The two lowest points on the planet are located in the deepest trench on Earth.
The trench is in the Western Pacific, just east of the Mariana Islands. The region surrounding the trench is home to many unique environments, including active mud volcanoes and marine life that is adapted to pressures 1,000 times that of sea level.
The deepest spot in the ocean is called the Challenger Deep. The Challenger Deep d is difficult to measure from the surface, but in 2010 it was pegged at 36,070 feet by using sound waves. The deepest spot in Challenger Deep was found using pressure sensors. Other estimates are less than 1,000 feet.
The second-deepest place in the ocean is in the Mariana Trench. The east of Challenger Deep lies the Sirena Deep, which is 10,809 feet deep.
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Everest is taller than the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, which is 7,044 feet below sea level.
The longest trench in the world is the Mariana Trench, which is more than five times the length of the Grand Canyon. The trench is only 43 miles wide.
The U.S. has jurisdiction over Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. In 2009, former President George W. Bush established the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument, a protected marine reserve for the approximately 195,000 square miles (506,000 square km) of seafloor and waters surrounding the remote islands. Most of the Mariana Trench is included in the monument.
The process that creates the Mariana Trench is called a subduction zone, where two massive slabs of oceanic crust collide. At a subduction zone, one piece of oceanic crust is pulled underneath the other, sinking into the Earth's mantle. A deep trench forms above the bend in the sinking crust where the two pieces intersect. The Philippine crust is being affected by the Pacific Ocean crust.
The trench is 180 million years old and the Pacific crust is 180 million years old. The Pacific plate is older than the Philippine plate.
It is not the closest spot to the center of Earth. The planet bulges at the equator, so the radius at the poles is less than at the equator. The Challenger Deep is closer to the center of the Earth.
The floor of the trench has a crushing water pressure of more than 8 tons per square inch. This is the equivalent of having 50 jumbo jets piled on top of a person.
The crescent-shaped arcs of the Mariana Trench and a chain of volcanoes rise above the ocean waves. There are many strange undersea volcanoes that intersect with the islands.
Liquid carbon dioxide is released from the Eifuku submarine volcano. The temperature at which the liquid comes out of the chimneys is 217 degrees Fahrenheit. There is a pool of molten sulfur 1,345 feet below the ocean surface at the Daikoku submarine volcano.
Life in these harsh conditions has been discovered by recent scientific expeditions. Animals living in the deepest parts of the Mariana Trench are in complete darkness and are under extreme pressure, according to a PhD student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The deep gorge of the Mariana Trench is far from land. Gallo told Live Science that dead plankton must drop thousands of feet to reach Challenger Deep, and that plant material rarely finds its way into the bottom of the trench. Some microbes rely on chemicals, such as methane or sulfur, while other creatures kill marine life below them on the food chain.
The three most common organisms at the bottom of the Mariana Trench are small sea cucumbers and amphipods.
Gallo said that these are some of the deepest holothurians ever observed.
The single-celled xenophyophores look like giant amoebas and eat by surrounding and absorbing their food. Amphipods are usually found in deep-sea trenches, but how they survived down there was a bit of a mystery. Japanese researchers found that at least one species of the Mariana Trench dwellers uses aluminum to shore up its shell.
The zone east of the Challenger Deep was also spotted by scientists during the 2012 expedition. There are clumps of microbes that feed on hydrogen and methane.
A fish that looks vulnerable is one of the region's top predators. Scientists collected specimen of the Mariana snailfish, which lives at a depth of about 26,200 feet. The snailfish is small, pink and scaleless, but it is full of surprises, according to a study published that year in the journal Zootaxa. The study authors wrote that the animal seems to dominate in this environment, going deeper than any other fish, and exploiting the absence of competitors by goingbbling up the plentiful prey.
The deep ocean can be a dumping ground for pollutants and litter. In a study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, a research team led by scientists at the United Kingdom'sNewcastle University showed that human-made chemicals are still present in the deepest parts of the ocean.
The researchers discovered high levels of pollutants in the amphipods they were sampling from the trenches. A study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution included polychlorinated biphenyls and polybrominated diphenyl ethers, chemicals commonly used as electrical insulators and flame retardants. The POPs were released into the environment through industrial accidents and landfill leaks from the 1930s until the 1970s when they were finally banned.
We still think of the deep ocean as being remote and pristine, but our research shows that this could not be further from the truth.
The amphipods in the study had the same levels of pollution as those found in Suruga Bay, one of the most polluted industrial zones of the northwest Pacific.
POPs can't degrade naturally, so they reach the bottom of the ocean by way of contaminated plastic debris and dead animals. The pollutants are carried from creature to creature through the ocean's food chain, resulting in higher than surface level pollution.
The long term, devastating impact that humankind is having on the planet is brought home by the fact that we found such extraordinary levels of pollutants in one of the most remote and inaccessible habitats on Earth.
Plastic pollution is invading the world's oceans and the Mariana Trench is not immune. Microplastics were found to be common in the lowest waters of the Mariana Trench in a paper published in the journal Geochemical Perspectives.
The people have been exploring the Trench for a long time.
The article was updated on May 16, 2022, with additional reporting by Elizabeth Dohrer, Live Science contributors.
Amos, May 12. The deep sea sub is 10 km down. The news is from the science environment. May 10, 2022.
M. Carolwicz was published on April 14. There is a new view of the deepest trench. NASA Earth Observatory has a new view of the deepest trench. May 10, 2022.
B. Embley wrote about May 4. There is a window into an active volcano. The ocean explorer is on the noaa.gov website.
J. V., A. A., B. R., and Beaudoin were all present. How deep is the mariana trench? The Marine Geodesy, 37(1), 1 was published in 13th of July.
Greenaway, S. F., Sullivan, K. D., Umfress, S. H., Beittel, A. B., and Wagner, K. D. A general method for precise, pressure-derived depths in the Ocean is included in the revised depth of the Challenger Deep. Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers was published in 2011.
Jamieson, A. J., Malkocs, T., Piertney, S. B., Fujii, T., and Zhang, Z. There are persistent organic pollutants in the deepest ocean fauna. Nature Ecology and Evolution is a book.
A.J. Jamieson wrote about February 14. Comment: How we found pollution-poisoned crustaceans. The press office of the university.
There are two types of dives: Challenger Deep and Sirena Deep. May 10, 2022.
The monument is called the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a website. May 10, 2022.
A group of people wrote a letter to the editor in the journal. The deepest part of the ocean is polluted with microplastics. The journal "geochemical Perspectives Letters" was published in the year 2013.
May 10, 2022, is the date of the expedition to the Mariana Trench.
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