QINGDAO - Chinese research vessel Kexue successfully collected a deep-sea probe from the South China Sea Monday, which brought back 186 gigabytes of first-hand data.

The probe was put in a cold seep at a depth of 1,130 meters in the northern part of the South China Sea in early September last year.

Over the past year, it has collected 186 gigabytes of high quality data and video.

The data is important to analyze the evolution, transformation and ecological relations of the biotic community in the cold-seep ecosystem, according to scientists with the Institute of Oceanology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.