Do you know where the deepest part of the earth is? It is located in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
Located in the western Pacific Ocean, about 200 km east of the Mariana Islands, the Mariana Trench is the deepest ocean trench on Earth. It is crescent-shaped, about 2550 km long and 69 km wide. The known maximum depth is around 11,000 meters. If you assume that Mount Everest is placed at this point in the trench, its peak will still be more than 2 kilometers underwater and cannot be exposed to the surface.
The Mariana Trench is named after the nearby Mariana Islands, which were named las-Mariana Islands in honor of Queen Mariana of Austria, the widow of Philip IV of Spain. The islands are part of an arc of islands formed on a cover plate on the west side of the trench known as the Mariana Plate.
This is the darkest place in the ocean, with almost no visible light, and it is both the least explored place and a place of great appeal to scientists and adventurers alike. What's at the bottom of it? In May 2017, an unknown type of lionfish was photographed at a depth of 8,178 meters, at a depth of 8,200 meters in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world's ocean in the Western Pacific Ocean.
An unknown type of lionfish was photographed at a depth of 8,178 meters
This is the deepest fish ever found by humans, it is called the "snail fish", its body is translucent, unbelievable, it can withstand this extreme underwater pressure to survive, here, you will not see any other fish or vertebrates, because this pressure is too much for this creature. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the water pressure is 108.6 million pascals (MPa), or 1071.8 standard atmospheres. At this pressure, the density of the water increases by 5%. The bottom temperature is 1 to 4 °C
The British ship Challenger first discovered trenches in 1875. On January 23, 1960, the first manned descent into the Mariana Trench was carried. The first was a manned descent by the Swiss-designed, Italian-made submarine Trieste, which reached the bottom of the sea on the afternoon of 23 January 1960, using iron bombs as ballast and gasoline as buoyancy. The onboard system showed a depth of 11,521 meters, but was later modified to 10,916 meters.
Why is the Mariana Trench so deep?
Why is the Mariana Trench so deep? Because the Mariana Trench is part of the Izu-Bonin-Mariana subduction system, it forms the boundary between the two tectonic plates. In this system, the western edge of a plate, the Pacific Plate, is pushed downwards below the smaller Mariana Plate located in the west. The crustal material at the western edge of the Pacific Plate is some of the oldest oceanic crusts on Earth, so the temperature is lower and denser, and the movement of the Pacific Plate and the Mariana Plate also indirectly led to the formation of the Mariana Islands. These volcanic islands are caused by the flux melting of the upper mantle, which is trapped in minerals in the subduction section of the Pacific Plate.
The Chinese manned submersible "Strivers"
At 8:12 on November 10, 2020, the Chinese manned submersible "Strivers" successfully dived more than 10,000 meters in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, and successfully sat on the bottom, sitting at a depth of 10,909 meters. It has set a new record for manned deep diving in China and is the first time in the world that 3 people have been taken to the deepest part of the ocean at the same time.
It is believed that as humans continue to explore, more secrets about the Mariana Trench will be discovered.