Ellie Abraham
Aug 01, 2023
content.jwplatform.com
A mind-boggling video has shown people just how far down the deepest place on Earth is, and it is utterly terrifying.
The jaw-dropping video came from a trailer for a film that features Titanic director James Cameron, who seems to have a thing about the deep ocean.
In the documentary, Long Way Down: Mariana Trench for National Geographic, Cameron took part in what was called the Deepsea Challenge which saw him dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean.
The Mariana Trench is some 7 miles down and is deeper than Mount Everest would be if it were pointing down into the Earth. The bottom of the trench is called the Challenger Deep and is the deepest point known on our planet.
For the attempt, a submersible was built to withstand the pressure in the deepest part of the ocean and trailers for the documentary terrifyingly showed just how far down the trench is.
The video revealed it took Cameron around 90 minutes to reach the bottom of the 7-mile deep trench.
In a condensed 1-minute video summarising the descent, the clip continued to give facts about the ocean in a graphic.
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Long Way Down: Mariana Trench | National Geographicwww.youtube.com
90 per cent of all ocean life lives between the depths of 0 and 660ft. A depth of 800ft is the dive depth of a nuclear submarine.
Continuing on from that, 1,044ft down is the deepest ever recorded scuba dive, while at 3,300ft the last trickle of sunlight begins to fade.
As has been in the headlines recently following the implosion of the OceanGate submersible, the Titanic sits at a depth of 12,467ft – just over one-third of the depth of the Mariana Trench.
At 36,070ft, the bottom of the Mariana Trench has been visited by only a handful of people, one of whom is Hamish Harding, the British billionaire who died onboard the Titan submersible in June 2023.
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