Roni Essex
Freediver, Spearo, Creator
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Roni Essex
Freediver, Spearo, Creator
Just how deep does the ocean go? If you took the highest point on land and submerged it, you would still have more than a mile between you and the deepest point in the oceans. The oceans harbor 99% percent of all living space on earth and have enough water to fill a bathtub that's 685 miles long, on each side. Tech Insider explains.
Blue whales usually hunt at depths of around 330 feet within the well-lit zone of the ocean. Deeper down at 700 feet, the USS Triton became the first submarine to circumnavigate the earth in 1960. At 831 feet we reached the deepest freedive in recorded history. Down here, the pressure is 26 times greater than at the surface, which would crush most human lungs. But whales manage it, diving to a max depth of 1640 feet, where they hunt giant squid. At 2,400 feet we reach the danger zone for modern nuclear attack submarines. Any deeper and the submarine's hull would implode. 2722 feet down is where the tip of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa would reach. A little farther at 3280 feet, we are deep enough and sunlight can't reach us.
We’ve now entered the midnight zone. Many animals down here can't see, like these eyeless shrimp at 7,500 feet who thrive near scalding hot underwater volcanoes. At this depth, temperatures are just a few degrees above freezing but the waters around hydrothermal vents can heat up to 800 F. 9816 feet is the deepest any mammal has been recorded swimming, the cuvier beaked whale, but not even the Cuvier beaked whale could explore the RMS Titanic which rests at a staggering depth of 12,500 feet. The pressure is now 378 times greater than at the surface, yet you can still find sea life like the fangtooth, hagfish, and Dumbo octopus, the deepest living octopus on earth.
At 20,000 feet is the Hadal Zone, an area designated for the ocean's deepest trenches like the Mariana Trench. If we tipped Mount Everest into the Mariana Trench, its summit would reach down to 29,029 feet. That still doesn't compare to the two deepest crewed missions in history. In 2012, director James Cameron descended to 35,756 feet, for the Deep Sea Challenger Mission. But Cameron didn’t quite break the record which was set by oceanographer Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh in 1960. Picard and Walsh descended to the lowest point on earth, Challenger Deep, at a record 35,797 feet. Scientists have sent half a dozen unmanned submersibles to explore Challenger Deep, including Kaiko which collected over 350 species off the seafloor between 1995 & 2003. But scientists estimate there are potentially thousands of marine species we have yet to discover. Humans have explored an estimated 5 to 10 percent of Earth's oceans. We've only just begun to understand the deep world that flows beneath us.