What do you think of this fact?
Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. But there’s a place that goes down deeper than Everest goes up: Challenger Deep in the Pacific.
Deeper than any mountain is tall
Challenger Deep lies at the southern end of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. According to Live Science, a 2021 measurement by the US agency NOAA found a depth of about 10,935 meters (35,876 feet). That’s almost 11 kilometers.
According to EarthDate, Mount Everest is 8,848 meters tall. So if you put it into Challenger Deep, its peak would still be more than 2 kilometers below the surface. Live Science puts the difference at about 2,100 meters.
Pressure like a pile of elephants
At the bottom of the trench, it isn’t just pitch dark and cold. According to Live Science, the pressure there is more than 1,000 atmospheres, over a thousand times what it is at the surface. A normal submarine would be crushed.
Still, people have been down there. On January 23, 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh dove to the bottom in the submersible “Trieste”. Almost 52 years later, on March 26, 2012, film director James Cameron made it alone in a specially built sub.
Bonus fact: The exact depth isn’t easy to measure. According to Live Science, a sonar signal takes about 14 seconds to reach the bottom and come back. Because salinity, temperature and pressure change how sound travels, the measurement is only accurate to about 25 meters.
That makes the bottom of Challenger Deep one of the least visited places on Earth. Thousands of people have stood on top of Everest, but only comparatively few have reached the deepest point of the ocean.
A dive to the bottom of a swimming pool gets you maybe 3 meters. Only about 10,932 more to go to the bottom of Challenger Deep.