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Google Maps is wonderful. Look what I found:

Challenger Deep

For those unfamiliar with this place (the little island barely visible at the top left corner is Guam), Challenger Deep is the world's deepest ocean trench, at 10,911 metres (35,797 feet) deep. This is around seven vertical miles below the ocean surface.

Challenger Deep is a surreal place, a place that has been visited by fewer than a dozen human beings - more humans have walked upon the surface of the Moon than have descended to the floor of Challenger Deep. Totally lightless, because light cannot penetrate the ocean to anything like that depth, it is, believe it or not, an abode of life: there are fish species living at that depth. Not to mention a unique collection of marine invertebrates.

These are creatures that we will probably never see alive in an aquarium. For one, they need total darkness. For another, they need a constant 4°C. For a third, they need pressure. LOTS of it. The pressure at the bottom of Challenger Deep is 75 tons per square inch - that is, wait for it, a whopping 11,200 atmospheres. Just to construct a container to hold water at that pressure would be a massive engineering undertaking: to build an aquarium that one could peer into, holding water at that pressure, is probably going to remain a pointless exercise in perpetuity. But, there are fishes living at that enormous depth, and other creatures too.

On the map linked above, Challenger Deep is the big black gash in the ocean (which is otherwise a nice deep blue): it's possible to see the dropoff from the continental shelf to the abyss. Jacques Picard descended this abyss in the bathyscaphe Triesteway back in 1960, and it took five hours to reach the bottom. Just to get to that depth requires a superbly well-engineered submersible: the thought of something going wrong at seven miles down doesn't bear thinking about. A very lonely place to die if your craft malfunctions.

This is one of those places that inspires a 50-50 split in thinking - between "astounding adventure" and "scares the living daylights out of me".

Even so, if someone offered me the chance to visit it, I think I might overcome my worries and go for it. Because I'd see things that only four or five other people in the whole of human history have seen. A scary, but compelling place to visit ...


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Wow Cali! Thank you for sharing! Awesome.

More commonly known, or at least better known to me, as the Marianas Trench.

Google Maps is quite a piece of work. It is pretty strange to look at satellite images of your own town and pick out your car in a parking lot.

Last edited by solongNthxforallthefish at 04-Jul-2005 20:41

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The aquarist is one who must learn the ways of the biologist, the chemist, and the veterinarian.

Cusk eel/10.

Last edited by Cup_of_Lifenoodles at 05-Jul-2005 02:59