Nobody has walked on the bottom of the Mariana trench, but six people have descended to it in submersibles. In 1960 the US Navy submersible Trieste made a dive with two crew on board, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh.
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.
In 1960, Navy Lt. Don Walsh (along with Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard) became the first person to descend to the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.
Last year an expedition to the Mariana Trench made history by conducting the deepest crewed dive ever completed as it descended 10,927 metres into the Challenger Deep.
Only three people have ever made it to the Challenger Deep. The first two did it 59 years ago this week: Navy Lt. Don Walsh, a submariner, and explorer Jacques Piccard. Walsh's engineering background allowed him to be a test pilot for the Trieste, a deep-diving research submersible purchased on behalf of the Navy.
As humans, we are unable to venture very far into the Mariana Trench due to the bone-crushing pressure deep beneath the ocean's surface. It is so strong that most deep-sea machinery struggles to function, making data collection very difficult.
You can't breath at the bottom of the ocean. If you can't breath, your body won't stay alive for more than about 30 minutes.
The deepest part of the ocean is called the Challenger Deep and is located beneath the western Pacific Ocean in the southern end of the Mariana Trench, which runs several hundred kilometers southwest of the U.S. territorial island of Guam. Challenger Deep is approximately 10,935 meters (35,876 feet) deep.
More than eighty percent of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored. Much remains to be learned from exploring the mysteries of the deep.
One reason the Mariana Trench is so deep, he added, is because the western Pacific is home to some of the oldest seafloor in the world—about 180 million years old. Seafloor is formed as lava at mid-ocean ridges. When it's fresh, lava is comparatively warm and buoyant, riding high on the underlying mantle.
The most recent visit to the Mariana trench was in March 2021 by British-American adventurer and video game designer Richard Garriott, who became the first person to visit both North and South poles, orbit Earth aboard the International Space Station and dive to the deepest part of the ocean.
On 26 March 2012, Cameron reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. The maximum depth recorded during this record-setting dive was 10,908 metres (35,787 ft). Measured by Cameron, at the moment of touchdown, the depth was 10,898 m (35,756 ft).
The deepest depth a submarine has gone is 10,925 meters (35,843 feet) by the Deepsea Challenger in 2012. This was a manned submersible, not a military submarine. The pressure at this depth is over 1,000 times that at the surface, which is why only a few submersibles have been able to go this deep.
Most of our world is still shrouded in mystery
You'd think that in humanity's three hundred thousand-year history, we'd be intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of Earth. Unsurprisingly, we aren't. In fact, 65% of our planet remains unexplored, most of which lies beneath the oceans.
The discovery of microbial mats — bizarre-looking, filamentlike clumps of microorganisms — living off chemicals from altered rocks 35,803 feet (10,912 meters) beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean comes from samples and video collected by an unmanned lander, part of movie director James Cameron's mission to the ...
At the very bottom of the Mariana trench lies the Challenger deep, the lowest point on earth that we know of it was discovered by the HMS Challenger during the first ever global Marine research expedition whose crew used weighted ropes to measure its depths.
At What Depth Will Water Crush You? Water won't crush your whole body but after the 1,000 feet (305m) mark, your body would find it extremely difficult to breathe. A bit further below that depth, your ribcage would most likely break.
The bathysphere was the first deep-sea sub that hit bottom in 1960 and was crewed. It doesn't take as long to travel to the bottom as you may think — it would take a rock only an hour to sink into the freezing darkness. The trench has a long history of robotic and human visitors.
Today we know sea monsters aren't real--but a living sea animal, the giant squid, has 10 arms and can grow longer than a school bus.
The Mysterious Organisms Living in the Mariana Trench
There are some interesting looking animals down in the Mariana Trench! Some of these strange organisms include Anglerfish, the Dumbo Octopus, the Frilled Shark, the Goblin Shark, the Telescope Octopus, Snailfish, and even Zombie Worms!
The remains of the Titanic are 12,500 feet deep. Experts say the pressure at that depth is between 370-380 bars.
The Titanic wreckage, which is about 12,500 feet deep in the North Atlantic, is in the midnight zone. That's as deep as about nine Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other.