Challenger Deep

9,800 meters.

More than 200 distinct microbes have been identified from mud recovered from the floor of the Challenger Deep.

200 from sediment samples at the deepest point on Earth, and that is a lower bound.

It reflects what could be identified from what was recovered, and recovery at this depth is difficult and destructive.

And that's level 84.

Level 85, 10,200 meters.

In 2005, researchers reported finding foraminifera living in sediment from the Challenger Deep.

Foraminifera are single-celled organisms that typically build shells, usually of calcium carbonate, in intricate chambered spirals.

You continue descending.

At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, at approximately 10,935 meters below sea level, though measurements vary slightly depending on the method used, is the Challenger Deep.

It is the deepest known point on Earth's surface.

named after HMS Challenger, a British Royal Navy corvette that conducted the first systematic scientific survey of the deep ocean between 1872 and 1876.

Later expeditions with more precise instruments revised the figure upward.

The name stuck.

On January 23, 1960, Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and United States Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh descended to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in a vehicle called the Bartheskaaf Trieste.

The Trieste was not a submarine in the conventional sense, it was a bathyscaphe, essentially an underwater balloon, a large float filled with gasoline for buoyancy, with a small spherical steel pressure capsule suspended beneath it, capable of holding two people.

They took a sounding there and found seafloor over 26,850 feet down, more than four miles deep.

The deepest place in all the oceans is near where the Challenger took its sounding, and it's called the Challenger Deep, and it's 37,800 feet down.

Can you even imagine? There's a place on Earth deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

The Challenger expedition revealed the shape of ocean basins, discovered the mid-Atlantic ridge, created the first systematic plots of currents and temperatures.

The deepest recorded natural point is 10,935 meters or 6.8 miles deep.

You might have heard of this spot, Challenger Deep.

If you put Mount Everest into the water upside down, there would still be over a mile until you get to the bottom.

It's roughly the average cruising altitude of a 737 airplane.

Mm-hmm.

And on one dive they went to the deepest part of the Challenger Deep and that was it.

Okay, so the Challenger Deep, it's deeper than Everest.

It's the deepest known point on our planet.

It's in the middle of the Pacific, just a relative stone's throw above the Mariana Islands.

And on the deep southern tip of this 1,500 mile or 2,500 kilometer long Mariana Trench is a chasm, Challenger Deep.

It was named after a mid-1800s British Royal Navy vessel that first found it.

But in 1960, the first vehicle traveled down there, and as of now only 27 earthling humans have made it to the Challenger Deep.

I am a specialist in deep water fishes, particularly things 3,000 meters and deeper.

So we're right down on the abyssal plains and then down into the super deep trenches like the Mariana Trench and Challenger Deep and those famous places.

I try to communicate the deep sea in an accurate light because everyone likes to see it as a monster show and it's hard to get good reporting and it's hard for people who want to learn to get good information without getting all that clickbait.

So about four years ago, five years ago during COVID, me and Alan Jamieson started the Deep Sea podcast to try and give people access to the deep sea facts, but also give scientists a bit more of a voice because they release these great press releases about their cool research and then it gets turned into monsters by the press anyway.

Jesus Christ owns the highest mountain and the deepest ocean.

Challenger Deep.

The deepest part that we've discovered in the ocean is over 11 kilometers down in the Mariana Trench.

You can take Mount Everest and plop it into Challenger Deep and you'll never see it again.

So deep.

The sea is his as well.

Three of these occur in the Aldridge Deep in the South Pacific near the Friendly and Kermadec Islands, where the deepest cast is five thousand one hundred fifty-five fathoms.

Four occur in the Northwest Pacific in the Challenger Deep, and the deepest cast being five thousand two hundred sixty-nine fathoms, while the greatest known depth of five thousand three hundred forty-eight fathoms was recorded in the Swire Deep off Mindanao by the German ship Planet in 1912.

This greatest known depth in the ocean is thirty-two thousand eighty-nine feet, or four hundred nine feet more than six English miles.

If the highest known mountain, Mount Everest in the Himalayas, twenty-nine thousand two feet, could be placed in this area of the Pacific, its summit would be covered by the waters of the ocean to a depth of three thousand eighty-seven feet.