11 kilometers below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, The Mariana Trench is the deepest point on the planet and one of the most mysterious places on earth.. Its inaccessibility is perhaps what fueled the legend for decades.
The Mariana Trench was discovered by accident. Sailing in 1875, the Challenger Expedition attempted to measure the depth of the Pacific by drilling using something as simple as a weight attached to a rope. HE scandal, how is this conical plumb known, it quickly slid deep into the ground: 8,188 meters. After a while, it was learned that it was much deeper.
The Mariana Trench gets its name from its proximity. The Mariana Islands, named after the Queen of Spain, Mariana of Austria (1634-1696), IV. Felipe’s wife.
When the abyss was discovered, sea exploration was in full swing, and the area was reminiscent of the rough waters Captain Nemo had traversed on his adventures in ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’, published just six years ago. What writer Jules Verne had dreamed of seemed to come true, but back then, technology was insufficient to unlock all the secrets this enclave contains.
For any animal, to go to such a depth and survive in it, It can withstand a pressure a thousand times higher than sea level. The darkness is complete and the temperature is only a few degrees. There are many who have tried, but only three expeditions have managed to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
1. Four manned expeditions hit bottom
No one could see what those depths were hiding until January 23, 1960. It was then Jacques PicardAccompanied by US Navy Lieutenant Donald Wash, he was able to reach maximum sea depth in a small submersible ship submerged. TriesteIt was designed and built by his father, Auguste Piccard. The descent took five hours, and the two men remained on the ocean floor for about twenty minutes before ascent, which took 3 hours and 15 minutes. The legendary giant squid was first spotted there. architeuthisAn unknown variant of a single and a few species never seen before shows the exception of this unknown ecosystem.
Filmmaker James Cameron, who brought Titanic to life in 2012, He decided to repeat Piccard’s success. By diving alone to the bottom of the Challenger Deep with a submarine called the Deepsea Challenger, Cameron collected previously unknown data and samples. It took James Cameron eight hours to reach a depth of just over 10,900 meters in the Mariana Trench. A descent that filled it with pride after years of research and study.
The last manned expeditions to the ditch, End of 2019 and beginning of 2021. American businessman landed in 2019 Victor Vescovo The Limiting Factor is on the submersible ship. And on November 10, 2021, Chinese Fendouzhe submarine It descended 10,909 meters from the trench led by the three researchers to obtain new specimens and images that will allow us to continue to explore the species and what this place on the seafloor was like.
2. More meters than Everest
This underwater life garden is located at the southern end of the existing small valley on the ground at a maximum depth of 10,929 meters. But there are some measurements that put its depth up to 11,000 meters.
In any case, this trench is so deep that its height will even surpass Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. Everest’s height is 8,848 meters, So if you could fully immerse yourself in this underwater hole, there would still be about 2,000 meters of water above the mountain peak.
3. Created by Lost
The Mariana Trench was formed by a geological event called subduction. when does this happen Two tectonic plates collide and the heavier plate is pushed under the other.. As a result, it creates a large depression in the underwater floor. There are various forms of loss. In the case of the Mariana Trench, like the Japan Trench and the Puerto Rico Trench, it was produced by the collision of two plates of the oceanic lithosphere. When this happens, there is a lot of volcanic activity that often creates arc-shaped islands, along with which these underwater trenches are formed.
Another subduction situation is what happens when a continental plate collides with an oceanic plate. It is the ocean that normally lies below the continent, and intense volcanism creates mountain ranges. An example of this is the Andes Mountains.
4. Challenger, lowest point
The Challenger Deep is the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. Its depth is between 10,902 and 10,929 meters. It is named after the British Royal Navy ship HMS Challenger, which participated in the discovery of the trench in 1875. The pressure of the cliff is about 1,095 times the surface pressure. This is the point most expeditions try to reach, but logically it is also one of the least explored spots in the world, given the technical difficulty in landing.
The second deepest point in the ocean is the Sirena Depth with a depth of 10,809 meters, also located in the Mariana Trench 200 kilometers east of the first.
5. Reservoir for life in extreme conditions
The depths of the Marianas are a place where life is very difficult due to the prevailing conditions: when there is an atmosphere on the surface, a pressure of more than 1,000 atmospheres, a temperature of 4 degrees and a life in complete darkness. After all, there are animals and organisms that have adapted to living in these conditions. The moat holds a unique ecosystem that it creates. plankton, glowing fish, and even giant squids that look like they’re straight out of fantasy novels.
The expeditions, which managed to go down quite deep, encountered eels, marine spongy organisms and transparent fish. Piccard stated that when he dug deep, he landed on “a beautiful mud floor full of diatoms.”
Much later, in 2011, it was discovered that the bottom of the cliff harbored xenophiophores. They are beings that may look like sea sponges, but in reality they are microorganisms organized into ‘false structures’, that is, forms with a certain organization that make them seem more complex, but they are still giant single-celled beings.
In the Peru-Chile trench in September 2018, The deepest fish ever found. The animals had a gelatinous texture. characteristic, not very consistent and ‘melting’ when pressure and temperature are different from the trough. One of them is the Mariana snail (Pseudoliparis swirei), was discovered more than 8,000 meters below sea level. According to scientists, the snail fish, which looks small and translucent, can withstand pressure equivalent to the weight of 1,600 elephants.
6. National Monument
To date, most of the trench is a United States protected area that is considered part of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. A place in the Pacific Ocean that is home to some of the world’s oldest seabeds, about 180 million years old. One of the reasons explaining the depth of this place.
7. Pollution hits bottom
In 2019, the explorers of the Five Deeps expedition led by American businessman and diver Victor Vescovo descended to the deepest point of the Mariana Trench and were stunned by what they saw.Even at such great depths the remains of a plastic bag and candy wrapper floated.
“It was disappointing to see human-made pollution at the deepest point on the planet,” Vescovo told Reuters. abandoned.”
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