Featured Image Credit: Hagai Nativ / Alamy Stock Photo/David Fleetham / Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: News, Titanic, World News
Kit Roberts
Topics: News, Titanic, World News
The ocean is deep, but some parts of it are truly abyssal.
After it sank, the Titanic came to rest at around 3,800 metres below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
This is, of course, an incredible depth and brings with it a huge amount of danger to anyone who tries to reach it, as anyone who has been on the internet or glanced at the news about the ill-fated Titan submersible will know.
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A video online shows the terrifying size and depth that the ocean reaches.
It starts in the shallows, before gradually moving down to show the various depths of oceans, seas, and lakes across the world. It show how the Titanic sits at around 3,800 metres down, which is just over the average depth of the Atlantic Ocean.
Typically, the sea floor slopes away from land in what is called a continental slope. Eventually, this levels off onto the abyssal plain, home to all manner of strange creatures.
However, the abyssal plain is far from a featureless desert. Sea mounts can erupt from the ocean floor, some even breaking the surface to form isolated islands which shelve off dramatically into the depths.
There are even whole chains of mountains. The mid-ocean ridge runs like a cricket-ball seam down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean.
But there are not just mountains in the deep ocean, there are also valleys.
These are the oceanic trenches, massive gashes in the ocean floor that fall kilometres further beneath the surface than the abyssal plain. They are vast spaces taking the depth of the ocean beyond even its usual abyss.
The deepest of these is the Mariana Trench, which is located in the Pacific Ocean. The entire trench is just over 2,500km in length.
The deepest known point of the seabed of Earth, known as the Challenger Deep, reaches a depth of 10,911m, plus or minus 25 metres.
For perspective, this means that if Mount Everest was placed in the trench, its summit would still be 2km beneath the surface.
The pressure of the water is a huge danger in the deep ocean.
Every 33ft, or 10.06 metres, the pressure increases by one atmosphere, which is what it is at the surface. So, at just over 10 meters the pressure we would experience would be just over double that at the surface.
At large depths even a small leak in a submersible's hull would be enough to cause a catastrophic implosion, which would be likely to be almost instantaneous.
At the Challenger Deep, the pressure is an astonishing eight tons per square inch, around 1,000 times that at the surface.
Despite this, several successful manned descents have been made to Challenger Deep. The first was carried out in the deep-submergence vehicle Trieste on 23 January, 1960.