11 kilometers below the Pacific Ocean and Mariana Trench, the deepest place in the world and one of the most mysterious places in the world. Its inaccessibility is what has fueled this legend over the years.
The Mariana River was discovered by accident. The Challenger Expedition, which began in 1875, attempted to measure the depth of the Pacific Ocean by sound using something as simple as ballast tied to a rope. He it’s a shameas the control cable is known, it quickly descended to the deepest point of the site: 8,188 meters. After some time it was discovered that it was very deep.
The Mariana Trench is named for its proximity Mariana Islands, named in honor of the Spanish Queen Mariana of Austria (1634-1696), wife of Philip IV.
After the sound was discovered, the search at sea was intense and the area was reminiscent of the dangerous waters that Captain Nemo had passed through on his journey in ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’, published six years earlier. What the writer Jules Verne dreamed of seemed to have come true, but modern technology was not enough to reveal all the secrets that this enclave had.
Location of the Mariana Trench / Organizations
For any animal, moving to that depth and surviving that means to withstand a force one thousand times greater than that of a ship. Total darkness 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 tours have come to an end
No one could see what the depths hid until January 23, 1960. That’s when Jacques Picardalong with US Navy Lieutenant Donald Wash, managed to reach the depths of the ocean in a bathyscaphe – a small submersible – called Triestedesigned and built by his father, Auguste Piccard. The descent took five hours and the two men were under the sea for twenty minutes before the ascent, which took three hours and fifteen minutes. There he was able to see the legendary giant squirrel for the first time. ArchiteuthisThe unknown type of species is the only species that have never been seen before, which shows the diversity of that unknown environment.
Trieste bathyscaphe, the first to take people into the Mariana Trench / Quickly
In 2012, the filmmaker who gave life to TitanicJames Cameron, He decided to repeat what Piccard had done. Cameron dived solo to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Deepsea Challenger, and collected previously unknown data and samples. It took James Cameron eight hours to reach a depth of more than 10,900 meters in the Mariana Trench. A descent that filled him with pride after years of research and work.
The last trips to the pit were back late 2019 and early 2021. In 2019 the American businessman went down Victor Vescovo increase in submersible Limiting Factor. And on November 10, 2021, a this submarine Fendouzhe it went down to a hole of 10,909 meters, operated by three researchers with the aim of finding new samples and images that will help us to continue to find the life and the condition of the bottom of the sea.
2. More meters than Everest
This fruit garden of underwater life is located at an altitude of 10,929 meters at the southern end of a small basin that exists on the site. However, there are other measurements that place its depth up to 11,000 meters.
Even so, the tunnel is so deep that its height exceeds the tallest mountain in the world: Mount Everest. He Everest Its height is 8,848 meters, So if you could completely submerge yourself in this underwater hole, the top of the mountain would still have water about 2,000 meters above it.
3. It is made and cut
The Mariana Trench was formed through a geological process called subduction. This happens when Two tectonic plates collide, and the heavy one passes under the other. As a result, it produces a lot of depression under water. There are several types of subduction. In the case of the Marianas trench, like the Japan and Puerto Rico trenches, it was formed by the collision of two oceanic lithosphere plates. When this happens, there are often volcanic eruptions that create wing-shaped islands and, with them, these underwater channels are created.
Great depth in the area / Five Deep
Another limiting factor is what happens when a continental plate and an ocean collide. It is mostly an ocean under the continent and large volcanic eruptions create volcanoes. An example of this is the Andes mountains.
4. Challenger, the lowest point
Challenger Deep is the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. Its depth is between 10,902 and 10,929 meters. It was named after the British Royal Navy ship HMS Challenger, which participated in the discovery of the hole in 1875. The pressure in the abyss is about 1,095 times that of the surface. This is a point that many expeditions have tried to reach, but understandably, it is one of the most unexplored in the world due to the technical difficulties involved in its descent.
The second deepest point in the ocean is the one called Sirena Deep, located in the Mariana River, 200 kilometers east of the first, with a depth of 10,809 meters.
5. A life preserver in the harshest environment
The depth of the Marianas is a place where life is very difficult because of the conditions that exist: more than 1,000 atmospheres of pressure – while the surface is one -, 4 degrees of temperature and life completely in the dark. However, there are animals and organisms that are adapted to live in these conditions. Moat has a unique environment created by planktonshiny fish and even a giant octopus that looks like something out of a fantasy book.
Expeditions that have managed to reach great depths have encountered eels, organisms similar to sea sponges and transparent fish. When Piccard descended, he found that he had landed “under a fine layer of mud full of diatoms.”
After some time, in 2011, it was discovered that there were xenophyophores at the bottom of the abyss. They may look like sea sponges, but the truth is that they are microscopic organisms that form ‘pseudostructures’, that is, they are made up of a certain group that makes them look very complex, but they are still single-celled giants.
In September 2018, at the Peru-Chile cemetery, a the deepest fish ever discovered. The animals had gelatinous tissue shape, is very flexible and ‘melts’ when the pressure and temperature are different from the hole. One of them is the Mariana snail (Pseudoliparis swirei), found more than 8,000 meters below sea level. Small and graceful in appearance, the snail fish can withstand the force equivalent to the weight of 1,600 elephants, according to scientists.
Strange creatures fill the bottom of the pit / Pinterest
6. National monument
Today, many of the trenches are protected areas in the United States, recognized as part of the National Trench Marine Monument. A place, the Pacific Ocean, which has some of the oldest places on earth, about 180 million years. One of the reasons that can explain the depth of the place.
7. Pollution reaches the ground
In 2019, the explorers of the Five Deeps expedition, led by the American businessman and sailor Victor Vescovo, went down to the center of the Mariana Trench and discovered surprisingly that iEven in such remote areas they used to swim in a plastic bag with the remains of sweets.
“It has been disappointing to see that there is pollution of human origins in the center of the earth,” Vescovo admitted in a statement to Reuters, where he warned that the lake is being treated as “a huge dumping ground for garbage.”
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Contact the Environment department: crisisclimatica@prensaiberica.es
