, on the line 1-5...

[Richard Gillespie] She was unable to get a bearing

on the signals sent out by the Coast Guard.

[Jeremy] There's a problem with their radio transmissions.

Howland Island wasn't there in front of them

when they expected it to be.

[Jeremy] Earhart isn't receiving

or responding to the messages being sent out by the ship.

Earhart was calling in the Itasca.

Itasca was replying,

but Earhart was not hearing their replies.

[Jeremy] The radio operators can only listen in horror,

as the drama unfolds,

until all contact

is lost.

[static noise]

[Dr. Alexander Clarke] Where did they go? What happened to them?

It's one of the greatest mysteries of our time.

[Richard] When Amelia Earhart was reported as overdue,

missing,

it was huge news

all over the United States, all over the world.

[Jeremy] A massive rescue effort is launched,

but after weeks of searching,

Amelia Earhart is officially declared lost at sea.

It's concluded she must have crashed into the water

somewhere close to Howland Island.

The hunt for her aircraft deep beneath the waves

continues to this day.

Many people believe this lost at sea theory,

but no trace has ever been found of a crash

around Howland Island.

[Jeremy] What if Amelia Earhart and her navigator

didn't crash at sea at all?

In the days following her disappearance,

something happens that supports this possibility.

People were saying that they were receiving signals,

radio signals

even after the disappearance of the airplanes.

These calls go on night after night.

They're hearing Amelia Earhart very clearly saying,

uh, "SOS, SOS, this is Amelia Earhart."

[Jeremy] But after finding no trace of Earhart or her plane,

the official search dismisses these radio messages

as false reports or hoaxes.

But what if they were real?

Did Amelia miraculously survive and make it to dry land?

If so, the question is where?

Our best piece of information

about what happened in the final moments,

hours of Earhart's flight,

are the radio logs.

[Jeremy] This real-time record

was transcribed by the radio operators aboard

the U.S. Coast Guard vessel,

and it contains a tantalizing clue.

The last thing they heard her say

was, uh, "We are on the line

157337,

running on the line north and south."

[Jeremy] These numbers refer to a fixed navigation line

that runs directly through Howland Island.

Amelia and Noonan were using it to try

and get a fix on their location.

So they're running on the line looking for Howland Island,

which is what they should have done.

[Jeremy] Crucially, around 400 miles to the south

on the same line

lies another small piece of land,

Gardner Island.

Gardner Island is... Is a very small atoll.

It's got fringing reef and an internal lagoon.

It's like an elongated triangle.

[Jeremy] This uninhabited island

was searched back in 1937,

but only from the air.

Is it possible the official search missed something.

For over 30 years, Ric Gillespie has been leading a team

of multi-disciplined researchers,

who think this might be the case.

In the 1990s,

they launched a series of ambitious expeditions.

We were the first people

to go to that island

and look for signs of Amelia Earhart.

[Jeremy] They searched for clues above and below the water,

using everything from metal detectors

to state-of-the-art sonar technology.

And they uncover profound evidence,

including a 1930s pocket knife

and a glass bottle that used to contain

women's anti-freckle cream.

What's all this stuff doing there?

[Jeremy] But it's not the decisive proof

Ric and his team have traveled all this way to find.

Are there any signs of Amelia's aircraft?

Everybody talks about a smoking gun in the Earhart mystery

has to be the plane.

Everybody wants the plane.

[Jeremy] Initially, there were no signs of it on the island

or in the shallow reef that surrounds it.

Then finally,

a breakthrough.

And there's this piece of aluminum laying right there on the surface.

At that point, you don't know

whether it's something important or not.

[Jeremy] The thin metal sheet, has lines of rivet holes,

an unmistakable indication

that it came from an aircraft.

How did it get all the way out here

to this uninhabited island?

Are these the remains of Amelia Earhart's airplane?

Is it the proof that she crashed somewhere near

or even on this island?

When a team of researchers scour a remote Pacific island

for signs of the long lost aviator, Amelia Earhart,

they find a vital clue.

A small piece of aluminum with telltale signs

that it came from an aircraft,

raising the possibility

that Earhart crash landed on the deserted island

and lived out her days as a castaway.

Could this possibly be part of Amelia Earhart's

Lockheed Electra?

[Jeremy] Ric's team begin the laborious task

of comparing the rivet patterns on the aluminum

with aircraft from the same period.

We cannot forget that

World War II is virtually contemporary with Amelia Earhart.

Wreckage from World War II planes

litters the Pacific Ocean.

[Jeremy] Does the aluminum sheet match with a Lockheed Electra?

The pattern doesn't quite fit.

It's like close but no cigar, and it's got to be perfect.

[Jeremy] But it doesn't appear to match

with any other aircraft either.

We were stuck.

We said, we don't know where this thing came from.

[Jeremy] It's a devastating blow.

What this piece of metal is

and where it came from remain unclear.

Could the answer be hiding in plain sight?

Footage from Amelia's record-breaking journey

shows one easily overlooked anomaly.

You can see that there was a repair done to the plane,

where there's a piece of sheet metal that was added

that you don't see in earlier legs of their trip.

[Jeremy] Earhart's plane had a small navigation window

in the back right hand side of the fuselage.

But in later pictures,

it's not there.

[Richard] They took that window out

and covered the hole with a plain aluminum patch.

[Jeremy] This reignites interest

in the aluminum sheet found on Gardner Island.

A custom repair job

might explain why the rivet markings

don't match with a Lockheed Electra

or any other aircraft.

Ric and his team put this theory to the test

by checking the size and shape of the window patch.

It's almost like solving a puzzle

and trying to figure out where the puzzle pieces fit.

[Jeremy] They find that the size of the patch

and that of a mystery piece of aluminum

are a perfect match.

It's the biggest breakthrough yet,

but not conclusive proof.

For that, direct evidence is needed

that ties this small piece of aluminum

to Amelia's aircraft.

[Dr. Dijanna Figueroa] Now we can use new technologies

to help us gather more evidence, and hopefully,

help us solve this mystery.

[Jeremy] In 2021,

Penn State University

offered to analyze the piece of aluminum

using their own nuclear reactor.

The team are using,

uh, neutron activation analysis to understand

the construction of the metal.

[Jeremy] By showering it with radioactive neutrons,

they may reveal subatomic clues

hidden on the surface of the aluminum.

Things like tiny traces of paint

or indentations, for example, from serial marks.

Things like that, which you just wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye.

We've gotten some preliminary reports from Penn State.

[Jeremy] The researchers, Daniel Beck and Alison Portanova,

spot hidden inscriptions etched into the metal.

Their system showed, what appeared to be, three letters

on the surface of the sheet.

This new discovery could be a game changer.

If these are tool marks or even better yet, a serial number,

this could be a direct link to Earhart's aircraft.

For now, what the letters mean remains unknown,

but the scientists at Penn State have plans to apply new,

more refined filters to their neutron imaging equipment.

With better resolution and more analysis,

Ric and his team may be able to prove,

where this piece of aluminum came from,

and the answer could finally solve

one of the most puzzling aviation mysteries of all time.

[water bubbling]

Over the past decade,

hundreds of abandoned boats have washed up

on the shores of Japan,

from small wooden rowing boats

to larger steel vessels.

Where they come from and what happened to their crews

is the subject of global speculation.

But can breakthrough satellite technology

finally help solve the mystery

of Japan's ghost ships?

Since 2017,

the number of abandoned boats arriving on Japanese shores

has increased to unprecedented levels.

There are sometimes hundreds, every year, washing ashore.

[Dr. Dijanna] Where are these boats coming from?

What has happened to their crew?

[Jeremy] Tragically, they aren't always empty.

Some of these broken vessels contain the bodies

of those who were sailing them.

These corpses are occasionally found

in a strange condition.

Some are even missing their heads.

Heads missing?

Ooh!

Ships are turning up

on the western coast of Japan full of corpses.

What's going on here?

[Jeremy] The first step in unraveling this mystery

is finding out where these boats are coming from.

The local police launch an investigation.

The results are perplexing.

The Japanese authorities have identified

that the vessels come from North Korea, because of the artifacts within them.

[Jeremy] It's a breakthrough that only partially solves the puzzle.

North Korea lies over 600 miles away.

How are these boats ending up in Japanese waters?

For many Japanese citizens,

large numbers of mystery ships arriving from North Korea

causes fear and paranoia.

The context here is that relations between

Japan and North Korea are very strained

because of years and years

of North Korean ballistic missile tests.

[Jeremy] In 2017,

these missile tests ceased.

Their end coincided with the dramatic increase

of abandoned boats finding their way to Japan.

But some people are convinced this is no coincidence

and that instead of sending rockets towards Japan,

the North Koreans are now sending ships full of spies.

As hundreds of abandoned boats

wash up along the western shores of Japan,

many local residents suspect foul play.

One new theory suggests these ghost ships

actually belong to an unlikely group of people,

North Korean spies.

It's a suspicion, born from years of distrust

between the two nations

and a long history of North Korean espionage on Japanese soil.

Over recent decades,

the North Korean state has abducted people from Japanese coastlines.

[Jeremy] No one knows how many citizens have been taken,

but the authorities believe it could number in the hundreds.

Are these so-called

ghost ships simply a new tactic in this dirty war?

[Dr. Alexander] Could the North Koreans now be sending spies

to Japan in these boats?

[Jeremy] To find out, I'm talking to Prof. Araki,

an expert in North Korean politics.

Have you investigated any of these ghost ships yourself?

[in japanese]

Have you found anything to support the idea,

they are being used by spies?

[in japanese]

Oh.

[in japanese]

Do you think this hat belonged to a spy?

[in japanese]

[Jeremy] Prof. Araki's theory

is supported by the fishing equipment

often found onboard these abandoned vessels.

It also partially solves another unexplained detail,

why some of these ghost ships

still contain the decomposing corpses of their crew.

So we know where these vessels are coming from

and who owned them,

but we still don't understand what's happening to them.

Accidents at sea kind of do happen,

but why so many North Korean fishermen have been lost at sea

defies explanation.

[Jeremy] The Sea of Japan

is one of the most fiercely contested bodies

of water in the world.

The location of international boundaries is disputed.

And Japan, Russia, China and both South and North Korea

all compete for the same fish.

To get an edge in this highly competitive piece of water,

some of these countries have been accused

of deploying so-called dark fleets.

They are fishing vessels that are doing their best

to stay off the radar.

[Jeremy] These flotillas can comprise hundreds of ships,

and they often fish illegally in other country's waters.

They don't want to be detected by authorities

or anybody that's monitoring them.

[Jeremy] Now, state-of-the-art

satellite technology is helping researchers

find these clandestine fishing fleets.

So the fleets that were invisible

and very, very hard to track now become trackable.

[Jeremy] Pictures beamed from space

reveal huge numbers of Chinese fishing vessels

operating in Korean waters.

These illegal fleets are capable of decimating fish stocks

and displacing North Korean fishermen.

What we think is happening are these North Korean vessels

are going further and further out into the sea

to try and make their quotas, to try and catch

the amount of fish they need.

Most of these fishing vessels are not properly equipped

for these sorts of long distance voyages.

They don't have anything to send out an SOS

if they get into trouble.

That crew, once they are beyond sight of land,

are completely on their own.

[Jeremy] Equipment failure and dangerous seas

may go some way towards explaining

Japan's ghost ships.

But one strange question remains unanswered.

Why are some of the corpses found on board

missing their heads?

Around the world, fishing conflict

is increasingly common.

[Jeremy] Have the international disputes on the Sea of Japan

turned violent?

Or is there a less sinister possibility?

Could there be a natural explanation for this phenomenon?

[Jeremy] It's thought many of these ghost ships

spend months at sea before reaching the Japanese coast.

Some people have suggested that these heads were removed

through natural decomposition processes.

The tale of Japan's ghost ships

is something straight out of a horror movie.

But satellite technology has revealed that

this real life story may in fact be about

our overexploitation of the oceans,

and by exposing and clamping down on illegal fishing,

we may be in sight of bringing this gruesome phenomenon to an end.

In 2019, a swimmer off the coast of Israel

spots something unusual on the seabed.

Beneath him is a strange stone tablet

covered in what looked like ancient hieroglyphs

from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs.

Can an ongoing investigation

help reveal what this bizarre artifact is?

Is it genuine? And if so, how did it find its way

to the bottom of the sea?

After his incredible underwater discovery,

Rafi Bahalul alerts Israel's antiquities authorities,

who dispatched a team to inspect and recover the artifact.

The preservation is amazing.

When you look at it, it almost looks as if it was made recently.

Like, perhaps it could be a fake,

but in fact, it's just very, very well-preserved.

[Jeremy] If genuine, it's a wonder how this tablet has survived

in such good condition, but that's not the only mystery.

It is covered in, what is unmistakably,

ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

[Jeremy] Deciphering these markings may help

reveal more about this strange stone

and perhaps even its age.

Only a handful of characters are carved into the rock,

giving Israel's leading scholars very little to go on

to decode this puzzle.

Amazingly, they are able to use

the style of the hieroglyphs

to date the tablet to a specific era.

The iconography and the inscription

that was made on that slab

was done over 3,000 years ago.

[Jeremy] It dates from the New Kingdom,

a golden age of ancient Egypt,

when this once mighty empire was at its zenith.

The markings on this stone

refer to an ancient Egyptian goddess called Seshat.

[Jeremy] Seshat is the goddess of wisdom and knowledge,

a lesser known deity seen less frequently

in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

She's usually only mentioned

in very important temples that were built by pharaohs,

so her appearance on a tablet

found underwater is very mysterious.

[Jeremy] This vital clue suggests

that the stone tablet is a small piece

of an ancient Egyptian temple.

Could the rest of it still be here

in the same patch of seabed?

[Dr. Peter B. Campbell] Is it a remnant of a lost city,

of a lost settlement?

Is it an Egyptian version of Atlantis?

A strange stone tablet is found on the sea floor,

close to the coast of Israel,

and some people think its discovery might point

to a lost settlement

hidden beneath the water.

Could it be that here we have a newly found

ancient Egyptian temple or even a city

on the seabed?

[Jeremy] It's a tantalizing possibility,

but the hopes of finding an Egyptian Atlantis

are quickly dashed by one critical anomaly

located at the bottom of the stone tablet.

It has a hole cut or shaped into its side.

[Jeremy] This circular feature is a giveaway sign

of the stone tablet's true purpose.

What we have is an almost square, rectangular stone

with a large hole cut through it.

In the Bronze Age, all anchors looked exactly like this.

[Jeremy] It's a revelation that helps explain why this stone tablet

was found under water,

but something still doesn't make sense.

Most other ancient Egyptian anchors

are plain and simple in design.

The mystery here is actually the quality of the tablet itself.

The hieroglyphs are beautifully carved.

They're very, very detailed and very clear.

They must have been carved by a highly-skilled stonemason.

They say to us that this is something very special indeed.

You might want to ask the question, well,

if it's this beautiful inscription, why,

why do something so mundane with it?

[Jeremy] Could the answer lie in ancient Egypt's reputation

as a seafaring powerhouse?

Ancient Egypt is one of the first maritime cultures in world history.

Then, as now, ships are great symbols of wealth and power,

so often Egyptian pharaohs like building really grandiose vessels

to display the monumentalism of their reign.

[Jeremy] Is this stone anchor from a mega yacht

of the ancient world,

perhaps even one belonging to a mighty pharaoh?

It's an exciting theory,

but not one that everybody is ready to accept.

So if you look closely at this stone,

it's very clear that some of the words are cut off in half.

[Jeremy] Israel's antiquities experts

also noticed this subtle detail

and more.

At the bottom of the stone,

the face of the goddess appears to have been purposely

chiseled away.

What could explain this unusual damage?

This is a common thing that we see,

where certain iconography that has meaning or has

some kind of religious or spiritual power

might be removed,

usually by people who don't believe in the same thing.

Unfortunately, this was all too common in ancient Egypt,

when one deity became less popular

or for political reasons,

people would go around defacing images of them.

[Jeremy] If this stone tablet is originally from a temple,

how did it end up in the sea?

This was clearly an architectural element from a building

that was ripped off the building

and cut up to be reused as a stone anchor.

[Dr. Peter] This appears to be some form of ancient recycling,

where a sailor needed an anchor

and found this abandoned stone

and then created an anchor out of it.

[Jeremy] The story of this strange stone tablet

appears to be solved.

But one detail remains unanswered.

The one piece that's missing from this discussion is actually about the ship

that the anchor came from.

[Jeremy] The identity of this vessel is unknown,

but archeologists suspect it may have sunk in a storm,

explaining how this anchor finally came to rest

on the seabed.

This stone tablet remains an unparalleled discovery,

one of the best preserved ancient Egyptian anchors ever found,

and researchers are planning to return to the site

where the anchor was found

hoping to unearth more treasures

from the same shipwreck.

New findings may finally reveal

where the anchor came from and who it belonged to,

thereby solving the last pieces of this puzzle.

[water bubbling]

Are we alone in the universe?

It's one of life's greatest mysteries.

With recent advancements in space exploration,

we've never been closer to knowing.

To find out where to look for extraterrestrial life

and what it might look like,

astronomers are now turning their telescopes around

and pointing them, not at the stars,

but down into the depths of the unexplored oceans.

[Jeremy] 2013,

an ROV operating in the Indian Ocean

near a drilling site records something strange.

[Dr. Dijanna] What am I looking at here?

Is it an animal?

[Jeremy] It morphs shape in front of their eyes...

...before putting on a dazzling light display.

It's only once the footage gets back to the surface

that this creature is identified

as a potentially rare shape-shifting ctenophore.

This alien-looking life form is known to science,

but what other strange creatures

could remain undiscovered

in our vast underwater world?

Seventy percent of the surface of Earth

is covered in ocean,

yet 80% is unexplored,

unobserved and unmapped.

[Jeremy] The underwater realm

includes some of the world's most extreme environments,

and it's filled with bizarre creatures.

If we can find life, even the smallest,

simplest examples of it

in unexpected places on our planet,

this does raise the notion that we could perhaps

find it in other places within our solar system.

[Jeremy] 2017,

a survey team drills holes to the seabed

through 3,000 feet of Antarctic ice sheet.

It's a very, very extreme situation,

both in terms of temperature and lack of light.

[Jeremy] These pitch black subzero waters

are one of the most hostile environments imaginable

and an unlikely place to find signs of life.

The scientists are here to collect mud samples from the sea floor,

but they are stunned by what they find

hidden away beneath the ice.

They spot 22 unidentified organisms,

unknown to science, clinging to the side of a rock.

Somehow in the darkness,

organisms managed to survive.

[Jeremy] How is this possible?

What are these unknown creatures?

When researchers drill holes

beneath the thick Antarctic ice,

they find something no one can explain.

What researchers see underneath the Antarctic ice sheet

are living creatures

that are kilometers inside the edge of the shelf.

[Jeremy] These mysterious lifeforms

appear to be unidentified types of sea storks and sponges.

Scientists do not expect to see animals in this environment.

People are most familiar with photosynthesis,

where organisms on planet Earth

get their energy from the Sun,

that would be your plants, your algae, your phytoplankton.

[Jeremy] Finding life here is so strange because

unlike most other food chains,

no light penetrates this far beneath the ice sheet.

Right now, scientists can only speculate

how these creatures survive,

but they think they might have evolved a unique way

of gathering energy.

We call it chemosynthesis,

the ability for organisms to get energy from chemicals

that they're surrounded with, as opposed to getting energy directly from the Sun.

[Jeremy] If life can survive on Earth

in even the coldest and darkest environments,

could it also survive in places even more extreme?

The bottom of the ocean is a very mysterious place,

about which we know very little.

[Jeremy] Its deepest parts are well over six miles beneath the surface.

In this hostile environment,

it's not just the lack of light

that makes it so hard for life forms to survive.

They have to be able to cope with the high pressure,

because of all of that water weight coming from above.

[Jeremy] It's a place that even scientists struggle to reach.

At these depths, the pressure is the equivalent

of putting one ton of weight on the tip of your finger.

[Jeremy] It takes specialized, reinforced submersibles to explore,

but the few people brave enough to venture this deep

have reported weird and wonderful encounters.

Life in the deep ocean

takes on forms that sometimes are even

beyond our imaginations.

[Jeremy] And incredibly, it's not just in the water,

where we are making groundbreaking discoveries.

In 2020, scientists examine core samples

taken from hundreds of feet below the sea floor

in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean.

[water bubbling]

What emerges stuns them

and biologists around the world

and could reshape our understanding of life.

When a team of scientists drill down deep beneath

the floor of the Pacific Ocean,

they find something they never expected,

life.

The core samples that emerge contain colonies of bacteria,

somehow thriving in ancient volcanic rock

below the seabed.

We're talking about rock that could be anywhere from ten million

to 100 million years old.

[Jeremy] Stranger yet, the bacteria were found

more than 400 feet beneath the sea floor...

Leaving the puzzle of how they got here

and how they survive.

When these rocks formed and then cooled on the seabed,

microcracks appeared, which were later infilled by clay minerals.

[Jeremy] Trapped deep underground,

it's speculated that the bacteria extract energy

from chemicals in the surrounding clay.

Their discovery could have radical implications

for our search for extraterrestrial life.

The key thing here is that

conditions in the deep ocean beds

are quite similar to some of the conditions on Mars.

[Jeremy] All evidence suggests

Mars was once a water world,

and though it lost its vast oceans billions of years ago,

it could still have similar types of rock below its surface.

If life can manage to survive within rocks

that are ten to 100 million years old

in the deepest parts of the ocean, then certainly

they should be able to handle the conditions that we see

on many other planets.

[Jeremy] The discovery of these incredibly hardy bacteria

could also add weight to an even more radical theory.

Could life survive in the vacuum of outer space?

[Jeremy] Some scientists speculate

that simple life could be incubated on asteroids

and other space debris

in a similar way to the bacteria found beneath

the Pacific Ocean.

We know that life first emerged on Earth

at least 3.5 billion years ago,

but the exact mechanisms

and nature behind the emergence

of the first Earth life forms remains mysterious.

[Rob Rondeau] The conventional theory is that life emerged

deep in our oceans,

around hydrothermal vents,

which spewed minerals and heat

into the surrounding water.

But there are alternative

and more controversial theories.

[Dr. Dijanna] There's one theory called panspermia.

That's the idea that life could potentially

travel from one planetary body to the next.

The idea of panspermia doesn't have a lot of evidence right now.

However, some believe that this might actually be

a reasonable explanation on how life

began here on Earth.

Discoveries being made in the deep corners of our oceans

are radically changing our understanding

of where and how life can survive.

And these insights are helping scientists continue their search

for life elsewhere in the cosmos,

and may soon even lead us to the discovery of

alien life on other worlds.