How deep does the ocean actually go? There would be more than a mile between you and the deepest point in the water even if you sank the tallest point on land.
99% of all land on Earth is covered by water, and there is enough water in the seas to fill a bathtub that is 685 miles long on each side. California is around 720 miles long, for comparison.
To put things in perspective, the length of a blue whale, the biggest mammal on Earth, is around one-sixteenth the average height of a human. Blue whales often hunt in the well-lit area of the ocean, at depths of around 330 feet.
Reaching 2,722 feet down is where the tip of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, would reach. A little farther at 3,280 feet, we’re deep enough that sunlight can’t reach us. We’ve now entered the midnight zone.
Many animals do
In 1960, the USS Triton became the first submarine to round the globe at a depth of 700 feet.
We arrive to Herbert Nitsch’s record-breaking 831-foot deep free dive, which was the deepest free dive ever captured on camera. The majority of human lungs would be crushed by the pressure, which is 26 times stronger here than at the surface. However, blue whales are able to search for gigantic squid by diving to a maximum depth of 1,640 feet.
Nitsch experienced severe decompression syndrome during his fall, which caused many brain strokes. But he made it to the surface, got better in a hyperbaric chamber, and eventually made it out alive.
We enter the danger area for contemporary nuclear-attack submarines at a height of 2,400 feet. The haul of the submarine would implode if it were any deeper.
Those that live close to sea volcanoes that are scorching hot can’t see while they’re here, like eyeless prawns at 7,500 feet.
Although it is only a few degrees above freezing at this level, the water near hydrothermal vents may reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Cuvier’s beaked whale holds the record for swimming at the greatest depth to which a mammal has ever been seen.
However, even Cuvier’s beaked whales are incapable of exploring the Titanic wreck, which is located at an incredible depth of 12,500 feet.
At this point, the pressure is 378 times higher than at the surface. However, there is still life to be found, like the dumbo octopus, the deepest-living octopus on Earth, and fangtooth hagfish.
The hadal zone, which includes the Mariana Trench and other deep ocean trenches, is located at 20,000 feet.
Even though Mount Everest’s top would be 29,029 feet below the surface of the Mariana Trench, the two crewed missions that went the deepest in history are still deeper than that.
The oceanographer Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh travelled to the Challenger Deep, which is the lowest point on Earth, at a record depth of 25,979 feet, in 1960.
They retained the record for many years until the advent of the adventurer Victor Vescovo in 2019. Vescovo performed three dives to the Challenger Deep that year, with the third dive setting a new record by going down to 35,839 feet.
Six autonomous submersibles, including Kaiko, which gathered more than 350 species from the bottom from 1995 to 2003, have been launched by scientists to study the Challenger Deep. However, according to experts, there may be thousands more marine species that we haven’t yet discovered.
