Marianas Trench is the deepest oceanic trench on the earth.
In 2009, it was established as a United States National Monument.
It’s so deep that only 3 people have ever tried going there.
So let’s discuss everything about Marianas Trench and “What if we detonated a Nuclear Bomb in the Marianas Trench?” in today’s video of DiscoverZen.
Globally, there are over 50 major ocean trenches covering an area of 1.9 million square kilometers or about 0.5% of the oceans.
But Marianas Trench is the largest of them.
It is located in the western Pacific Ocean about 200 kilometers or 124 miles east of the Mariana Islands.
It is crescent-shaped and measures about 2,550 kilometers or 1,580 miles in length, and 69 kilometers or 43 miles in width.
The maximum known depth is 10,984 meters or 36,037 feet at the southern end of its floor known as the Challenger Deep.
The Marianas Trench is part of the Izu-Bonin-Mariana subduction system that forms the boundary between two tectonic plates.
In this system, the western edge of one plate, the Pacific Plate, is subducted beneath the smaller Mariana Plate that lies to the west.
The deepest area at the plate boundary is the Marianas Trench proper.
The movement of the Pacific and Mariana plates is also indirectly responsible for the formation of the Mariana Islands.
These volcanic islands are caused by flux melting of the upper mantle due to the release of water that is trapped in minerals of the subducted portion of the Pacific Plate.
Four manned descents and three unmanned descents have been achieved.
The first was the manned descent by Swiss-designed, Italian-built, United States Navy-owned bathyscaphe Trieste which reached the bottom at 1:06 pm on 23 January 1960, with Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard on board.
This was followed by the unmanned ROVs Kaiko in 1996 and Nereus in 2009.
The first three expeditions directly measured very similar depths of 10,902 to 10,916 meters or 35,768 to 35,814 feet.
The fourth was made by Canadian film director James Cameron on 26 March 2012.
He reached the bottom of the Marianas Trench in the submersible vessel - DeepSea Challenger, diving to a depth of 10,908 meters or 35,787 feet.
In July 2015, members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Oregon State University, and the Coast Guard submerged a hydrophone into the deepest part of the Marianas Trench, the Challenger Deep, never having deployed one past a mile.
The titanium-shelled hydrophone was designed to withstand the immense pressure 7 miles under.
Victor Vescovo achieved a new record descent to 10,928 meters or 35,853 feet, on 28 April 2019, using the DSV Limiting Factor, a Triton 36000/2 model manufactured by Florida-based Triton Submarines.
He dived four times between 28 April and 5 May 2019, becoming the first person to dive into Challenger Deep more than once.
Now let’s talk about the possibility of life in the trench.
At the bottom of the trench, the water column above exerts a pressure of 1,086 bars or 15,750 PSI, which is more than 1,071 times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.
At this pressure, the density of water is increased by 4.96%.
The temperature at the bottom is 1 to 4 Degrees Celsius or 34 to 39 Degrees Fahrenheit.
At this kind of pressure, you would think that there won’t be any possible life.
Sure humans can’t withstand this pressure, but some of the sea creatures can.
The expedition conducted in 1960 claimed to have observed large creatures living at the bottom, such as a flatfish, which are about 30 centimeters or 12 inches long, and shrimps.
Many marine biologists were skeptical of the supposed sighting of the flatfish, and it is suggested that the creature may instead have been a sea cucumber.
But during the second expedition, the uncrewed vehicle Kaiko collected mud samples from the seabed, and even more, tiny organisms were found to be living in those samples.
In July 2011, a research expedition deployed untethered landers, called Drop cams, equipped with digital video cameras and lights to explore this region of the deep sea.
Among many other living organisms, some gigantic single-celled amoebas with a size of more than 10 centimeters or 4 inches, belonging to the class of Monothalamea were observed.
In December 2014, a new species of snailfish was discovered at a depth of 8,145 meters or 26,722 feet, breaking the previous record for the deepest living fish seen on video.
In May 2017, an unidentified type of snailfish was filmed at a depth of 8,178 meters or 26,800 feet.
So do you think that the place is so extreme that there is no possibility that humans can intervene in Plastics?
Yes, we are talking about pollution!!
Well, we sure did...
In 2016, a research expedition looked at the chemical makeup of crustacean scavengers collected from the range of 7,841 - 10,250 meters within the trench.
Within these organisms, the researchers found extremely elevated concentrations of PCBs, a chemical toxin banned for its environmental harm in the 1970s, concentrated at all depths within the sediment of the trench.
Further research has found that amphipods also ingest microplastics, with 100% of amphipods having at least one piece of synthetic material in their stomachs.
In 2019, Victor Vescovo reported finding a plastic bag and candy wrappers at the bottom of the trench.
That year, Scientific American also reported that Carbon-14 from nuclear bomb testing has been found in the bodies of aquatic animals found in the trench.
Now, since we already have contaminated the trench with plastics, let’s imagine detonating the most powerful thermonuclear bomb ever tested.
Yes, Tsar Bomba…
Well, you would think that the bomb will cause a tremendous explosion and a huge Tsunami will hit the pacific coast with 100’s of meters of height, and in the worst-case scenario, we will get earthquakes and nuclear winter.
But this is not true to the most extent.
Remember that the pressure is extremely high in the trench, around 1,086 bars or 15,750 PSI.
When the bomb detonates on the sea bed of Marianas Trench, it will have to deal with an immense amount of water pressure from all sides.
At first, after detonation, many meters of water and sea bodies inside the ocean will die instantly because of the heat from the explosion.
Soon, many Seismic sensors around the world will start detecting the earthquake.
But that’s about it in terms of threat to human beings on the surface.
But why?
It's because, as the bubble from the explosion increases slowly, immense water pressure will start weakening it down.
And after several minutes, the bomb will implode to nothing.
But everything won’t be so good.
Soon after the detonation, a massive amount of water in the ocean will start becoming toxic, as the explosion disintegrates into many smaller, hot, and radioactive bubbles drifting upwards.
It will be equivalent to a mushroom cloud but inside water.
And as our mighty destructive blast reaches the ocean’s surface, it won’t do anything other than bubbling plumes of radioactive warm water in the pacific.
This will kill many underwater creatures and also lead to some nuclear rainfall but won’t be something bad for us.
So, this was all about Marianas Trench and a brief speculation about a Nuclear Detonation inside it.
Now let’s discuss about something more destructive, “What if we created a Black Hole on Earth?”.
Well, that seems like a different topic to speculate and investigate on DiscoverZen.