Until Piccard and Walsh’s historic dive, scientists had debated whether life could exist under such extreme pressure. After a five-hour descent, the pair spent only a scant 20 minutes at the bottom and were unable to take any photographs due to clouds of silt stirred up by their passage. Navy submersible, a bathyscaphe called the Trieste. The first and only time humans descended into the Challenger Deep was more than 50 years ago. The water pressure at the bottom of the trench is a crushing eight tons per square inch-or about a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. Permits for research in the Challenger Deep have been secured from the Federated States of Micronesia.īecause of its extreme depth, the Mariana Trench is cloaked in perpetual darkness and the temperature is just a few degrees above freezing. Permits for research in the monument, including in the Sirena Deep, have been secured from the U.S. protected zone as part of the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument, established by President George W. The majority of the Mariana Trench is now a U.S. Challenger II returned to the spot with an echo-sounder and measured a depth of nearly 7 miles (11 kilometers).

The Challenger scientists recorded a depth of 4,475 fathoms (about five miles, or eight kilometers) using a weighted sounding rope. Challenger as part of the first global oceanographic cruise. The depths of the Mariana Trench were first plumbed in 1875 by the British ship H.M.S. At the collision point, one of the plates dives beneath the other into the Earth’s mantle, creating an ocean trench. They form when two tectonic plates collide. The Mariana Trench is part of a global network of deep troughs that cut across the ocean floor.

If Mount Everest were dropped into the Mariana Trench, its peak would still be more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) underwater. territory of Guam-is nearly 7 miles (11 kilometers). The distance between the surface of the ocean and the trench’s deepest point-the Challenger Deep, which lies about 200 miles (322 kilometers) southwest of the U.S. Located in the western Pacific east of the Philippines and an average of approximately 124 miles (200 kilometers) east of the Mariana Islands, the Mariana Trench is a crescent-shaped scar in the Earth’s crust that measures more than 1,500 miles (2,550 kilometers) long and 43 miles (69 kilometers) wide on average. While thousands of climbers have successfully scaled Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth, only two people have descended to the planet’s deepest point, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench.

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