If you were a giant and standing in Taiwan, behind you is China, while to your left are
the two Korean nations and Japan.
To your right are the Philippines, Indonesia, and
Australia.
However, directly in front of you is one of the locations hiding the most
mysteries; the Mariana Trench!
Scientists have been fascinated by this location due to
the abundance of terrifying things.
The Mariana Trench is a gift that keeps giving because we are discovering more and more scary
things!
In this video, we bring the new terrifying discoveries scientists have
just made in the Mariana Trench!
What is an oceanic trench?
An oceanic trench is a long and narrow depression in the
ocean floor.
These trenches are considered the deepest part of the ocean floor,
occurring at the boundary between convergent plates and lithospheric plates.
These plates slowly move toward each other at distances
that range from a few millimeters per year to more than 10 centimeters.
The trench is created when one of the plates slides
below the lithospheric slab.
Generally, oceanic trenches reach between 1.9 and 2.5
miles below the nearby ocean floor.
This article takes a look at some of the deepest oceanic trenches in the world.
Every ocean is deep and mysterious in its own way.
But compared to the Mariana Trench, some parts of the ocean look like
the shallow end of a pool!
The Mariana Trench, sometimes called Marianas Trench,
found in the western Pacific Ocean, is the deepest part located in any ocean!
It is a 1,580 mile crescent-shaped section in the
crust of the Earth.
The truly impressive part of the Mariana Trench has nothing to do
with its length and everything to do with its depth.
Although it hasn’t been well explored because of the challenges associated with
going that deep, the trench goes at least 36,070 feet deep, as measured with sounds
pulses sent through the ocean during a 2010 survey by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, NOAA!
Because Guam is a U.S. territory and the 15 Northern Mariana Islands are a U.S.
Commonwealth, the United States has jurisdiction over the Mariana Trench.
In 2009, President George W. Bush established the Mariana
Trench Marine National Monument, which created a protected marine reserve for
the approximately 195,000 square miles or 506,000 square km of seafloor and waters
surrounding the remote islands.
It includes most of the Mariana Trench, 21 underwater
volcanoes and areas around three islands.
How did the Mariana Trench form?
The Mariana Trench was created by the process that occurs in a subduction zone, where two
massive slabs of oceanic crust collide.
At a subduction zone, one piece of oceanic crust
is pushed and pulled underneath the other, sinking into the Earth's mantle, the layer
under the crust.
Where the two pieces of crust intersect, a deep trench forms above the bend
in the sinking crust.
In this case, the Pacific Ocean crust is bending below the Philippine
crust.
The Pacific crust, also called a tectonic plate, is about 180 million years
old where it dives into the trench.
The Philippine plate is younger and smaller than
the Pacific plate.
At subduction zones, the cold, dense crust sinks back into the mantle and is destroyed
However, as deep as the trench is, it is not the spot closest to the center of Earth.
Because the planet bulges at the equator, the radius at the poles is about 16 miles
or 25 km less than the radius at the equator.
So, parts of the Arctic Ocean seabed are closer to the Earth's center than the Challenger
Deep.
The crushing water pressure on the floor of the trench is more than 8 tons per square
inch or 703 kilograms per square meter.
This is more than 1,000 times the pressure felt
at sea level, or the equivalent of having 50 jumbo jets piled on top of a person!
What is life like for the organisms in Mariana Trench? Animals living in the deepest
parts of the Mariana Trench survive in complete darkness and extreme pressure.
Also, Food is extremely limited, because the deep
gorge is far from land.
Leaves, coconuts and trees rarely find their way into the bottom
of the trench, and dead plankton sinking from the surface must drop thousands of feet
to reach Challenger Deep.
Instead, some microbes rely on chemicals, such as methane
or sulfur, while other creatures gobble marine life lower on the food chain.
The Mariana Trench was first pinpointed in 1875 during the undertaking of a global
circumnavigation.
It was found by utilizing sounding equipment on the HMS Challenger.
It was named for the nearby Mariana Islands.
This undertaking, the Challenger expedition from 1872 to 1876, was revolutionary
in the field of oceanography.
During that time the ship went almost 70,000 nautical
miles, exploring and mapping as it traveled.
During the trip, about 4,700 species were discovered.
Let us start the scary discoveries at Mariana Trench with an auditory one!
Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory placed a titanium-encased
hydrophone, a device which records sound, on the deepest part of the
ocean floor, in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench!
But what did they hear?
The device recorded the sounds in the ocean over a period of three weeks, and
scientists were shocked at what they heard!
You would think that the deepest part of the ocean would be one of the quietest places
on Earth.
Yet there really is almost constant noise from both natural and man-made sources.
The ambient sound field at Challenger Deep is dominated by the sound of earthquakes,
both near and far, as well as the distinct moans of baleen whales and the overwhelming
clamor of a category 4 typhoon that just happened to pass overhead.
There was also a lot of noise from ship traffic, identifiable by the clear sound pattern the
ship propellers make when they pass by.
It is like sending a deep-space probe to the outer
solar system.
We’re sending out a deep- ocean probe to the unknown reaches of inner
space.
After analysing the sounds, the scientists were able to separate the natural noise from
the manmade noise.
Scientists recorded a loud magnitude 5.0 earthquake that took
place at a depth of about 10 kilometers or more than six miles in the nearby ocean
crust.
Since the hydrophone was at 11 kilometers, it actually was below the earthquake,
which is really an unusual experience.
The sound of the typhoon was also dramatic, although the cacophony from big storms tends
to be spread out and elevates the overall noise for a period of days!
Now can you believe human made plastic can make its way to the depths of Mariana
Trench, and also end up inside a living organism?
Researchers have uncovered the presence of plastic in a previously unknown
species of deep-sea amphipods, which was discovered in the Mariana Trench – the deepest
trench in the world.
The researchers officially named the species Eurythenes plasticus
in reference to the plastic it has ingested.
The tiny Eurythenes plasticus was discovered nearly seven kilometres below sea level
in the Pacific Ocean by scientists from Newcastle University.
Alan Jamieson, head of the research mission, noted that we’re now
at the point where we are looking at a new species from an unexplored habitat and it’s
already contaminated with plastic.
PhD student Johanna Weston, who was part of the research team, said there was a
microfibre inside one of the four specimens of Eurythenes plasticus examined.
They had found polyethylene terephthalate (PET),
a substance found in a variety of commonly used household items such as water
bottles and workout clothes!
The newly discovered species shows how far-reaching
the consequences of our inadequate handling of plastic waste truly is.
There are species living in the deepest, most remote
places on earth which have already ingested plastic before they are even known about
by humankind!
Plastics are in the air that we breathe, in the water that we drink and now
also in animals that live far away from human civilization!
Now, do you care for an alien-looking organism living inside the ocean?
You will find one in the Mariana Trench, where Scientists
have discovered a new species of snailfish that swims at depths of up to five miles in
the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world’s oceans.
Its been named the Mariana snailfish or Pseudoliparis swirei and lives a
rather pleasant and ‘happy’ life underneath 8,000 metres of sea, according to the
scientists who found it.
The happy life is surprising because, at this depth, the pressure
is so great that it is similar to similar to an elephant standing on your thumb!
How this creature manages to survive these intense
pressures, which make the deep sea as inhospitable to most life forms as outer space
continues to baffle scientists!
But this little fella is not only surviving but is the top predator and has little competition
for prey!
Snailfishes have adapted to go deeper than other fish and can live in the deep
trenches.
Here they are free of predators, and the funnel shape of the trench means
there’s much more food.
There are lots of invertebrate prey and the snailfish are the top
predator.
They are active and look very well-fed.
Snailfish are quite sociable beasties and hang around in large groups, feasting
on small crustaceans and shrimp.
From one scary organism, we go to another, although this animal is kind of cute!
The dumbo octopus, also known as grimpotheuthis,
is a genus of pelagic umbrella octopuses.
The name originates from the creature’s resemblance to the character of
Dumbo from the 1941 Disney film of the same name.
Take the two large fins, one on either side of the mantle, that protrude like ears, add
in the octopus’s small size, relatively short
arms, bell-shaped body, pale coloring, and tendency to hover over the seafloor, and you’ve
got a cephalopod that’s often called the cutest octopus in the world!
The Dumbo octopus was first discovered around 1883, but the first specimen was not
seen until the 1990s after the first deep-sea submersible vessels were invented.
The dumbo octopus is small compared to other octopods,
averaging between 20 and 30 centimeters.
The octopus gelatinous body allows it to exist at the highly pressured
depths of up to 13,000 feet!
The extreme pressure keeps its body together, and if
brought to the surface, its body would not be able to work correctly!
So it is basically sentenced to a lifetime in the deep ocean!
They feed on snails, worms, and other creatures they hoover up from the ocean floor
and propel themselves through the water by flapping their strong fins, not by expelling
water forcefully from their siphons, as other octopuses do.
Webbing between their arms aids them in swimming.
Let’s hear what you think of the mysteries of the Mariana Trench in the comment
section below