There aren't a ton of places we can go on this planet that haven't had people step on them before, but below the surface of the ocean, there's still plenty of mystery.
There aren't a ton of places we can go on this planet that haven't had people step on them before, but below the surface of the ocean, there's still plenty of mystery.
And the depths involved are pretty mind-boggling.
Note where the lines are for the current free-diving and scuba diving records are: not even 500 meters down. And Randall's illustration does get into the reason we've had so little success diving deep.
And seeing just how much further down the Titanic came to rest — 12,460 feet, or about 3,700 meters — makes its discovery that much more amazing.
And neither do many of the animals we associate with deep dives.
And, as Randall notes, they have been known to surface with evidence of weird things happening, but we don't actually know what else might lurk down there.
Way, way down, well beyond where the Titanic sits, we have deep sea trenches.
The deepest is the Pacific Ocean's Marianas Trench, which contains the deepest known point on earth: Challenger Deep. At 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) down, it has only ever been visited by three people. One of them was Titanic director James Cameron.
It took him two and a half hours to make the journey — think of that the next time you drive seven miles. That's got to be worse than L.A. rush hour traffic.
At the depths he was traveling to, the pressure added up to an astounding 16,300 pounds per square inch.
"That's like have two Humvees stacked on your thumbnail," he explained, only that pressure would be felt all over the vehicle, with him alone inside.
It wasn't completely desolate, but he also said he "didn't see anything bigger than about an inch long."
However, video he took of the journey showed some bigger things, like amphipods and sea cucumbers. Really, finding anything living at the incredible pressures so far down is amazing.
Deepwater Horizon's oil well sinks down to 35,000 feet (at least, it did before the explosion), the world's deepest.
They drilled for 24 years, eventually reaching a depth of 7.5 miles, making it deeper even than Challenger Deep. Here's the cap.
I mean, if you thought Cameron's journey to Challenger Deep was slow, consider this: in 24 years, the deepest hole ever drilled only managed to go 7.5 miles (12 km), while Voyager 1 left the Solar System, 16.5 billion km away, just 26 years into its journey.
Also at that depth, some microscopic fossils. Way down at 7.5 miles, the pressure ratcheted the temperature up to a balmy 356 F (180 C), which led them to stop drilling.
If you want a taste, check out what Russian fisherman Roman Fedortsov has found in his nets on some deep sea trawls.
And you won't see anything else like it anywhere. He swears up and down that none of the pics are photoshopped.
And maybe I'm not so curious about the unexplored ocean after all.