China’s Jiaolong manned deep-sea submersible completes 300th dive

China's Jiaolong manned deep-sea submersible on Sunday completed its 300th dive since its maiden mission in August 2009.

Jiaolong, aboard China's Deep Sea No. 1 research vessel for the 2024 Western Pacific scientific expedition mission, arrived at the first operating area in the Western Pacific Ocean at around 22:00 Beijing time on Saturday, and conducted its first dive in the designated area on Sunday.

Jiaolong is scheduled to make 17 more dives in three operating areas to investigate seamount biota and understand the location, environments and biome composition of seamounts.

Jiaolong is China's first independently designed and integrated 7,000-meter-class manned submersible, and has set a diving record of 7,062 meters in the Mariana Trench in June 2012.

A group of Chinese and foreign scientists from countries including Canada, Spain, and Colombia, set sail on Aug 10 from Qingdao City in east China's Shandong Province to conduct the 45-day scientific mission.

The mission is organized by the China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association under the Ministry of Natural Resources and implemented by the National Deep Sea Center.

The gross domestic product (GDP) of China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) reached 301 billion Macanese pataca (MOP) (about 37.5 billion U.S. dollars) for the first three quarters of 2024, marking a real year-on-year growth of 11.5 percent, according to data from the Statistics and Census Service of the Macao SAR Government on Monday.

This marks the first time since 2019 that Macao's GDP for the first three quarters has surpassed the 300 billion MOP level, with service exports increasing by 11.4 percent year on year.

With continued improvement in Macao's local economic conditions and job market, residents' incomes have increased, driving steady growth in private consumption. In the first three quarters of this year, the consumer expenditure rose by 5.8 percent year on year.