Our lovely little planet boasts some pretty extreme places. The soaring heights of Everest,
the searing temperatures of Death Valley and the impossible conditions of the Antarctic.
Earth has all manner of fascinating nooks and crannies. But today we’re going to be
exploring the…
...very, very deep ones. That’s right… we’ll be locating the deepest point on Earth,
...which may not be where you think.
I’m Stu, this is Debunked, and we’re here to sort the truths from the myths, and the
facts from the misconceptions.
So… the deepest point on Earth. Seems simple enough. I mean, there can only be one deepest
point, right?
[Mocking laughter] HA… wrong!
Turns out, there’s a number of deepest point candidates which all fit the bill in their
own special way. Ultimately, the answer to the question “What’s the deepest point
on Earth?” is, rather annoyingly… “it depends”. Are we talking about naturally-occurring
or manmade deepness? Are we measuring from surface level or from sea level? What about
the deepest point that we humans can actually visit?
Let’s start with something nice and easy; the lowest naturally-occuring exposed point
on dry land.
The winner in this quite specific category of deepness goes to the shores of the Dead
Sea.
Located 80 kilometres, nearly X miles away from the Mediterranean Sea, the famous salt
lake
sits between Israel, Palestine’s West Bank, and Jordan.
Named for its extremely high salinity,
almost 10 times that of the ocean, which makes life impossible for any organisms larger than
bacteria,
...the Dead Sea lies at an elevation of 432.65 metres (or 1,419 feet) below sea level, at
this depth the Empire state building would only just poke it’s spire above sea level
/ water.
But surprisingly...
the Dead Sea’s surface level is actually dropping by more than 1 meter / 3 feet each
year. But don’t worry it will eventually reach a sort of equilibrium and not completely
evaporate away.
These shores may be pretty deep, but we can go much, much deeper.
And for this, we need to head underground, into the wonderful world of cave systems.
Turns out, the autonomous region of Abkhazia, legally a part of Georgia in Western Asia,
is chock full of enormous chuffin’ caves. Indeed, Abkhazia (ab·kei·zhee·uh) is home
to the four deepest caves on Earth.
The deepest of these was thought to be Krubera Cave, which stretches down to 2,198 metres
(or 7,208 feet) beneath the surface.
But in 2018, further exploration of the Veryovkina Cave, located only a few kilometres away,
confirmed it as the lowest naturally-occuring point underground, plunging down to a depth
of 2,212 metres (or 7,257 feet), which is about 2.6 burj khalifas stacked on top of
each other and shoved under ground! But, despite this incredible depth below the Earth’s
surface, you’re actually still above sea level.
Although further exploration is likely to discover deeper passages, Caves will unfortunately
only get you so far. There are natural wonders far deeper that do still lie above ground.
Technically.
Discovered in 2019 there is a canyon located in eastern Antarctica that plummets to a depth
of 3,500 metres (or 11,500 feet) below sea level.
That’s roughly 8 times deeper than the shores of the Dead Sea, and almost as deep as the
average depth of the ocean. Now that’s deep.
To put this canyon into more perspective, if you took the deepest point of the Grand
Canyon (6000FT / 1830m) and sunk it below sea level, it would only be about half the
depth of this thing.
Sadly, this incredible natural wonder is unvisitable, as it’s currently covered by an enormous
glacier, so you’d need to smash your way through millions of tons of ice to get to
the bottom of the Denman Canyon. However it is still ‘technically’ the lowest naturally-occuring
location above ground on Earth.
But why bother digging your way through all that ice when us humans have already dug a
mine deeper than the world’s deepest canyon?!
Let’s travel to South Africa and say Sawubona to the Mponeng Gold Mine (Sawubona = [pig]
Sow-ooo-bonner)
First commissioned in 1987, the world’s deepest mine now sits at staggering 4 kilometers
/ 2.5 miles below the surface, and an ongoing expansion project will push this to 4.27 km
/ 2.65 miles deep. That’s as deep as 4 of South Africa’s Table Mountains stacked on
top of each other.
Digging this deep into the Earth's crust means dealing with constant seismic activity - Mponeng
experiences around 600 earthquakes every month!
And the miners work in unbearable conditions where the surrounding rock is 60 degrees celsius
or 140 degrees fahrenheit and humidity levels can exceed 95%!
Alright - so far we’ve talked about deep lake shores, canyons, caves and mines, all
of which are impressively profound in their own right. But let’s stop pussy-footing
around and mosy on down to the legitimate King of the Deep.
For that, we’re going to head east, and down several thousand metres below the ocean
surface, to the southern end of the Mariana Trench. Here we find a crescent-shaped channel
in the ocean floor over 2 and half thousand kilometres (or 1 and half thousand miles long
and 69 kilometres (43 miles) wide.
Here in 1875, using little more than weighted ropes, HMS Challenger recorded a depth 8,184
meters, that’s 26,850 feet.
76 years later another British vessel, unoriginally named the HMS Challenger II, set out to investigate
these extreme depths and recorded a maximum depth of 10,863 metres (or 35,640 feet).
Now known as the Challenger Deep, if you flipped Everest upside down and plunged it into this
area of the Mariana Trench, the summit would still be over 2 kilometers away from the sea
floor!
In the following decades, numerous scientific surveys and expeditions have attempted to
ascertain the exact depth of the Challenger Deep.
In 1960, the first descent to the sea floor of the Challenger Deep was completed by two
oceanographers aboard a deep-sea submersible. After a descent lasting almost five hours,
the pair finally reached a depth of 10,911 metres (or 35,797 feet), where they stayed
for only 20 minutes owing to a worrying crack appearing in one of the outer window panes
on the way down. Yikes.
At that depth, it’s not hard to see why. The water pressure in the Mariana Trench reaches
up to eight tons per square inch, or roughly a thousand times the standard atmospheric
pressure at sea level.
As a result, only certain species, such as sea cucumbers, scale worms, and other simple
organisms, are able to survive in this brutal environment.
Despite numerous dives, it has proven difficult to nail down an exact depth, and sources frequently
differ on the precise figure.
Luckily, however, there’s the General Bathymetric [BATH-uh-MEH-trik] Chart of the Oceans, which
as you might have guessed is a map of the world’s oceans.
The eggheads behind this authoritatively state the maximum depth of the Challenger Deep as
10,920 metres (or 35,827 feet).
Regardless, even the most conservative measurements confirm the Challenger Deep as the deepest
point on Earth.
But wait. There’s more. You see, the Challenger Deep is only the deepest
naturally-occuring point on Earth. Humans have actually managed to go even deeper.
Join me as we travel to the Soviet Union in 1970!
Here the Soviets began work on a scientific project with one simple aim - to drill as
deep as possible into the Earth’s crust.
Beginning as a reverse equivalent to the Cold War ‘Space Race’, they began drilling
directly downwards in the extreme northwestern region of Russia, comfortably inside the Arctic
Circle.
Though ‘Project Mohole’ - an American attempt...
...to do the same thing off the coast of the Mexican island of Guadalupe - was ultimately
abandoned in 1966 due to funding issues and political opposition,
...the Russians eventually achieved greater success.
Known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole, this unfathomably deep excavation actually consists
of a central hole with several smaller holes branching out from it; the deepest of these
is named SG-3.
After almost 20 years of drilling, SG-3 reached a truly staggering depth of 12,262 metres
(or 40,230 feet),
...over 10% deeper than the Challenger deep! At this depth,
further drilling was made impossible by unexpectedly high temperatures of up to 180 degrees celsius
(or 356 degrees fahrenheit).
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the project was eventually
abandoned, and all that is left at the opening of the world’s deepest hole is an inconspicuous
rusty metal cap in a concrete floor, surrounded by the remnants of the partially-destroyed
research station.
Though the 23 centimetre (or 9 inch) wide SG-3 reached only around a third of the way
down through the Earth’s Crust, at 12.2 kilometres (or about 7.5 miles) deep,
it remains the deepest point on Earth ever reached to this very day.
In a previous video we gave you a brief overview of our production process and how you can
learn these skills with a free trial subscription of Skillshare.
Today we’re going to talk about kinetic typography. You may have noticed that we’re
a fan of this animation and try to incorporate some wherever we can.
They’re great fun to create and a very effective way making something more aesthetically pleasing
to the eye. You can learn how to make your own sequences with Phil Ebiner’s Kinetic
Typography Crash Course , where he’ll take you through the entire process across 11 classes
in a little over an hour!
There are courses covering the full spectrum of design and animation but it’s not just
tutorials,
you can take part in class projects and share your work with the community of fellow creatives
for support and advice .
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